I was minutes from heading out the door. Jen and I were about to make the three-hour drive to the Denver airport, en route to Detroit for our friends’ wedding. The phone rang. It was Shannon Ethridge, producer at Camp 4 Collective.

“We need some help writing a script for this Backcountry.com piece,” she said.

“I can’t. I’m about to leave for Detroit,” I said, speaking words I never thought I’d ever say.

I was bummed I wouldn’t be able to help. A few years ago, I had a great experience working with Camp 4, envisioning a story and writing the script and copy for “Tentbound in Devil’s Bay,” a piece for The North Face. I’d been wanting to collaborate with them again ever since.

Camp 4 is putting together some really engaging motion content, not just authentic, cinematic films, but branded spots for some huge clients. The four directors/photographers at Camp 4 are all friends and people I respect.

Tim Kemple, motion director and still photographer, and I go way back to my early days at Rock and Ice when we collaborated on various articles and departments, including “Kemple’s Corner,” my profile of Dave Graham and other cool stuff. Anson Fogel and I live in the same town, Carbondale, and I’ve been admiring his emotional, darkly urgent movies for the past few years. What can I say about Renan Ozturk other than I think he’s a complete, total storytelling and visual-arts genius? We’ve worked together as writer/editor for Renan’s awesome story on climbing Meru for last year’s ASCENT magazine. And then there’s Jimmy Chin, the godfather of expedition storytelling.

I thought about it again, and realized that I should jump at any opportunity to work with these creative ballers, even if I’m headed to the creativity-vacuum of Detroit.

“OK, just send me what you have so far, and I’ll take a stab at writing something quickly.”

I had no idea what the focus of the spot was, but neverthless, I quickly wrote about a minute of voice over. I sent the first draft over to Anson and Shannon, hopped in the car and started driving to Denver.

Over the next few hours, my mind was completely blown by the power that is the iPhone. The iPhone—which normally serves as my most cherished procrastination device, whether that means playing Words With Friends, liking SuicideGirls photos on Instagram, hashgramming, insta-tweeting, sending kooky or obscene SnapChats to Joe Kinder, etc.—was now revealing its full and awesome power to me.

On the drive to Denver, I was going back and forth with Anson, editing the script. I’d never before written anything creative on my iPhone, so this was a new experience. Not to mention I was doing it all in the car—don’t worry; I know not to text and drive, or scriptwrite and drive!

From Denver, we caught a direct flight to Detroit. We picked up our rental car, and pushed north to our friends’ rehearsal dinner. By this point, Anson had recorded the new script and layed it down on the spot. He sent me a password-protected Vimeo link to the video and I loaded it up on my iPhone. Stuck in Michigan traffic, I was watching, for the first time, the rough spot and hearing the words that I’d only just written spoken aloud.

Writing for writing, and writing for dialogue or voice-over, are two very different things. I am learning that, for voice over, you need to write something that seems almost so overly simplistic that it verges on being a trite, dumb cliche. But trite, dumb cliche is really what resonantes with most people today.

The sharp-witted ear, able to catch a Shakespearean-grade pun, is an organ gone extinct, my friends.

The voice-over I wrote, however, was a bit boring, lacking a build up to a climax. At this point, Anson suggested that we do a conference call with Tim to discuss the spot’s direction. Tim was on the east coast with his girlfriend’s family. They were at a Hibachi restaurant. Tim snuck away from the knife-weilding Asian cook-performer and ducked into the bathroom to watch the Vimeo spot and text back and forth with Anson and I.

At this point, I’d arrived at the rehearsal dinner. A bunch of Michigan folks I’d never met milled around on the lawn, playing lawn games and drinking Labatt. Meanwhile I sat in a rather dwarfish rental car, a Chevy Spark, working on my iPhone.

Anson was in Salt Lake, doing all the hard work, while Tim and I were each trying to balance our pre-existing social engagements with this project. Anson arranged a conference call, and we three spoke on the phone—another iPhone first for me—and we got together a game plan for how to make the script awesome.

It was pretty cool to maximize my iPhone’s potential. Over about eight hours, I wrote and edited a script, watched various iterations of the motion spot on Vimeo, texted and had a conference call with a guy in a Salt Lake studio and another guy sitting on a toilet of a hibachi restaurant, and with me sitting in a rental car outside a rehearsal dinner in Michigan.

At the end of the day, I was also stoked to help Camp 4 out in this very small capacity. Ultimately, the final spot launched a few weeks ago, and it has been a complete viral success. Anson ultimately came up with all the best voice over lines, and I helped write the more mediocre ones. But still, I’m proud to have collaborated with them, and I think the way it all went down was pretty unique and just shows how tech-savvy and forward thinking this crew at Camp 4 is. If you haven’t seen “This Is Backcountry” yet, please enjoy it and share the living fuck out of it: