When you’re building a business doing rugged productions in one of the more remote places on the planet, you need three things — deep experience, great preparation, and tools that help you work more efficiently.

The Beards, New Zealand’s Southern Alps-based creative agency and production company, have created incredible videos, photos, and campaigns for clients like The North Face, Red Bull, Ford, H&M, and Nutri-Grain for the past 10 years, relying on Adobe and Frame.io to keep them on top of the world professionally — while they operate at the geographical bottom of it.

Unstoppable relationships.

In 2014, Founder and Executive Creative Director Tim Pierce brought his connection to the outdoor lifestyle and action-sports industry, and Founder and EP Toby Crawford brought his experience in “mustering cattle and skippering yachts” to form The Beards. Tim recalls: “Toby was in the early days of a tech startup and lent a hand with a few small shoots. We quickly realized that his mind for business and my creative brain were complementary. We did a few local jobs together and took a trip to Hong Kong for an Australian agency, but when we pulled off an ambitious three-day shoot, we felt there was potential for something bigger — that Wanaka could be a hub to service global brands’ creative and content needs. Ten years later, I guess you could say the vision was right.”

Tim and Toby share a commitment to living authentic lives while creating work that inspires and enriches others’ lives. Over the past decade, The Beards have become internationally recognized for their connection to the outdoor lifestyle and snow industry as they create experiences that help people “get out and connect with the great outdoors.” Their ethos and work have built ongoing relationships with their clients, who trust them to navigate the challenges of working in some of the toughest conditions on Earth.

Their collaboration with Nutri-Grain and Australian agency Brand Faction began in 2020, with The Beards producing long-form mini documentaries for broadcast TV to digital content for online outlets featuring world champion skiers and triathletes for an ongoing series titled Unstoppable. What keeps Brand Faction and Nutri-Grain coming back? The Beards’ keen understanding of sports culture, working with athletes, and skill in translating those stories for broad audiences. “High-risk projects in alpine environments need an element of trust between production, agency, and client, otherwise they just don’t happen,” Toby says. “We love building on trust and clear communication, and this partnership is one example of that. It also means we become more efficient as collaborators. With a deeper understanding of a brand's objectives, we become more effective in helping them achieve their marketing and content goals.”

Reaching for the cloud.

From two-person local teams to a larger, distributed network of specialists, The Beards collaborate with creators and clients across continents. On recent projects, they’ve worked with an agency and a finishing house based in Australia, an editor in Texas, a sound engineer and a VFX artist in Auckland — not to mention production managers, stylists, camera operators, and more, from all over the world.

The Beards enthusiastically cite Adobe's ecosystem as key to their success. “As we've grown from a production company to a full-service creative agency, we can start offering different creative services, as well,” Toby states.

The Beards use Adobe InDesign to create pitch decks, and Adobe Photoshop along with Adobe After Effects for graphics and animation. Adobe Lightroom is integral to every photography job they do. “It's a perfect balance of organizing and crafting your imagery, and with the latest AI-powered masking and object removal tools, jobs that used to take hours now take minutes, saving our clients money and opening up creative opportunities,” he adds. “Even Adobe Acrobat is a big part of our operations for our production documents.”

But perhaps the tool that most accelerates their collaboration and unifies their workflow is Frame.io. “We first started using Frame.io in 2020, when a colorist we were working with sent us work-in-progress assets via Frame.io. After trialing it ourselves on a few offline edits, we quickly saw the benefits, and the efficiencies far outweighed the costs, so there was never any debate about the value. The interface for collaboration, speeding up the feedback loops, upload time, security, etc., is unparalleled. Frame.io has been a gamechanger for us,” Tim says.

When it comes to NLEs, Adobe Premiere Pro is non-negotiable for them. “Over the years, we've dialed in our own templates and guidelines specifically relating to Premiere Pro to make our post-production workflow as seamless as possible. AI features such as Auto Scene Detection, Text-Based Editing, Enhance Speech, Auto-Transcription, and Remix save us a lot of time. Using a variety of these tools across a job enables us to deliver edits 10-20% faster."

