With two award winning titles, Flavor Country and Time Well Wasted, already under their belts, Sandbox Films has nothing to prove. But that doesn’t stop them from continuing to prove their one of the best in the game every season. Say what you will about Canadians, but Whistler is by far one of the best snow towns I have ever been to and I’m pretty jealous that it’s Sandbox’s daily backyard playground. Unfortunately this last season many ski areas suffered poor snow conditions, and Whistler wasn’t an exception. Sandbox also had to deal with quite a few injuries to their riders.

Andrew took a bad slam at a park session with Snowboarder Mag. They built a massive jump with a sketchy inrun. Andrew got tossed off the take off and came down hard on his side. His femur bone shot up and shattered his pelvis and his arm broke really bad.

Sounds like they had an unluckily season. Judging by the trailer though, it appears that Sandbox has still been able to make the best of it and put together a quality film.

Bonus Material! 30 Seconds in a Heli

Think Thank has put out some pretty solid films over the past couple seasons. And this season’s production, Cool Story, doesn’t seem to be anything less than what viewers have come to expect. High production quality, cool personalities, and innovative riding is what the Think Thank crew is all about.

Think Thank usually comes with some great music too. The song used in the trailer is an older song called My Coco by Stellastarr*. Here’s a song a bit more up to date from their recently released album Civilized.

Stellastarr* – Freak Out

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Bonus Material! Who doesn’t like wreck sections?!

What’s better than having an Elektro dance party to open up your snowboard teaser? Oh yeah… Great filming. Great locations. Great snowboarding. And great editing. That’s exactly what Alterna Films gives you. I’ve never seen one of Alterna’s films before, but this one will be on my must see list this video season. I love the dance party count down and the “dropping” ending. Good Stuff.

It may just be this cool Colorado summer, but the snow season seems just around the corner. Or maybe it’s that it really is just around the corner, with snowmaking operations less than two months away! I’m very excited for this season and am looking forward to trying to double my days spent on the hill last season. The more I think about it, the more I start to get anxious. In order to try and fill the void until the lifts start operations, I’ll be posting a new snowboard trailer, or two, each week.

To kick things off is Neverland by Absinthe Films. The title graphics look nice and although the editing is better than most, I’d still say it’s only so-so. But with a rider list that includes Travis Rice, Nicolas Müller, Romain deMarchi, DCP, Eero Ettala, Gigi Rüf and many others, Neverland is sure to be one of the years best films.

As a little bonus, an upcoming German production company asked us to post their trailer. Although the riding isn’t on par with Neverland, for obvious reasons, it’s still a fun little flick to check out. And besides, I always like supporting people that are trying to make their dreams happen, so here is the trailer for S-Cut Productions film In Between.

P.S. I hope everyone decides to use Vimeo as their video sharing site this year. It’s just such a nice compression and video player.

So I’ve spent the past week going over every link in the Idiom Life link directory to try and find the Top 5 Websites of the Snowboard Industry. This proved to be quite troublesome. I was actually really surprised to find such a lack of good, clean, useable and valid web design within the industry. There are so many good designers and artists involved in our sport that I figured we’d have a lot more good web design. It’s not to say that there aren’t good sites out there, but they seem to be few and far between. And what’s even more startling to me, a fellow designer, is that I could only find one site that had more than a couple pages with coding that validated to web standards. For all you developers out there, use this link and get valid! Anyway… I know this is suppose to be an uplifting article about the BEST sites, so I’ll get back on track now.

For this Top 5 list, instead of just trying to choose the five best overall sites I’ve decided to feature the very best site in five different categories; Best Usability, Best Flash Design, Best Community, Best Retail (store), and Best Design. Lets dig in.

More on the flip side »

Idiom Life started out as a local snowboard video production company. Back in the day it was actually called Idiom Pictures. Those were the days! Just out of high school. No job that required too many hours of my time. No “global warming”. Just the mountains. The snow. My board. And my camera. My old friend and I would log 90+ days of riding at resorts alone. And another good amount of days logged in the backcountry. We kept this pace for a good couple of seasons as we met and rode with a lot of great riders. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. He became a cop (what?!). I became poor. And that was that.

However, on the brightside, my becoming poor pushed me to develop my skills and evolve into a better editor and designer of all things. And luckily enough I still have a solid 50 hours of footage to show the world. Now the footage is a bit dated but, in my opinion, most of the riding still meets or exceeds the level of today’s riders. Consider this the first teaser video of many to come. The song is Miseria Cantare by AFI, one of my all-time favorite bands.

