Arthur Longo and Alex Tank sharing high fives for good times. Photo: Jb Liautard via Instagram
I don’t think I need to come here and argue that drinking water is much better for you than drinking sugary and chemical-filled energy drinks. At this point it seems like everyone already knows, but somehow don’t seem to care. I also don’t think I need to argue that the amount of money the companies behind these energy drinks put into the snowboard industry for events, videos, and projects like Supernatural, the Art of Flight, and Peace Park is not only valuable, but essential. After all, snowboarding is a business and businesses need money; and energy drink companies and other non-endemic brands looking to reach a youthful market have a lot of money. But as the old saying goes: “mo money, mo problems.”
These days, almost everything in snowboarding has a little bull, yellow star, or cat-scratch logo involved — it’s all about that little dance with the devil for a bigger budget or more exposure that marketers do to get their projects green-lit. The personalities that clashed and came together in the past to make the videos you watched on repeat growing up are whitewashed to lose all the raw enthusiasm and rough edges that made us love snowboarding in the beginning. Instead of hand-picked teams of riders who wanted to ride together, snowboard video lineups are determined by the riders’ sponsors, and a lot of those sponsors happen to be energy drink companies. Why? It’s easy: they pay the most money. So when something like the Drink Water crew comes around, it really throws a monkey wrench into the system, especially when they decide to make a snowboard movie.
This year, Austin Smith and Bryan Fox of Drink Water mixed things up and went all in with filmmaker Liam Gallagher for their own movie, The Pathology Project. What made this different? Instead of getting assigned a crew for the season, they rode with their friends. And instead of getting lost in overly produced segments that lose all semblance of reality, they let friends be friends and basically turned on the cameras to see what happened. Seems like such a basic idea, to make a snowboarding movie about friends — take you’re own experiences: when you ride, you generally ride with friends, and it’s usually a pretty fun time. And it comes across as much in the video. The effect of this “riding with friends” is immediately felt in the video and carries through for the entire length of the movie. Apparently, when crews are brought together by their mutual friendships, riding styles, and personalities (rather than line items on a sponsor’s team roster), this is the result — and the result looks really, really good.
As the primary sponsor, Drink Water reworked the system system and chose to ignore the chirps from sponsors’ perches and filmed a movie that focused on what snowboarding meant to them. While this can’t and won’t happen for every video in the future — again, it is hard to do these sorts of things without money — it is a refreshing break from the traditional model we’ve all been exposed to the last handful of years. There is a new D.I.Y. spirit emerging again within snowboarding, and whether that spirit finds its form in a grass-roots banked slalom event, a low-budget snowboard video, or just in people looking to do something totally different, that is a good thing and I am all for it.
This is what it is all about. Photo: Instagram
To learn more about Drink Water, check out WeDrinkWater.com.
