The following article was originally printed in the December 2023 Issue of Slush. To access the full article click here.
Words by Spencer Shubert
A few winters back, I was in an Uber with a snowboard buddy, catching up on how the season was treating us. We were both filming for different projects and were sharing stories about spots, tricks, dramas, and the rest of the underbelly of filming for snowboard videos. When we were getting out, the driver turned back to us and said, "I know you're speaking English, but I didn't understand a word y'all said." I never had realized I learned a different language, a privilege I thought I lost when I dropped out of high school. Instead of throwing away my education like everyone said, I found that I just replaced it with seemingly useless information about snowboarding. For example, instead of world history, I could tell you when grabbing before a grind became cool (Louif tail grab back lip in Bon Voyage). My understanding of geopolitics revolves around what cities get snow and what spots are there. I literally had a crash course in physics.
Whether my lessons in "jibology" are useless or not is beside the point. My taxi guru gave me some perspective on just how much snowboarding, and the videos surrounding it, had influenced my life. From the way that I dressed, people I surrounded myself with, the music I liked, and even my vernacular largely came from this collection of clips and montages of people sliding down snow. Needless to say, it completely consumed me, and for the better part of my life, it has been spent trying to emulate the feelings I got from watching snowboard videos.
That is just my story. Everyone on the Ride team has a different version in finding their passion for snowboarding. Jed Anderson grew up at Canadian Olympic Park, and his mom ran Riders on Board. Dan Liedahl and editor Jake Durham lived just down the street from Hyland Hills. Jacob Krugmire's older brother was a pro snowboarder (for Ride, baby). Reid Smith went to a snowboard school. My parents were ski bums. Savanna Shinske and Parrish (one of the main filmers) were doing god knows what in the backwoods of Vermont. Cole Navin is a total snowboard nerd, and Jill Perkins didn’t even find it until a little later in life. There are more than a dozen people involved in making Rated R, and the common theme between us is we all love snowboarding, but deeper than that is the effect snowboarding videos have had on us. They are a cornerstone of the culture we came up under. Just like in my story, the contents from these videos like tricks or quotes were used like a second language within our industry. Almost like it is part of the coding used in the makeup of snowboarding.
It sounds silly trying to explain the importance of snowboard videos, but moving away from full-length movies feels like pulling the heart out of our sport. The idea of a snowboard film is arbitrary at best; there is usually no set script or plot besides a group of people driven by passion trying to capture the ever-fleeting feelings of joy from riding a snowboard. But it is so much more than that. They are the catalog of snowboarding's past. A way to give the snowboarder creative freedom and show what is possible while also building off the knowledge of what was done before. It's the ultimate form of storytelling for an action sport, and without storytelling, there is no history. Without any history, then snowboarding is a shell of an industry...