BRANDON RUSSELL: So you’re quite a veteran to snowboarding… you’ve been riding since… ‘86?
MIKE BASICH: Yeah… ‘85-’86ish. Next year will be my twentieth year.

B: How do you think you’ve lasted so long with out completely killing yourself?
M: Riding the soft stuff, haha. I quit riding the hard pack quite a while ago. I kinda started off with the world cup halfpipe, that’s what started my career, the competition thing. And it turned into big air after that. My body started feeling it, my back, my posture’s horrible. Five years ago… or, four years ago I stopped competing and started photography and wanted to do something that set my own schedule, so now I ride and chase the snow around in my van, wherever it’s soft. I rode Northstar yesterday and I am aching today, from one day of riding, cause I don’t ride resorts that often anymore.

B: Now you mentioned photography… is that what you love to do now? Your Point of Views and Self Portraits are amazing.
M: Being in the sport for twenty years I gotta keep things interesting for me. Going from competition, to starting my own business, to running the business and negotiating contracts, going to filming, and stuff like that is to always bring something new in that I haven’t done yet. Photography is something that I got interested in after shooting with so many photographers and wanting to shoot what I see, so I’d tell a photographer to go over here and over there and they don’t like that too often so I had an interest to try and capture what I had in my mind and it turned into what I see as a rider, so it turned into Point of View stuff. I got a couple remotes so I can shoot myself from the ground. That’s been interesting, my new little spark to keep things interesting for me…

B: Like your now infamous 120-foot acid drop out of the helicopter, how’d you come up with that crazy idea?
M: That happened two years ago and it was about a three year project that I wanted to do, it was on the back burner for awhile until I told my girlfriend at the time about it, I’d just started getting more into photography that year. I wanted to shoot a photo like that but run it without the heli, so you see this guy falling out of the sky and there’s no cliff or anything next to him from where he took off. That was the original vision that I wanted to try to capture but it turned out that no one ran it that way. That’s kinda how that thing started.

More on the flip side »

BRANDON RUSSELL: Mikey, thanks for taking time off of your busy schedule, touring for loveHate. How is the tour going?
MIKEY LeBLANC: A party, a plane, an hour and another party.

B: Are kids getting as stoked as you hoped they would?
M: I think so, the tricks are unquestionable, the video and the music grows on you like fine wine… I’m really at the point where I edited it with Shelby, and have seen it so much. And I still really love the video so… at this point, selfishly, I don’t care… because I love it.

B: Tell us a little about Kidsknow and the loveHATE video.
M: Kidsknow is my production company, I did the vid In association with Burning Bridges. That is Shelby’s company. loveHATE is a lot of my friends and me making what we do during the winter visible to kids.

B: Who is touring with you for the loveHATE and Positron tour?
M: Mostly Justin Hebbel, Darrel Mathesen and Jon Kooley for loveHATE, and Devun, Dufficy, and Dionne for the Positron video. It’s a nightmare, or, a dream come true. Six a.m. flights, one hour in the hotel room, straight to the premiere, straight to the bar after. Drink all night, and then get a cab to the next flight. It’s rock star shit.

B: Who are you most stoked to be touring with? Who in this video do we most need to be watching?
M: I like everyone. For loveHATE; Hebbel is insane. So tech. It takes a lot of watching to tell what he’s doing. And Darrel is also ridiculous.

B: What is your vision for Kidsknow?
M: Make snow videos that are non-scripted, and in the middle, have some social commentary fun. Possibly say something without beating you over the head with it.

B: Switching gears to some other projects of yours, How is Holden going?
M: Amazing and crazy. The gear is making me happy and I pretty much know the whole business now. From start to finish.

More on the flip side »

My good friend Travis does general contracting work up in Breckenridge. During his drive up there yesterday (August 15th) he took this picture of Summit County’s first 2008/09 snow and emailed it to me. As with many of you that will see this photo, it brought a great big smile to my face. I’m already on the edge of my seat just waiting for opening day. Although it’s extremely early to know, especially considering the drought Colorado has been in, I can’t help but feel like this is a good sign of things to come this winter.

Here is my second choice of the snowboard video trailers to show you. It’s coming to us from Germany. The guys over at Isenseven always impress, and this new trailer is no exception. Here’s what they have to say about it:

It’s been a while but we’re back with some moving pictures for you again. This time literally. We put together an exclusive selection of moments from our past trips into a little story, read like a book, just without any climax. You can enjoy a journey to Norway, Austria, New York, Washington, Idaho, Vermont and Quebec cut down to just one night and one day. This new teaser for “Teenage Love Graffiti” (DVD release fall 08) is availbale for download in HD or iPod format at www.isenseven.de as always.