We have only just departed from this decade, but a lot changed within it. With the exception of a few crews and production companies, free full length web releases pretty much became standard. Cameras were cheaper so everyone was making movies and throwing them online, and some solid videos were made.
After a while though, I think it's fair to say that things got a bit stale. The media landscape was changing rapidly and there were more snowboard videos being made than ever before, but the formula for making them stayed the same. We had got ourselves into a bit of a rut, and very few people seemed to thinking about whether their audience would want to see the same shit we’d seen the year before, just on some different rails and jumps and with a different soundtrack. I’m not saying there weren’t good movies being made; there were some great ones, but there was definitely a lot of repetition.
In the last couple of years things have started to get interesting again. We’re seeing a wave of videos with a different pace and style that are getting us seriously fired up to go riding, which I think is the point of snowboard movies? Or maybe I should call them short flims now, I'm not sure. Either way, you'll know them when you see them.
Oh yeah, one last thing to say about this decade. The rise of Instagram. This app has had more impact on the media landscape and our own social behaviour than anything else. Full lengths went from 40 minutes to 8, and now many people can’t even hang on for 59 seconds. This shit has also changed the way that we snowboard. Nothing is left unfilmed, and it seems that there’s often more priority put on capturing and consuming the 'moment' than there is of just living it. Ok, shut up Theo. There are good sides to social media too. This was just supposed to be a small intro to a list of videos, not an article about the ethics of an alternative digital reality. I’ll continue with this discussion at some point soon, but for the mean time you should just have a dig back through this selection of quality movies from the last ten years.
Bon Voyage - Videograss 2010. VG recently released all 12 of their movies on a little HVX keychain, you should probably buy it.
9191 - Volcom 2010
Back to the Boneyard - The Bangshow 2010. Featuring Method’s editor-at-large Mike Goodwin.
https://vimeo.com/groups/120208/videos/15281371
PSOTRATSOC1983 - Comune 2011
https://www.zapiks.com/comune-psotratsoc1983-full-m.html
A2M - Barfbags 2013. Watch it to the end.
Horgasm – A Love Story – Shredbots 2011. Easily the most entertaining video to drop in the last decade. A blindingly good combination of funny and gnarly.
Defenders of Awesome 2: Stay Bad Ass - Capita 2014 (all parts on this channel, keep clicking)
King Cobra - KBR 2014. Scandinavian looseness.
Rendered Useless - Chiken Meat Unlimited 2015. This is the full experience.
Mediocre Madness - Drink Water 2015. The trip of trips.
Glue – 2016. One of the first of the new wave of truly beautiful videos from Hitsch Haller and Chris Lüdi.
Side Hit Society – Airblaster 2016. Airblaster keeping things Airblaster. Thanks guys, you’re the best.
Atagge Wolkenkratzer - 2016. Early season in Austria with some excellent motion graphics from Fabian F Fuchs. You should also watch all of the other Atagge videos, they're absolute quality.
Left Brain Right Brain - Think Thank 2016. Pure fun.
Beacon - 2017. It’s got Louif floating down a river, as well as a bunch of other beautiful things.
Loose Change – 2017. Sparrow, Niels and friends adventuring through the East.
Nothing But - Postland Theory. Seriously good parts from Will Smith, Cees Wille, Artem Smolin, Simon Houlind and Kas Lemmens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Vof0CeJnw&feature=emb_title
The Future of Yesterday – BYNDMDLS 2018. A modern classic.
Brown – Brown Cinema 2018
Landline – Vans 2018. Very strong evidence that the full movie isn't dead just yet.
The Uninvited – 2019. Jess Kimura and co taking things into their own hands with this savage all female project.
Wop Presents: Needsnow - 2019. Sami Luhtanen, Niels Schack, watch this shit.
PULP - The North Face 2019. Timeless snowboarding.
Contradiction - Elias Elhardt 2019. A complicated relfection on snowboarding's beautiful simplicity.]
SUNŌKERO - Korua Shapes 2019. I wasn't initially planning on including a Korua clip in this list (despite the fact that they're absolutely stunning) because they're usually around 3-4 minutes which I didn't think quite qualified as a movie. Then I luckily remembered that their latest visual work from Japan was 9 minutes. Fair warning though, if you watch this you will immediately lament the fact that you're not snowboarding right now.
Suzy Greenberg 270 The Movie - Scott Stevens and friends 2019. This one just sneaks into the list by a matter of days, dropped online on Dec 21. This movie will make you feel like you're 12 again.
This list was a very long one and there's a very good chance that I've forgotten a bunch of really good movies, which I apologise for. Again, this is a reflection of the times that we live in. It's just fucking impossible to keep track of everything anymore. 2020 is going shit so far, but we look forward to seeing where snowboarding goes in the next ten years, hopefully we stop fucking up the planet and it keeps on snowing. x