AOK: Exercise Videos from the XR Studio

The brief

The challenge.

Exercise videos live outdoors. Showing Nordic walking means showing forest, light and a path, not a gym. The fair date was fixed, the calendar said winter, and there were three weeks between enquiry and finished film. No time for weather windows, no time for a location scout with a plan B.

Season

Summer in winter

Bare trees, grey light, wet ground: what the outdoors had to offer would have looked wrong at a spring trade fair.

Deadline

Three weeks

From enquiry through concept, set build and shoot to delivery. Every day of weather risk would have been one too many.

Content

Exercises shown correctly

Posture, pole technique, footwork: exercise videos have to read from several angles, otherwise nobody learns from them.

Use

For the fair

The clips run on a stand next to real people. A backdrop that flickers or looks flat stands out immediately there.

How it was produced

Virtual backdrop behind, real ground in front.

The forest went onto the 35 m² LED wall as a real-time environment: summer foliage, afternoon light, depth through camera tracking. In front of it, CreativeCinema built the set people actually walked on: a curving path of wood chips and bark mulch, lawn, planting and deadwood at the edges. Where shoes and poles touch the ground, the ground has to be real, otherwise the eye does not believe the rest either.

View from behind of a Nordic walker on a real wood chip path walking into the virtual summer forest on the LED wall — TRANSITION The real path runs up to the wall and continues in the virtual environment. The camera does not see the seam.

Close-up of running shoes and pink walking poles on real wood chips, blurred leaves in the foreground — DETAIL Close-ups of pole technique need real ground. Wood chips that crunch cannot be replaced by a wall.

We shot over two days with three cameras: a wide for the movement sequence, a medium for posture and address to camera, and a detail camera for feet, hands and poles. Each exercise is captured from every angle in a single pass, without the trainers having to repeat the same sequence three times.

The set itself stayed up across both days. Switching between Nordic walking, resistance band routines and dumbbell training meant no rebuild, only a change of position on the path and a tweak to the lighting mood on the wall. That is the difference from an outdoor shoot, where every change means a drive, new light and new weather.

Set build, virtual environment, shoot and delivery sat with one team. With three weeks end to end that is not a convenience, it is the precondition: there was no handover at which a day could have been lost.

Why it matters

What the studio route adds over an outdoor shoot.

Season to order. Summer light and full foliage in winter, without waiting for a weather window that may never come.
A date that holds. Two fixed shoot days instead of a period with fallback dates. With three weeks to the fair, that decides the outcome.
Real ground where it counts. Path, lawn and planting are physical. The part that shoes and poles touch has to be right, the rest comes from the wall.
Three angles in one pass. Wide, medium and detail run simultaneously. Exercises are complete on the first take.
Quiet for the voice. No passers-by, no wind in the microphone, no traffic. Trainers speak in studio acoustics.
A set that comes back. The environment is built and saved. New exercises in the same setting need no new forest.

The maths

Three weeks from enquiry to trade fair.

An outdoor shoot in a summer forest was simply not possible in winter. The alternative would have been to wait until May, or to arrive at the fair with footage that did not match the subject.

In the studio the plan looked like this: concept and sign-off of the environment in week one, set build and shoot in week two, edit and delivery in week three. Two shoot days, no fallback date, no weather forecast in the calendar.

The trainers came to Erlangen for two days, twenty minutes from Nuremberg. Nobody travelled to a forest that would not have been one in February.

And the set stays. Whoever needs a new exercise series in a year shoots it in the same summer forest, without anyone asking about the weather.

Behind the scenes: a crew member holds the clapperboard next to an AOK trainer with walking poles on the bark mulch path in front of the forest backdrop — SET The same set for Nordic walking, resistance band and dumbbells. Nothing was rebuilt between exercises.

SET The same set for Nordic walking, resistance band and dumbbells. Nothing was rebuilt between exercises.

Said plainly

When we advise against it.

If you are shooting a single exercise in June with a park outside the door, you do not need a studio. The studio route pays off when several conditions come together: a fixed date, a season or place that is not available right now, several exercises or formats in one go, and footage that is meant to be reused later.

All four applied here. If you are unsure which side your project falls on, we will tell you before the quote.

Your project

Your setting, independent of the calendar.

Tell us about the subject, the date and the environment you need. We will tell you honestly whether the studio route pays off for you, and send the quote within 24 hours.

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