Travis Rice Quotes - Page 2

I knew Shin [Biyajima] a little bit early on, but it's funny because where I really met Shin, and where he made a strong impression on me, was in Jackson Hole. I sledded back to a secret zone way deep in the Jackson backcountry to some freeriding. I got out there and followed some snowmobile tracks figuring it's just some snowmobilers.

I actually enjoyed getting lost in Japan's backroads, finding myself in a wasabi farm.

It was just on a whole other level, getting to experience and ride that terrain. We spent a fair amount of time in the Hakuba Valley.

I'm passionate about capturing amazing snowboarding action. I get so much out of the artistic endeavor of even getting one amazing shot in a pristine environment, using specialist cameras to showcase how fun and dynamic snowboarding is. That's what I live for.

Even getting one amazing shot in a pristine environment is what I live for.

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.

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

There's no doubt 'normal' is changing - spring actually came a month early in Alaska, for example, and we had to stop filming.

One of the proudest things for me with this film [The Fourth Phase] is that year after year we put ourselves right out there making it and no one got seriously injured.

The Tokyo Dome Big Air contest (in 2003) was my first trip to Japan. I think I won it with a double back or something. Those events were fun. I was underaged, like 19 or 20, and going over to Japan in the very beginning was insane. It was amazing.

When I finally got to go ride the mountains in Japan, it blew my mind.

Apart from those other riders there is a whole production team [ of The Fourth Phase] behind the cameras too, hauling hundreds of kilos of fragile and awkward filming equipment up those same frozen landscapes. They're the real heroes.

I was pretty blown away by how vast and aggressive the terrain is in the Japanese Alps. You're looking up at peaks, and it's like Alaska seeing all kinds of amazing stuff that looks ridable, but it's 70 percent death defying; only a small percentage really goes.

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

The whole goal with this thing [Ultra Natural] from the start was to really let rider's style define them and their line choice.

We started out making a film [ The Fourth Phase] about the incredible snow we get at home in Wyoming, the journey soon macroed out into this epic 16,000 mile trip around the North Pacific, taking us to locations in Japan, Alaska, the Kamchatka Peninsula in far-eastern Russia, and back to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

I'm very much looking forward to doing nothing fixed, just riding for fun.

We pretty much had crazy weather, historically speaking, in every location we filmed [The Fourth Phase]. Nothing has been normal in the past three years.

I love to snowboard with no cameras: 100 percent.

While researching the project [The Fourth Phase] I stumbled across this amazing research by a scientist called Dr Gerard Pollack who had done studies on what he called a 'fourth phase' of water.

The idea [of the Fourth Phase ] was that by taking a closer look at where our weather comes from, and the processes involved in making it, we could all walk away with a greater appreciation of water in its various magical forms.

Shin [Biyajima] rides down with this big ol' Japanese grin and giggle and I'm like what? Two years later, when I started planning the trip, I knew Shin was from the Hakuba area, and I didn't want to come film in Japan without a Japanese rider. Shin had the time and availability, and it worked out perfect.

It's probably the most personal project [The Fourth Phase] I've done, which changed the dynamic a little bit.

I'm really interested in revamping the Supernatural contest, so I'm going to put a lot of effort and energy into that going forward.