-By Nick Lipton
-Photo's Courtesy of Videograss
Snowboard videos are an odd thing these days. On one side of the coin you have sponsors pouring in millions of dollars to film epic worldwide adventures with helicopters, 35mm cameras, and Hollywood editing rooms. On the other side you have a group of kids filming each other with one camera and a Macbook Pro. Both processes’ can make a good movie, but snowboard movies have been stale as of late. You either watch a movie that is supposed to be edgy, or is supposed to set the standard for perfection and progression. Either way, I’m bored of it all. Luckily for all of us, a production company called Videograss has been formed and will be pleasing our eyeballs shortly.
The purpose of this new company is to bring the grit, passion, and emotion back into snowboarding- Something that has been brutally absent in the last few years. Of course, everyone claims that is the goal, but with Mikey LeBlanc, Darrell Mathes, Nima Jalali, and both Hakker brothers (Lance and Mike) running the ship, I can actually believe their claim.
Referred to by many as the Holden/Ashbury project this movie will be much more than that. The heads of this project all have long histories in snowboarding, and have never been perceived as boring. The word boring being massively important, since videos have lost their edge in recent years. How will these guys avoid creating just another run of the mill shred flick? I asked Nima, he had this to say, “We’re going to make a snowboarding movie like no other movie you’ve seen, a breath of fresh air for snowboarders. Riders are taking control of this movie. We live, breath, and eat snowboarding so we know who to put in the movies and how to put a movie together.” Lance Hakker also put his two cents in, “We are going to make a movie with some grit, something raw and real.” I then asked how real? How much grit can a snowboarding movie actually have, will the movie just be flooded with lifestyle shots? Lance said, “We’re going to let our riders and filmers figure that out, whatever they do is good by us. Nothing posed, if it’s awkward, let it be awkward. We’re making a movie about snowboarding and what happens out there.”
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