One of the deep routed motivations for looking at our connection to snow and its journey to our mountains came from Bryan Iguchi, who I rode with a lot when I was just a teenager.

I think it mostly comes down to trying to align with people who are down with a mission and will bring optimism.

I realized pretty quickly just how big and aggressive some of the mountains were down in Nagano Prefecture.

We were looking at weather and our relationships with weather. It goes to a few other places, and I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't go into it, but it's about a willingness to expose oneself a little bit more and share something openly and honestly. It's more than just landing tricks. Moving forward, this is just another stepping stone.

We needed to do "Community Project" to feel comfortable doing our own thing, and then "That's It That's All" was this experiment with camera technology and shooting snowboarding a little differently. "Art of Flight" was that dream of "That's it That's All" realized. Then we didn't want to make an "Art of Flight 2," so we stepped back and tried to take a different approach to create a more multi-faceted film. "The Fourth Phase" has more of a storyline, and it was much more personal for me.

I've been to Japan so many times, but I still constantly stumble across things that are so foreign to me.

Ya know it's funny, what's happening to us. Our lives have become digital. Our friends, now virtual. And, anything you could ever wanna know is just a click away. Experiencing the world through second hand information isn't enough. If we want authenticity we have to initiate it. We will never know our full potential unless we push ourselves to find it. It's this self-discovery that inevitably takes us to the wildest places on earth.