All images courtesy of Cassiano Sala
All Around the World
For nearly two decades, I’ve journeyed around the world, immersing myself in different cultures and uncovering their stories. From the neon-lit streets of Hong Kong to the vast deserts of Saudi Arabia, each location has revealed its own rhythms, rules, and profound truths.
More than anything, I’ve learned how to go beyond what’s visible to the casual tourist in order to tell compelling stories and craft memorable experiences. To create work that resonates, you have to embed yourself in the culture, understand the people, and see the world through their eyes.
The reason clients come to Journey isn’t complicated: We take the time to understand the nuances of the people, places, and nations our work represents. We don’t just pretend to know the difference between what works in Riyadh versus what resonates in Dubai; we’ve been there, experienced it firsthand, and built relationships that matter. While other agencies might parachute in for a day or two, our teams are there year after year, having conversations, sharing meals, and getting to the heart of the matter.
Although distilling over two decades of travel into a few lessons is no easy feat, we’ve identified five principles that guide how we craft meaningful, culturally attuned narratives for our clients:
1. Culture is key
2. Prioritize local voices
3. Don’t underestimate geography
4. Have resources at the ready
5. Bring your A-team
Bag packed? Good. Let’s hit the road.
1. Culture is key
When it comes to understanding a different culture, it takes more than just skimming a travel guide or memorizing a few phrases. It takes time, genuine curiosity, and a willingness to abandon preconceptions. For the Middle East, that means understanding it’s not one homogeneous place; it’s an amalgam of enclaves, villages, and nations, each with their own rich histories, distinct dialects, unique culinary traditions, and specific customs.
This understanding doesn’t come cheaply or quickly, but it’s absolutely essential for our process. We physically go there. We listen. We observe. And most importantly, we recognize our limitations and that we can’t possibly know everything.
To fill in the gaps, we build networks of local experts. When geomagnetic fields made our drone crash during a cave shoot in Oman, what saved us wasn’t a guidebook; it was the local honey harvester who knew the caves from visiting the beehives inside, and who was able to retrieve the SD card with the footage.
Majlis Al Jinn is one of Oman’s largest caves. Thanks to our local fixer, we found a team that trained and helped our film crew descend and ascend 120 meters on a single rope. We enjoyed an excellent coffee with the local community, and they also helped us to charge the drone batteries.
This shoot was the most challenging of our five-year mission to create immersive content for the Oman Across Ages Museum. Over those five years, Journey explored caves, rainforests, mountains, and remote islands, photographing over 300 Omanis of all ages to showcase the nation’s diverse heritage.
The upshot of those complex shoots is that they will enable Omanis to experience previously inaccessible parts of their country for years to come.
In Saudi Arabia, the film production industry was in its infancy, which meant we had to rethink our casting process, ultimately turning to Instagram instead of traditional channels to find expat actors and actresses.
We get through these make-or-break moments precisely because we’ve taken the time to understand and adapt to the cultural realities around us.
Our work on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Pavilion at World Expo 2025 is the clearest expression yet of what it means to shape a project by place, culture, and people. From the start, we understood this couldn’t be designed from afar; it had to be built with Saudi people and grounded in their culture, values, and landscapes.
Over several years, we worked closely with local artists, musicians, historians, and community voices to shape the pavilion from the inside out. We spent time in cities, coastal villages, deserts, and even the Red Sea, learning how geography informs identity, how tradition coexists with ambition, and how to tell stories that reflect a nation in transformation.
From 3D-printed coral walls that ‘grow’ in real-time to music studios alive with Saudi artists, every space was made to resonate. We didn’t just translate Saudi culture, we co-created with it, ensuring every element, from architecture to interactive content, helped to tell their story, not tell it for them.
It was a journey of listening first and designing second. Today, the pavilion stands as a material testament that when you commit to being there, the work becomes more than a spectacle. It becomes meaningful.
2. Prioritize local voices
There’s a difference between telling a story about a place and letting a place tell its own story. The key to that difference is listening to how the locals describe themselves.
