ESPN Snowboarding

A special thanks goes out to Ally Distribution and all the filmmakers for hooking up the trailers you see to the right. Watch them and go buy their videos. Seriously. And check back next week for more hubbub on this season's crop of snowbro movies.

I'm hard-pressed to slap a "best" label on any one snowboard film. What if I'm farsighted and heli follow-cam shots make me dizzy? What if I puke on command every time I see a neck fold over a rail? What if I'm sitting in New York, where it's 86 degrees with why-bother-showering humidity, and I'm too jealous to watch any more damned videos?

One man's "best" is another man's boooorrring, but one adage that came up throughout my screenings of this year's snowboard videos was to know from experience. The dudes who have been in the game for nearly two decades really do know how to make snowboarding look pretty. But, as shrimp can attest to—looks aren't everything.

Blank Paper Studios may just have reinvented the way we perceive the snowboard film. This is the third film for the 3-year-old, Munich-based Blank Paper Studios. Co-founders David Benedek (formerly of Robot Food; Snowboarder's Rider of the Year in 2002 and 2003; double-corked 1260-puller extraordinaire), Boris Benedek (former World Cup rider and older bro) and Christoph Weber-Thoresen (team Nitro) all shot, edited and starred in the film.

"We didn't want to hold on to Robot Food simply because it was successful, so we moved in different directions. Blank Paper is the brainchild of Christoph Weber and myself. We had a few ideas we wanted to work on, and those turned into our first film, "91 Words For Snow," says David about the startup.

As an audience of snowboarding, we are accustomed to riding shots. Mix in a bit of testosterone-filled tomfoolery and you have your film. But, with a beginning, middle and end to each segment, not to mention a soundtrack that lifts you off your seat into a method air pose, Blank Paper's In Short succeeds by telling snowboarding's story from start to finish—and it does so well before we see any sign of snow.

What's that, you say? Are there Park jumps? Check. Backcountry booters? Check. Big mountain madness with an avi scare or two? Check. Urban jibbery, bomb drops, wall rides, down-flat-downs? Check, check, check and check.

Shot in Super 16 and 16 mm film, In Short opens with nature shots suitable for high school biology class—fire ants, reeds blowing, a canopy of trees—but just as the floodgates of hippy emotion start to open—TIMBER! An immense tree crashes to the earth and is on its way to becoming a snowboard, ultimately packaged and shipped by Jake Burton himself.

Building a snowboard from start to snow elicits an interesting paradox. We're snowboarders, and we love nature, but we're snowboarders—we need nature. What to do? Trees schmeess. We've managed to avoid sustainable shredding so far, so let's continue to brush it off for now. Just remember, next time you're sitting through another February with a 30-inch base, have faith—there will always be fake snow ... in England.

The British countryside is the perfect place to get radical, and if global warming keeps at it, blokes like 14-year-old Jamie Nicholls and Colum Mytton may be one step ahead of the future. No snow? No problem. Rock the artificial dry mogul fields while the sheep sleep next to the Poma lift. Jeans encouraged.

Through travel, you can discover something new and removed from your day-to-day. If you're financially blessed and able to work something you love into a trip, adventure will ensue. Snowboard films and travel are synonymous, but beyond shapes of mountains, snowpack variations and road signs in foreign tongues, there's usually little to distinguish between places.

In In Short, when Mikey Leblanc, David and Eric Messier go to Asahidake to ride with Shinji Ohmori, you know they're in Japan. Sushi, arcade games, Asahi in paper cups, hot dogs on windshields, copious laughter from landing to takeoff and good effing riding (that goes beyond the requisite dreidel spin off a park jump) abound.

If Mikey Leblanc singing in a kimono is indicative of anything, it's that "crew dynamics are everything if you want to make an honest film and not a visual fake of what 'fun' looks like. When people notice a real connection between riders in a film it reminds them of why they like riding with their friends. We picked riders we wanted to spend our year with—whether or not they're hot shit," says David.

A good video part uses a substantial time slot out of a rider's season and can force them to choose between the contest circus or a video part. In most modern-day snowboard films, the effort is obvious—maybe even a little too obvious, to the point that the snowboarding looks mechanized. Sometimes, with all the fancy shots, 100-plus-foot gaps and dizzying spins, it makes you wonder where the fun went.

When your sled caravan is held back because one of your boys packs in Budweiser and it explodes behind him all over the trail, you get a sense of what Mikey Basich's Alaska might be like. There's not a chairlift to be seen, and the next week is spent in a snow cave. After telling a storekeeper they had shipped their snowmachines up from the lower 48 and were about to embark on mid-winter glacial camping trip, she says, "All this is just so you can go snowboarding?"

Their unanimous reply?

"Not just."