What’s Harder Than Skiing at Night in an LED Suit? Filming It

Sweetgrass Productions used 4,000-watt lights and gels to light up the ski segments. Photo: Oskar Enander

There are thousands of hours of ski footage available online. And it all looks pretty much the same: A skier rips though virgin powder, sails off a steep ledge, or bravely forges new paths through pristine backcountry. It’s fun to watch for, oh, 30 seconds or so.

Seen one, and you’ve seen them all.

To shake up a genre that’s grown so tedious as to be cliche, the skiing auteurs at Sweetgrass Productions will releasing the 12-minute film Afterglow on Sunday (a three-minute teaser went up today). It’s utterly unlike anything you’ve seen before. Instead of filming during the day, they worked mostly at night, draping the skiers in giant light suits. Even more impressive, they hauled gigantic, high-powered lights into the backcountry and lit up entire mountains as a backdrop.

“This is our way of saying, ‘Hey, skiing has been filmed for like 60 years but there are still ways to reinvent the medium and still ways to look at it with fresh eyes,” says film co-director Nick Waggoner.