Each city has its own tale, like how Riyadh, with its relatively homogeneous tribal and religious background, carries a fundamentally different narrative than the cross-cultural melting pot of coastal Jeddah, where Persian, North African, European, and South Asian influences have mingled for centuries.
Or like the multicultural unplanned settlements around Makkah, though everyone speaks Arabic, each group has their own distinct story, tales of pilgrimage that turned into permanent stays, of generations creating a home on the outskirts of one of the world’s most sacred sites.
These stories can’t be told authentically from the outside looking in. They demand patient listening, relationship-building, and a genuine respect for local perspectives.
With the help of trusted contacts throughout the region, not just fixers or guides, but academics, historians, local artists, and translators who open doors to communities and conversations that would otherwise remain closed, we can transcend simple documentation to amplify these stories that might otherwise go untold.
In practice, we also rely on these collaborators at the content stage to create the meaningful and inclusive museum experiences our clients expect. For instance, precise translation quality checks (QCs) are essential during the transition from development to export, ensuring no detail or nuance in our use of the local language is overlooked.
3. Don’t underestimate geography
The map never tells the full story. Or, to put it another way, geography isn’t just about knowing where places are. It’s about understanding how the land shapes everything from daily routines to cultural identities.
I remember finding myself without cell service in the Empty Quarter, the vast desert covering the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula, when the enormity of the landscape began to feel overwhelming. If I got lost here, nobody would be able to find me. That moment and many others taught me to respect the physical realities of the places where we work, and to always do my research before I travel somewhere.
Or take the time I was filming around the present-day site of Qiddiya City during August, with temperatures soaring to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. On a dirt road in the Tuwaiq Mountains, my water depleted and my body shaking from dehydration, I would have been lost without my local guide and friend who knew the quickest route back to town. It’s moments like these that remind you how the GPS in your pocket won’t tell you which valleys trap dangerous heat or which routes become impassable after rainfall.
We’ve witnessed Qiddiya City grow from concept to reality, and throughout that journey, the landscape has never been merely a backdrop. It’s been a fundamental character in the story, demanding respect and understanding for its geography, weather, and climate at every turn.
Never underestimate your setting or the relief that a cold Fanta at a local supermarket can bring after a long day in the desert.
4. Have resources at the ready
Film equipment and technology have evolved dramatically over the last 100 years. Compare the elaborate production behind Lawrence of Arabia to the footage we can now get from a single person with an iPhone.
But that doesn’t mean preparation has become any less critical. Every project requires the right planning and the right tools to translate your vision into reality.
I learned this lesson during a predawn shoot in Oman. We had invested in the best possible camera lenses, only to watch them instantly fog up when exposed to the morning air. Every minute spent waiting for them to acclimate was burning through our budget. That was the costly way I learned that equipment needs to spend the night outside to adjust to the climate – a simple solution, but one you only learn through experience.
The requirements for a project can vary dramatically. In some cities, the local professional culture dictates how tasks are assigned to teams, so what might be a five-person operation in one place requires an entourage of 50 in another. Understanding these expectations is key to making a project succeed.
The right resources can help you capture the essence of a place, which is what ultimately makes your work resonate (or not) with audiences. They can tell the difference between someone who took the time and effort to capture their reality and someone who’s just passing through.
5. Bring your A-team
Having the right tools is only half the equation. You also need the right people wielding them.
It’s all about matching skills and expertise to the task at hand. That might be the director of photography who’s excellent at capturing a certain kind of shot, the producer who’s excellent at keeping shoots on track, or the leading expert at capturing time lapses of the night sky. You can hire a world-class Hollywood cinematographer, but if they don’t understand the intricate cultural nuances or technical demands of filming somewhere like the Middle East or Asia, their expertise will have limited value.
If you think of our work like preparing a fine meal, you’ll understand that every element matters, from the terroir of the ingredients to the cooking techniques, to the final plating and garnish. In our case, it’s about having the right VFX artists, selecting the perfect soundtrack, and applying custom color grading to capture the region’s unique qualities.
We’ve refined this process through years of experience, learning which combinations of talent work best for each specific type of project. Our clients keep returning because they recognize that this attention to assembling the right team reflects something deeper: our genuine commitment to honoring the stories we tell.