Fade to Black: Steve Winter

When Steve Winter started filming on the slopes, the sport of skiing had very little "cool" cachet. "Back in the late '80s, it was more of a rich person's sport or just something families on vacation would do. There was a lot of DayGlo in the fashions and not a lot of coolness. It was not a core sport," he says.

To make matters worse, the sudden popularity of snowboarding—with its attendant extreme image and videos—was hitting skiing's bottom line hard. Winter, an avid skier himself, decided to turn things around.

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His debut film, a 15-minute piece titled Nachos and Fear, generated enough buzz to allow him to gather financing for his first feature, Soul Sessions. He also co-founded his company, Crested Butte, Colo.-based Matchstick Productions (MSP), with longtime friend Murray Wais. Winter says their films represented a turning point in the industry, focusing on athletes' personalities and abilities rather than on location and story, as he says was the norm in the well-known ski movies of the time. "We made skiers famous by following them around all year and then editing all that footage into a featured segment. They became the heroes and stars of the films," he says.

Winter and MSP have since produced more than 20 films, as well as the action-sports series Focused, which garnered three Emmy nominations for outstanding cinematography.

This year's MSP ski film, In Deep, will feature a few athlete segments and delve into specific aspects of the sport, such as powder skiing. The film uses Super 16 Arriflex 16SR film cameras and Sony HDW-F900s shot from the ground and from helicopters for back-country footage. There is also a proprietary (and top secret, Winter says) POV helmet-cam setup that uses Super 16. This, he says, is often strapped onto the heads of the professional skiers to capture breathtaking action shots.

Winter says MSP is taking a different tack with its distribution model this time around, handling all domestic distribution—and, therefore, retaining all domestic rights to the production—instead of shopping it out to an action-sports distribution company. MSP will launch a 100-stop worldwide film tour on Sept. 14 in Boulder, Colo., place DVDs and Blu-ray Discs in core ski shops in mid-October, and simultaneously provide a digital release through iTunes.

In addition to commercial work, Winter says MSP will release another ski film in 2010 as well as a tribute movie about beloved skier and MSP cohort Shane McConkey, who died this spring in a base-jumping accident. "We've been filming with him since 1993, so we have an entire career-span of footage. We just retransferred all his standard 16[mm] footage to HD, and we're going to do a full-HD release," he says.

When discussing his decision to still shoot Super 16, Winter says, "I know everyone claims they can make 24p look like film, but if I want it to look like film, I'm going to shoot film. I still love the art of it."

More on Steve Winter and Matchstick Productions

View Winter's reel