The Making of ORNADA: A Ski Film Driven by the Unexpected
There’s a hidden secret to all the big lines, beautiful pow turns, and perfect shots we see on screen when watching a ski film; it’s all about logistics.
Beyond the environmental and physical challenges of filming skiing, the actual production process involves a lot of hoping the weather cooperates while on a deadline, corralling professional athletes, remembering not to forget sponsor deliverables, wrangling busy creatives who are also skiers (a deadly combination for organization), and any number of other unforeseen variables.
In short, making a ski film is a beast of a project.
Things must have been getting quiet around the Armada Skis HQ, because two years ago, the brand embarked on an undertaking of epic proportions — a film featuring no less than their entire athlete team and an original live score.
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ORNADA, which depicts the deep Armada Skis roster as they board a plane to the planet Ornada, is a work of art in the most literal sense.
Throughout the film, viewers are treated to street skiing by some of Armada’s incredible roster of female athletes, like Rell Harwood, Olivia Asselin, and Marin Hamill. There's a rare backcountry segment from Phil Casabon (B-Dog), mind-boggling backcountry hucks from Tanner Hall, not to mention some top-tier Ski Boss B-roll, the most beautiful big mountain lines with Anne Wangler and Sammy Carlson, and so much more.
The film culminates as the team skis within sculptures created by the artist Madsteez, whose work is deeply embedded in the Armada Skis brand.
As I sat in the Lido Theater in Newport Beach, California, at the ORNADA Live Experience, I found that my initial curiosities about the project’s logistics had been replaced by utter awe of the product.
How did they manage to fit all these athletes, whose styles and skills span such a wide range, into the umbrella of one film? After all, such a task seems bound to fail, and yet, just like watching a contortionist fit themselves into a tiny box, when it works, the results are delightfully extraordinary.
The idea for a team film kicked around the brand for several years before it actually went into production. It seemed to both Armada and their athletes that films featuring individual skiers had become significantly more popular in the last few years.
“Everybody has a strong vision of how they want to portray their skiing and their own careers, and that probably led to us just feeling like we wanted to support the athletes in that way, and support their individual projects, and really help them bring to life their visions for being themselves,” said Tom Suesskoch, Armada’s vice president of brand and one of the film’s producers, on why it had taken them so long to pull the trigger on the project.
"It was never going to be the brand going to the athletes and saying, ‘we need you guys to do this.’ It needed to come from the bottom up, from the athletes," he added.
Armada’s athlete team is a mixed bag when it comes to specialties, made more so by skiers with unmatched career longevity like Sammy Carlson, whose early days were defined by heavy-hitting park skiing segments and X Games medals, but is now better known for bringing his bag of tricks to the backcountry of BC and Alaska.
In addition, it was abundantly clear to all involved that with a team as multi-generational as Armada’s, they would need to appeal to a broader audience. In short, to incorporate such diverse talent and have it captivate people in the age of social media, it would need to be nothing less than, in the words of B-Dog, “giving people with a ski porn addiction their fix.”
Early on, it was clear ORNADA could not be made over the course of one winter. Making the film would require two full years. However, the production team still wanted to use the time they had wisely.
The first shoot for ORNADA took place in Austria at Absolut Park in April of 2023. The year prior, Armada’s team week had culminated with the creation of an art installation in the form of a wall of skis at Absolut by MadSteez. For the opening sequence of ORNADA, they decided to build off what they’d already done, and with the whole athlete and production team assembled, they spent days stretching and painting canvas, building structures, and installing them on the mountain.
Once the team saw what was possible, they ran with the concept for the film’s closing segment, which also features large art installations created by Madsteez.
The closing segment was shot at Riksgränsen, which sits 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, and has an otherworldly quality that helped to set the scene for the planet ORNADA.
However, beyond the location’s aesthetic, legend has it that Armada Skis founders JP Auclair and Chris O’Connell first met at Riksgränsen in 1998. The final segment of the film works not just to close the piece, but to pay homage to the roots of Armada and freeskiing as a whole.
The other whole-team shoot that took place was at Mammoth Mountain, which holds a lot of heritage with both Armada and the sport itself. Of course, there were athletes who were busy or injured during these team shoots, and the crew had to adapt, but in the spirit of the film itself and the brand, both the production team and the athletes embraced the experimental nature of the film to fill these gaps and leaned into capturing the creativity and collaboration that took place.
In tune with the film’s entire process, many of the other segments were driven by the athletes themselves. For example, Tanner Hall and Sammy Carlson’s segments in Alaska and British Columbia largely came to fruition via the athletes' own initiatives to film there.
Other segments were put together by the production team based on skier style, an already planned trip, or simply with the idea that when paired, a particular group of athletes staged in a specific location over a period of time would yield film-worthy results.
Prime examples included Torin Yater-Wallace and Quinn Wolferman’s Utah/Wyoming segment, and Rell Harwood, Marin Hamill, Max Moffatt, Olivia Asselin, and Dani Bacher’s Quebec street segment.
“It's like Captain America meets the whole Marvel squad. It’s like it's the X-Men, they're all together, it's not a Wolverine movie. So it's really exciting in that regard,” said B-Dog of how the film sought to break the model of one athlete per segment in favor of cohesive parts that featured multiple athletes.
There’s no doubt that the healthy showing of ski porn, an incredible live set done by an experimental jazz band assembled purely for the film’s score, and the extremely loose yet equally entertaining storyline all played their own roles in making the film every bit as captivating as the team had hoped.
However, in the end, I have to think that some of the film’s success in acting as a visual marriage of skiing and art came from the unexpectedness of not just the product, but the production process. The energy and creativity that comes from bringing an athlete team like this together for multiple segments can’t be manufactured.
What was often seen as herding cats to meet sponsor deliverables in ski film production was taken as an opportunity to build something that truly reflected the brand that created the catchphrase “what skiing will become.”