DENVER—Before the snow falls, ski moviemakers from around the country roll out their latest offerings from Colorado, always aiming to better the previous year’s movie with stunning cinematography capturing the best skiers shredding the world’s gnarliest terrain.
For the next several weeks, premieres and showings will dominate area theaters, sparking the ski season with heart-pounding images that energize every type of skier.
The game was once dominated by Warren Miller, who inspired the legendary Greg Stump, who in turn spawned influential moviemakers Matchstick Productions from Crested Butte and Wyoming’s Teton Gravity Research. And now those two nearly 20-year-old outfits have seeded a swarming generation of ski moviemakers, many based in Colorado.
“Once there were two, and now there are 50,” said Steve Winter, who joins Red Bull and Matchstick Productions co-founders Murray Wais and Scott Gaffney in showing the anticipated documentary on Oct. 21 at Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House. “The Colorado scene has come on strong. Skiing in our state is a staple, and it is only natural that kids will turn their love for the sport into a career.”
Colorado has at least five prominent ski moviemakers. Sweetgrass Productions, which premiered its genre-bending “Valhalla” on Friday at the Paramount Theatre, was born of three Colorado College film grads. Denver’s Level 1 Productions last year won Powder Magazine’s coveted “Movie of the Year” award for “Sunny.” Boulder’s Stept Productions moved from Boston six years ago and has branched into diverse video production involving real estate, commercials, documentaries and off-snow action sports. And Crested Butte’s Two Plank Productions’ fifth movie, “Because,” garnered several awards.
Stept has developed one-of-a-kind cinematic approaches to capturing the vibrant yet somewhat underground urban skiing scene, which features brazen athletes sparking their skis down kinked handrails and brick buildings, according to the Denver Post ().
“We thrive on diversity, so we all film and edit differently, and collaborate to make sure our work doesn’t get stale. We think it is very important that every project we release is our best to date and, more important, that it is completely different than any previous work,” said Stept co-founder Alex Martini, who counts snowy metro areas as an asset for his Colorado filmmaking.
Level 1’s Josh Berman said Colorado’s central location and its treasure trove of top-talent skiers make it a no-brainer as a home base. The company’s River North headquarters is a common stopover for skiers on the move.
“Colorado is the hub of skiing in North America. So many of our athletes live within a couple hours of Denver,” said Berman, who last winter traveled to 11 states, Sweden, Canada and France to capture skiing for Level 1’s 14th annual film “Partly Cloudy.”
That jet-setting pace can be brutal and often sees producers holed up for six-week editing benders that can stretch up to the day before a premiere. Lately, several outfits have been taking two years to film and edit a movie, defying the industry’s traditional movie-a-year formula, which traces back to the earliest day of Warren Miller.
Sweetgrass Productions has always premiered its films in Colorado, starting in Aspen and moving to Denver last year. It recently unveiled its latest film, “Valhalla,” at Denver’s Paramount Theatre. The movie defies skiing’s music-video stereotype with an actual story line revolving around a backcountry tribe of gluttonous powderhounds.
“The perspective we are showing is different than the ski culture in Denver,” said Sweetgrass co-founder Nick Waggoner. “It’s exciting to bring something new to our home base.”
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Information from: The Denver Post,
