How to Plan Locations for a Multi-Day Content Road Trip

Location planning for a road trip content campaign is one of the most important and most underestimated pre-production investments. The locations determine the visual quality of everything captured, the narrative arc of the campaign, the logistical feasibility of the production schedule, and whether the content library generated is diverse enough to sustain a full campaign deployment or whether it looks like the same location with different activities. The Highway 395 route from Mammoth Lakes to Lake Tahoe on the Oru Kayak campaign was not chosen by accident. It was chosen through a specific planning process.

The full campaign that informs this article: Oru Kayak Lake Campaign.

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Start With the Story, Not the Scenery

The most common mistake in road trip content location planning is starting with beautiful places and then trying to fit them into a story. That process produces a collection of beautiful locations that do not add up to a campaign because the locations were chosen for their individual visual quality rather than for their contribution to a specific story. The story-first location planning process starts with the campaign concept and asks what kinds of places this story needs to include to be told completely.

For the Oru Kayak campaign, the story of the kayak bringing the kid out in you while demonstrating its portability and accessibility needed locations that felt genuinely beautiful and genuinely accessible, that varied enough visually to demonstrate the product's versatility, and that were geographically connected by a road that a person could actually drive with a kayak in their bag. Highway 395 provided all of that because the story was used to evaluate the route rather than the scenery being used to justify a story created around it.

The practical application is to write down the story in one or two sentences before any location research begins. Then evaluate every potential location against that story rather than against an abstract aesthetic standard. The location that is beautiful but does not contribute to the specific story is not the right location regardless of how impressive it looks in isolation. The location that directly expresses a specific aspect of the story is the right location regardless of whether it is as dramatically beautiful as alternatives that do not serve the narrative.

This story-first discipline is harder than it sounds because beautiful locations are naturally compelling and it is easy to rationalize their inclusion after the fact. The question to ask about every potential location is not is this beautiful enough but what specific story chapter does this location tell that no other location on the route tells as well. If the answer is unclear, the location probably does not belong on the route regardless of its visual quality.

The Location Evaluation Criteria That Matter

Once the story is clear, evaluating specific locations against it requires a consistent set of criteria that goes beyond visual quality. The production-relevant evaluation criteria for road trip content locations include narrative contribution, visual diversity from other locations on the route, logistical accessibility, light quality and timing, permit requirements, and the specific activities or experiences the location enables for the product being campaigned.

Narrative contribution is the first criterion because a location that does not advance the story is not useful regardless of how well it scores on the other criteria. For the Oru Kayak campaign, each location needed to contribute a specific visual and experiential chapter to the narrative. Convict Lake contributed the high-altitude alpine chapter. The Owens River contributed the high desert chapter. Bridgeport contributed the open water chapter. Lake Tahoe contributed the aspirational endpoint chapter.

Visual diversity is the second criterion because a campaign library that shows five locations that all look similar provides content that appears to come from the same place regardless of how far apart those places actually are. The deliberate visual diversity of the Highway 395 route, from high alpine lake to high desert river to open reservoir to one of the most famous lakes in California, gave the campaign a content library whose individual pieces could be deployed across different channels and different campaign phases without the audience sensing repetition.

Logistical accessibility is the third criterion because a visually spectacular location that requires two days of hiking to reach is not viable for a five-day road trip production with a full gear kit and a crew of four. Every location on the Oru Kayak route was reachable by paved road with the production vehicle fully loaded. That accessibility constraint was a reflection of the campaign concept: the product enables spontaneous water access and the locations needed to demonstrate that spontaneity rather than requiring the kind of logistical effort that contradicts the product's entire value proposition.

Research for Unfamiliar Locations

When the route includes locations not already known from personal experience, the research process for evaluating those locations requires going deeper than Google Maps and Instagram location tags. Those sources provide basic geographic and visual information but they do not provide the production-specific information that determines whether a location can actually support the production requirements of the campaign.

The production-specific research questions for any unfamiliar location include: what is the realistic access to the water for launching a kayak including any portage distance and terrain difficulty; what permits are required for commercial photography and how far in advance do they need to be applied for; what are the typical light conditions at the location at the times of day the production requires; and what are the specific environmental conditions that affect production including prevailing wind direction and typical afternoon wind strength.

The most reliable research source for production-specific location information is direct contact with the ranger district or park management unit that administers the location. Ranger stations can provide permit requirements, access information, typical conditions, and often specific recommendations about the best access points and timing that are not available from any online source. That direct contact is worth the time it takes in pre-production because it prevents the production-day discoveries of permit requirements or access restrictions that were not anticipated.

Location research conducted through direct contact with land managers also establishes a relationship with the people who can help if something goes wrong on the production day. A ranger station that has a record of a commercial permit application is a resource that knows the production is there and can be called if conditions change unexpectedly or if access to a specific section turns out to be restricted in ways that were not communicated through the permit process. That relationship is a form of production insurance that costs nothing beyond the time of the initial contact.

Building a Location-Specific Shot Plan

Once locations are selected based on narrative and production criteria, building a location-specific shot plan for each stop on the route translates the creative and logistical research into a practical production document that guides decisions on the production day. The shot plan is not a complete shot list with specific frames defined. It is a guide to the specific camera positions, angles, and timing windows that are most likely to produce the content each location is selected to contribute to the campaign.

For known locations, the shot plan can be built from direct experience with the specific conditions that each location offers. The angle that works at Convict Lake in morning light, the specific reflection quality that only exists in the first twenty minutes after sunrise, the access point that gets the camera closest to the water without requiring a portage, all of those details can be built into the shot plan before arriving at the location because they are already known from previous experience there.

For unfamiliar locations, the shot plan is built from the research rather than from direct experience, which makes it more provisional and more subject to revision on the production day. That provisionality is not a failure of planning. It is the appropriate acknowledgment that unfamiliar locations will reveal specific conditions and opportunities that cannot be fully anticipated from remote research. The shot plan for unfamiliar locations should identify the primary camera positions and timing windows to pursue, while explicitly leaving room for on-the-ground adaptation.

The shot plan serves a second purpose beyond guiding the production day: it serves as the brief for the crew. A crew that arrives at a location knowing the specific camera positions planned for that location, the timing windows for each setup, and the narrative purpose of the location within the campaign can contribute more effectively to the production than a crew that arrives with no location context and waits for direction on each setup. Shot plans are production communication tools as much as they are production planning tools.

When Familiar Territory Is a Competitive Advantage

The location planning process for road trip content campaigns has a significant shortcut available when the territory is already familiar from personal experience. The Highway 395 corridor was known from multiple previous personal trips before the Oru Kayak production and that familiarity eliminated the research requirement for most of the location-specific questions that would otherwise have consumed significant pre-production time.

That familiarity is a genuine competitive advantage in location-based commercial photography. The photographer who knows a territory from personal experience brings production-specific knowledge that no amount of remote research can fully replicate. They know where the light falls at what time of day. They know which access point eliminates a difficult portage. They know which section of the river has the most interesting character for the specific activity being documented.

Investing in personal trips through the territories where commercial production work is likely to happen is one of the highest-leverage pre-production investments available to location-based commercial photographers. Those personal trips are not just enjoyable experiences. They are knowledge-building exercises that compound across every subsequent production in the same territory and provide the location-specific confidence that allows productions in familiar territory to move faster and generate more distinctive content.

The competitive advantage of location familiarity compounds over time. A photographer who has been working in a specific territory for several years has a depth of location knowledge that a photographer visiting for the first time cannot match regardless of how thoroughly they have researched from a distance. Building a reputation for specific territories rather than attempting to serve every territory with equal competence is one of the most effective differentiation strategies available to location-based commercial photographers.

Location familiarity also produces a confidence in the field that unfamiliar locations do not provide. A photographer who knows that Convict Lake produces exceptional reflection conditions in the first twenty minutes after sunrise on calm mornings does not need to discover that fact on the production day. They arrive knowing it and they plan the production around it from the beginning. That planning advantage is the practical expression of location investment and it is visible in the quality and completeness of the content generated from familiar versus unfamiliar locations.

The combination of story-first location selection, multi-criteria evaluation, thorough research for unfamiliar locations, location-specific shot plans, and the competitive advantage of territory familiarity is the location planning system that produced the Highway 395 route for the Oru Kayak campaign. Applied to any road trip content campaign, this system produces routes with narrative coherence, visual diversity, logistical feasibility, and creative confidence that less systematic approaches to location selection do not consistently generate.

Book a discovery call: https://dalton-johnson.com.

1. What is your current location planning process for road trip productions and do you evaluate locations against the campaign story or against an abstract visual quality standard?
2. When planning locations in unfamiliar territory, what specific production-relevant questions do you research before the trip?
3. What territories do you have enough personal experience in to bring location familiarity as a competitive advantage on commercial productions?
4. How do you build visual diversity into a multi-location route to ensure the content library provides the brand with genuinely varied assets?

Dalton Johnson is a professional adventure photographer, filmmaker, and director with over a decade of experience creating campaigns on all seven continents. His client work includes Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, Big Agnes, Ford Bronco, and 160+ other brands. He runs Dalton Johnson Media as a full-service studio, from pre-production through post and distribution.