Beautiful, but you still had to Google it: Dream Hunt rethinks Uttarakhand tourism content

Watch most Uttarakhand tourism content and you come away wanting to visit. You also come away still needing to look the place up. Aashish Singh Bisht, founder and executive producer of Dream Hunt Productions, writes that this gap was the starting point for the company's Uttarakhand Tourism project.

The gap in the format

The existing approach, as he describes it, is well established. Strong photographs, drone shots, music, quick reels. Visually it works. But the history of a place, its cultural significance and the experience of being there were rarely part of the content itself, which left the viewer to go and find that information somewhere else.

The team's response was to build films and reels that were visually compelling and also descriptive, informative and story-led. Bisht writes that the aim was for every piece to give a viewer a reason to watch to the end, and to leave them knowing something they did not know before. The intention, in his words, was to move past the conventional "beautiful destination + music" format and put a stronger storytelling layer underneath it.

Filming a state you belong to

There was a personal stake in the brief. Bisht is from Uttarakhand, and writes that the state has never been a destination to him but home. Every location the team travelled to carried a sense of return even while it was being seen from a new angle.

That connection, he writes, made him more particular about how the state was represented. He did not want the team to showcase Uttarakhand. He wanted it to interpret the state and tell its stories in a way that felt true to the people and places being documented.

What made the difference

The difficulties he lists are practical ones. Settling on a format. Travelling across locations. Working out how to translate the richness of a destination into something that holds a digital audience. He describes that last problem as the most rewarding part of the process.

What worked, in his assessment, was that the team did not approach the work as a production assignment. Being from the state gave them an inherent understanding of it, and their production experience gave them a way to turn that into a format relevant to audiences now.

Dream Hunt Productions operates from New Delhi and has previously reported more than 350 projects delivered across government, corporate and tourism work, with Uttarakhand Tourism among the clients listed.

Key Takeaways

• The gap he identified. Most tourism content ends at inspiration. The viewer wants to visit, but still has to look up the place elsewhere. Bisht treated that missing layer as the brief.

• The change he made. Keep the visual quality, add the information. Every film built to give a reason to watch to the end and to leave the viewer knowing something new.

• Where the edge came from. Not equipment or budget, but belonging. Being from Uttarakhand gave the team an understanding of the state that a hired crew would have had to research.

• The transferable point. He treated a client project as something he owned rather than something he was assigned. In his account, that is what separated the output from a standard production job.
  

  ~Editor Shobhit Mehandiratta