For many businesses, being based in New Zealand could be perceived as a liability in terms of accessibility. Tim emphasizes, “Our business wouldn't survive here in Wanaka — at the bottom of the world — if we couldn't work with our contractors and clients remotely. We have to be intentional about finding ways to connect with people to keep ourselves freshly inspired, and show new clients that we can operate on a global level even though we’re not based in one of the major global cities. Not once have we stopped to question the value of our Adobe applications.”

Alignment mitigates risk.

The tools they use and workflows they’ve established also let The Beards communicate effectively with their clients. “I think another huge part of why Adobe's applications work for us is that it's a universal language that creators understand,” Toby says. “Generally, we find that if all the work is done right in pre-production, then production and post-production run smoothly. Communication throughout the entire process is vital.”

On a project like Unstoppable: Mt. Avalanche for Nutri-Grain, where they captured athletes Craig Murray and Sam Smoothy climbing and skiing down the steep, snowy mountain, preparation was everything. According to Tim, “We spent a lot of time scoping the national parks, talking to ski guides and the athletes to hone in on a mountain peak that could deliver what we needed for this story and client.”

With a four-day shooting schedule (two interview days and two days for climbing and skiing), the team had to navigate weather and snow conditions. “That means fluid schedules with specialist crews and busy talent — a production nightmare,” Tim says. “Once we’re in the elements, conditions change by the minute, and just the sheer effort and logistics required to move gear and humans around is slow going and full of risk. It’s a race against daylight to make things happen within a safe window of time, while also juggling the need to take the time required to capture the story elements we know we need. Often the action we’re filming is incredibly dangerous and can only be done once. There’s a lot of risk mitigation before we ever hit ‘record.’”

Which means that once they’ve recorded the precious footage, getting it to its intended destination is equally critical — and yet another reason why Frame.io plays such a key role in their process.

“We had one project with hard deadlines and had an Australian post house lined up to manage post-production. We shipped drives at the end of the shoot because we had 6TB of footage for color grading. But the drives got stuck in the mail, so we quickly pivoted and uploaded just the clips we needed to Frame.io for the post house to download and grade, keeping us on track with our schedule.”

Now, using Frame.io to send their media to editors has become standard operating procedure for The Beards. “Whenever we wrap a shoot, we upload all the data to Frame.io — upload times are incredibly quick from New Zealand. It is by far the most reliable software we’ve used for sending large amounts of data to our offline editors and post-production crew around the world.” In fact, they choose to send RAW files rather than proxies to their editors — because they can. “We don’t like to create proxies as we feel this is another unnecessary step in our workflow and given that Frame.io allows us to transfer raw data so effectively, we just do that. Using Frame.io to upload our RAW files speeds up our delivery times by at least 200-300%, and shaves three or four days off our turnaround time,” Toby says.

Being creative and effective.

It’s easy to focus on the logistics, but the tools should ultimately allow the creators to do what they love most. Tim reminds us, “Being creative should be fun. Being effective should be fun. The Frame.io platform makes the job more enjoyable and takes a lot of the tedium out of the post process. The UI is intuitive and easy to share, and it means we and our clients can focus on the creative stuff without getting bogged down in data transfers or files not working. Additionally, there are no more layers of email feedback. We spend less time on the phone with editors, colorists, and sound engineers because we can leave more precise feedback. We can navigate reviews and approvals much, much faster with Frame.io — I imagine it doubles the speed of our post-production process.”

And then there are the seemingly small things that add up. “We've reduced the cost of postage and the mail delays — which are a big thing in New Zealand — by not having to ship drives around. Overall, I’d estimate that we’re seeing a 100-150% increase in efficiency,” Tim adds.

But perhaps most importantly, what The Beards find is that Adobe has helped them build their dream business while pursuing work that nourishes them professionally and personally.

“One of our biggest challenges is staying connected to the industry from our remote location. Every day we get to be strategic and creative, working to help businesses solve problems and connect with audiences,” Toby says. “There’s a lot of gratification in seeing a project resonate with an audience in a positive way or seeing a project play a part in propelling a company's narrative to create positive business outcomes for them. It’s an incredible feeling when we make time to stop and reflect on it all.”

As busy as The Beards stay — from snow through surf seasons — it's amazing that they have any time to reflect at all. And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

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