the long road
One of the UK’s largest Country, Roots and Americana festivals has trusted us with their photography every year since 2023.
The Challenge
The Country and Americana scene in the UK continues to rapidly grow meaning bigger audiences wanting rich experiences, but also an increasingly crowded marketplace where festivals like The Long Road need cut-through.
At the heart of the festival was the music, and at the heart of the music was the culture - an ecosystem rich in style, fashion, cars, bikes, camp-outs and beyond. We needed to bring this to the front, to put all of these complex areas at the centre of the work and use them to tell stories.
As the festival has continued to grow - launching new stages, opening more days and extending music programming has meant we’ve needed to keep adapting, ensuring we had the right talent and resource on-site to get the things delivered.
Finally, we had all the challenges shooting a multi-stage festival filled with breakout features, activations, and sponsors has; long days, on-site direction and delivery, rolling with the punches and managing a professional team working across lots of different areas. We always focus on looking after people so they’re making their best work and align everything into a single consistent visual message.
How We Made it Work
With a growing demand on our delivery as the festival has gone from strength to strength, we met the evolving challenges by putting the following things in place:-
Mapped-out demands and broke the shot list into work packages covering the programming, sponsors, features, atmosphere and special projects. We then may clever commissioning and production decisions to make sure that not only did we have the right people on the ground but they were prioritising the right work through a single point of team management
Baked-in an ongoing development of our practice so that day-on-day, year-on-year we were reviewing work and best practice, the things that went right and wrong and making adjustments for a happier team and a stronger delivery
Grounded our our practice in Production - putting the effort in to get planning right in Pre-Production, having experienced Producers and Stills Leads run things on the ground and an integrated Post-Production process that not only gets the shots delivered but beings a new cycle of review to improve
Put SPOCs (Single Point of Contact) into the process so those leading the team and making production decisions were named, direct contacts for Marketing, Partnerships, Artist Liaison, Stage and beyond
The Impact
“Their team is super organised and built fantastic relationships with our stage and talent managers, making everything run smoothly across the weekend. Pine consistently capture the scale, energy and unique character of our festival.”
Caoimhe Foran, Festival Marketing Manager
