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Matchstick stakes new “Claim”

Company takes ski film to new heights, while getting back to an old-school attitude
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Incredible Air Sean Pettit hit a massive table on Blackcomb last season. Photo by Blake Jorgenson

What: CLAIM Premiere

When: Sunday, Sept. 14, doors at 8 p.m.

Where: Telus Conference Centre

Tickets: $15

With the summer slowly fading away, the thoughts of many in this diehard ski town are turning towards the upcoming winter season. And what better way to get stoked on a fresh season of powder than a brand-new ski flick?

Steve Winter is executive producer and one of the founding fathers of Matchstick Productions (MSP), an institution in the ski film industry. He launched the company back in 1991 with co-owner Murray Wais.

“It was really for a love of skiing and traveling around the world,” Winter conceded. “At first, it was more about skiing than it was about filmmaking.”

But fundamentally Winter and Wais were on a mission to make skiing cool again. In the early ‘90s, the world of skiing was totally different from the one we know today.

“Really, skiing in that era was not supercool, it was more the rich person’s sport,” Winter explained. “There was a lot of DayGlo, and it wasn’t really that cool.”

The two novice filmmakers were inspired by Greg Stump’s projects to inject a hipper feeling into their movies using music and other elements. It wasn’t an easy feat.

“The ski industry didn’t support it at all,” Winter said, adding that marketing people in the industry during that time didn’t care about making the sport appealing to kids. “They were all about the rich people buying Bogner suits and whatever else. They could care less.”

“…They just wanted to groom (kids) into being the next rich Bogner wearers,” Winter said with a chuckle, “They didn’t really care about the image of the sport.”

It wasn’t until the hip new sister sport of snowboarding appeared on the horizon that the ski industry decided to try and appeal to the next generation of winter sport enthusiasts.

“Snowboarding, I believe, saved the ski industry. Because what happened is when snowboarding came along, they came along with so much of a cooler image. And not just out on the hill, their style, but the lifestyle – the clothes they wore and everything else – and it started digging into the pockets of the ski industry people,” Winter said.

While snowboard manufacturers were willing to sponsor snowboard films, the ski industry definitely wasn’t as receptive at first.

“We were met with a lot of stonewalling and we had to really break down those walls and prove (ourselves) to them by taking very little money.”

But MSP paved the way – they were the first to get skiers paid to just appear in films. Now its industry standard to sponsor athletes to appear in films and magazines alone, instead of just the ski racers.

“It’s hard to see us, as an individual company, the impact that we make, because there are so many people out there doing a great job at it, but we definitely had a good five-year run where it was just us up against the man… as soon as we made that break, we made it a lot easier for other younger filmmakers to come in, and now there’s a slew of other great filmmakers out there.”

With no background or training, and having to learn everything through trial and error, Winter and Wais grew MSP into the successful company it is today.

Since their very first film, “Nachos and Fear” premiered in 1992, MSP has produced a total of 20 films.

Over time, their work has evolved alongside the progression of the sport and the accomplishments of the athletes themselves, meshing big mountain riding with jibbing and extreme adventure skiing segments. The production quality has also improved dramatically as MSP has grown and technology has improved by adding dollies, cranes, helicopters, and high-def camera techniques into their shoots.

For the men of Matchstick it’s all about getting back to the basics of winter sports – having a good time and pushing limitations.

“The ski industry has really been coming back to that lately,” Winter said, “There were a lot of years where it became so image-heavy and so (about) who the cool person is. I think now it’s really (back) to the ‘70s where it was really just about fun.”

That new attitude is fundamental to MSP’s latest creation, “Claim, The Greatest Ski Movie … EVER!”

“A lot of times, in the last so many years, a professional athlete… will do something really cool, and then they don’t want to show emotion that they were stoked on what they did,” Winter explained, “…Whereas we feel that if you do something that you’re stoked on and that took you a long time to learn how to do, you should show it, you should claim it, you should pump your fists, just like in professional sports.”

The film is full of lighthearted, campy and over-the-top “claiming” — basically the winter sport equivalent of a touchdown dance, though you shouldn’t expect any of the athletes to go as far as spiking their skis.

The skiers featured in the film, Mark Abma, Ingrid Backstrom, Rory Bushfield, Chris Davenport, Simon Dumont, Stian Hagen, Hugo Harrisson, James Heim, Eric Hjorleifson, PK Hunder, CR Johnson, Shane McConkey, Sean Pettit, Chris Rubens, TJ Schiller, Colby West, and Jacob Wester, have a lot to brag about – they put a lot of time and effort into perfecting the shoots and epic tricks, making multiple trips to Alaska, Europe and the backcountry of British Columbia to film.

“They worked really, tremendously hard,” Winter said. “Every shot is a good, A-plus shot.”

Anyone who caught MSP’s last film, “Seven Sunny Days,” will invariably remember the awe-inspiring wingsuit flying segments. Well, this film also has an extreme sport angle, except this time it’s a speed session with skier Antoine Montant, in Chamonix, France.

“He’s got a small parachute that’s like a paraglider, but very small, that he skis down these giant peaks with,” Winter explained. “And whenever he comes into danger, like a thousand-foot cliff or a crevasse or something, he just completely lifts off the ground and flies over it, flies back down and lands on the slope and continues to ski down.”

This synthesis of skiing and paragliding is typically done in fairly flat slopes, but Montant takes it to new heights, literally and figuratively.

“…This guy’s actually skiing very gnarly, big peaks,” Winter added.

“Claim” sounds like it could be a tough act to follow. But it looks like MSP may go in a different direction with their next film.

Winter points out that their last few flicks have been very athlete-based. To keep things interesting, they’re considering doing more travel-based films, featuring more cultural elements of the ski world.

“There will be some athlete segments, but it’ll be a different kind of movie where we try to feature exotic locations and the people that are there,” Winter said.

But for now they’re focusing on premiering and promoting this newest film, which makes its world premiere right here in Whistler.

“Whistler is almost like a home to us, and a lot of our athletes and shooters and stuff live there, and we spend so much time filming there,” Winter explained, “It’s a diehard skier city. A lot of ski towns are a lot smaller, they don’t have as many people. This is a place we can go where there’s a huge conglomerate of skiers.”