What you ride and how you choose to ride is such a dynamic part of what this contest [ Ultra Natural] is built for.
Sometimes storms come through with wind and blow the features off or sometimes they come in heavy and grow the features to the point where we have to shovel them off again. Leading up to the window for our event we try to get everything lined up and safe for the riders.
The whole goal with this thing [Ultra Natural] from the start was to really let rider's style define them and their line choice.
I'm very much looking forward to doing nothing fixed, just riding for fun.
Bryan [Iguchi] had this beautiful philosophy about our connection with these incredible cycles. There's a line from one of his poems that always stays with me about 'This process we follow; this cycle we ride' and it's almost become a strap line for the film.
One of the deep routed motivations for looking at our connection to snow and its journey to our mountains came from Bryan Iguchi, who I rode with a lot when I was just a teenager.
One of the proudest things for me with this film [The Fourth Phase] is that year after year we put ourselves right out there making it and no one got seriously injured.
We're all doing what we love. It's how we express ourselves - operating in a space where you don't know if something is possible or not.
I'm passionate about capturing amazing snowboarding action. I get so much out of the artistic endeavor of even getting one amazing shot in a pristine environment, using specialist cameras to showcase how fun and dynamic snowboarding is. That's what I live for.
I love to snowboard with no cameras: 100 percent.
There's no doubt 'normal' is changing - spring actually came a month early in Alaska, for example, and we had to stop filming.
We pretty much had crazy weather, historically speaking, in every location we filmed [The Fourth Phase]. Nothing has been normal in the past three years.
We faced blizzards, sub-zero temperatures, and of course dangerous snow conditions and vertiginous drops. That's what you get when you're working with fickle mother nature - you start out with a solid plan and it always changes, so you have to evolve and adapt.
Apart from those other riders there is a whole production team [ of The Fourth Phase] behind the cameras too, hauling hundreds of kilos of fragile and awkward filming equipment up those same frozen landscapes. They're the real heroes.
When your location is a snowy mountain in the winter the obstacles are pretty extreme.
We started out making a film [ The Fourth Phase] about the incredible snow we get at home in Wyoming, the journey soon macroed out into this epic 16,000 mile trip around the North Pacific, taking us to locations in Japan, Alaska, the Kamchatka Peninsula in far-eastern Russia, and back to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
While researching the project [The Fourth Phase] I stumbled across this amazing research by a scientist called Dr Gerard Pollack who had done studies on what he called a 'fourth phase' of water.
The idea [of the Fourth Phase ] was that by taking a closer look at where our weather comes from, and the processes involved in making it, we could all walk away with a greater appreciation of water in its various magical forms.
Ultimately it's a snowboarding film [Fourth Phase], of course, so the main thing that we wanted to celebrate was how awesome snowboarding is! Secondly, we wanted to celebrate the environment that we all shape our lives around. So the film documents myself and other like-minded individuals attempting to follow the hydrological cycles that shape the worlds we've committed our lives to.
Even getting one amazing shot in a pristine environment is what I live for.
It would be really nice to have a venue stop in Japan someday. Japan would be perfect for it.
We were looking at weather and our relationships with weather. It goes to a few other places, and I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't go into it, but it's about a willingness to expose oneself a little bit more and share something openly and honestly. It's more than just landing tricks. Moving forward, this is just another stepping stone.
I'm really interested in revamping the Supernatural contest, so I'm going to put a lot of effort and energy into that going forward.
It's probably the most personal project [The Fourth Phase] I've done, which changed the dynamic a little bit.
We needed to do "Community Project" to feel comfortable doing our own thing, and then "That's It That's All" was this experiment with camera technology and shooting snowboarding a little differently. "Art of Flight" was that dream of "That's it That's All" realized. Then we didn't want to make an "Art of Flight 2," so we stepped back and tried to take a different approach to create a more multi-faceted film. "The Fourth Phase" has more of a storyline, and it was much more personal for me.
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