This shot was from my first day shooting for Nimbus back in the day. It’s cool how things work out. I was in the right place at the right time finishing up a shoot at Baker and they needed a Cine a few days later in Whistler for a 6 week shoot which ended up turning into a 5+ year creative partnership with @ericrpollard and most recently working with @chrisbenchetler for two years on #mountainsofthemoon. Working with this crew has had a huge influence on my creative style and the type of skiing/riding I prefer to shoot. The bar they set is still really hard to beat! Thanks boys!!
One of my favorite parts of working on Mountains of the Moon was getting the chance to really play (I’ll save the jam band references because we might have already overdone it a little) Director @chrisbenchetler editor @codemangram and DP @tylerjhamlet encouraged the crew to not be afraid to take creative risks and do as much as possible in camera: we had crazy lighting rigs on jet skis and cables, lasers, projection mapping, cameras on vertical sliders a hundred feet up, dip cameras under drones, avalanche crash boxes…the whole grab-bag of weird stuff.
Somewhere in the chaos I had this idea: What if I made my own aperture shapes?
One of my vintage Zeiss lenses already gave the out-of-focus areas this wild saw-blade look (see pic), so I wondered if I could lean into that and create custom bokeh shapes. A couple hours later with an exacto knife and construction paper what ended up being called “Jeff’s Art Project” was born.
We tried it on the next shoot (the climbing sequence) and, to my complete shock, it actually worked. If you watch the film you’ll catch the weird little Easter eggs all over the place: Dancing Bears, Steal Your Faces, Dead lightning bolts all created for about ten bucks and some late-night tinkering.
We've been daydreaming of bluebird pow days... and there's only 140 days to wait! Our helis start flying December 1st, 2025.
⛷️: @hedvigwessel
🎥: @jeffwright
🎬: Clip from @warrenmillerent Daymaker
Can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you @edubzy !! Update: Thank you so much to all of the well wishers!! @edubzy and I couldn't be more appreciative and excited!! Also, everybody keeps asking who took the picture. I faked her out saying I was going to shoot a timelapse and that her and Bullet should hop in for a quick pic.
New work coming to @hbomax tonight! Psyched this thing is finally going to be out in the world!
Huge thanks to @tetongravity and @hbomax for giving me the chance to DP the expedition portion of the show.
If you tune in you’ll see the athletes and crew had some spectacular hardships to overcome. I couldn’t be more proud of them and the deep friendships that were forged as a result.
