How Adventure Films Now Keep us Inside
How Making Content Should Inspire Us to Get Outside, Not Keep Us Inside
I’ve been living on an island in Washington State all summer and trying to watch the sunset from a kayak or the beach everyday.
There have been so many evenings this summer when the sky looked like spilled ink across the horizon, the last light reaching into the salt-scented air as I reflect on the day with my fiancé and our cute blue heeler doggo. In these moments, I’m not really thinking about my job, how to make content, I’m just outdoors and present. When it came to writing this week’s article, I wanted to remind everyone that cares to read this that making content should feel like an invitation, not a billboard.
Something that’s really been on my mind recently is that it seems like the point to making content now is to keep people on their screens. To keep them on another scroll-fueled dopamine drop. However, what I believe we need is magnetism that pushes people away from the glow - not deeper into it. In that place between sea and sky, or on a forest trail slick with dew, we’re chasing the quiet resistance. It’s countercultural to create content that asks nothing of your reach or pinch‑zoom. To get you outside again - undistracted - that’s the work that feels radical.
We’ve all been there (I feel like I’ve been there a lot more frequently over the past year) fingers hovering, mind flickering from notification to notification, our thumbs trained to reflexively unlock. Content used to wake something in us. Now it often wakes the void. I see it in friends who drift off mid‑story because a red dot popped in the corner of their screen. I see it in local parks half full of people, each face illuminated blue‑white in the dusk.
Earlier this summer, I did a road trip with my fiancé to Washington state and it forced me to be present and grounded in the outdoors again. Something I hope you’re able to find once you finish reading this newsletter ;)
Less can be more
This outdoor content brief is about helping all of us to tell stories of adventure that cradle the soul. So let me whisper a truth I’ve found on leaner winters when budgets were tight and every dollar mattered: the more minimal the setup, the more luminous the experience. There was a time I dragged a bulky camera uphill through a canyon, sweat punching my shirt. I watched the light hit the rocks in a perfect moment and realized I could’ve been present, just as present, if I dropped the gear. The archives would lack another “hero shot,” but my lungs would remember the taste of sage and the taste of ineffable grace.
So what if we built something that exists to dismantle itself? Let’s write about that hike where the only lens is your own two eyes, the only soundtrack your bootsteps and the wind. Let’s make content referrals that read like invitations: ‘Step outside before the sun trades kisses with the horizon.’ Not links to affiliate pages or a workshop, just a date with yourself.
Outside these days, everything has an obligation tagged to it - watch this, join that, buy this - but what if we defy that? What if we publish a story where the call to action is: go. Just go. And stay gone until your ears remember birds again, until the back of your neck feels open, until screens seem like a story you read once, not the story you live.
Outdoors doesn’t mean stadium‑scale all the time. It’s the 10‑minute stroll to a hidden lookout, the park bench that faces the wet green of an early spring, the empty road after midnight that carves through farmland. I believe we need a soft yet fierce reclamation of these moments - stories that land as gentle revolutions.
Document the small things
In this countercultural content challenge we’re handed, pick one small thread: a morning when the dew feels extra memorable, when the cold brought some color into your friends cheeks. Let that sit in a journal for two days before it hits Instagram. No filter. Shoot with your phone, let the shot wobble. Publish it without a caption that sells something. Let it hang and root in people’s chest. Let them pause long enough to wonder if they have time to let dawn in.
Making a short film about how the phone stays in the car, or how the light sculpts a fern unfurling in the woodlands. Write a blog post about how you realize halfway through that mini-adventure your mind stops circling anxieties because it’s busy staying alive.
That feeling of my skin against cold water, the echo of a birdcall bouncing off rock, and the warmth of a late‑afternoon sun when I’m not not tracking engagement is the type of feeling I’m chasing in the content I’m making these days. It’s those things that matter to us as outdoor loving folks but it’s something we’ve forgotten as we try to make content for the algorithm.
Push back on the trends
In closing, there’s no real trajectory to this article. No metric to hit. The point isn’t virality since only a small portion of you will resonate with this. I just hope to spark something in you that gets you outside long enough to remember why we make content about the outdoors at all. Love letters don’t always need to be “optimized for the algorithm.”
The point has always been outside, not in, and if we can coax a single soul off the feed and into wind‑lit air, that’s enough.
Now that you’ve made it to the end, I’ll plug my stuff since that’s what allows me to keep these articles coming!
I sell e-books about adventure filmmaking - they’re $7 and 50+ pages worth of super actionable tips and guidelines to make beautiful, memorable content.
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I’m Roo Smith - a two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker and photographer based in Boulder, Colorado. I’ve spent the last decade crafting stories that move people, working with brands like Patagonia, The North Face, Microsoft, Outside Magazine, and Netflix to tell grounded, human stories rooted in the outdoors.
But I don’t just make beautiful films, I build full campaigns that help brands grow. I partner with impact-driven companies to plan, shoot, and launch story-first content that performs across web, social, and paid media.
Whether it's a short doc, a commercial with soul, or a campaign built for conversions, I’m here to take the creative off your plate and deliver something that works.
When I’m not behind the camera, you’ll find me songwriting, swimming in alpine lakes, and trail running.