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Professional halfpipe skier Alex Ferreira has done a lot over the past couple of years, from winning Olympic silver in 2018 to claiming a coveted X Games Aspen gold medal last winter.
But one thing the Aspen local didn’t have much background in was filmmaking, leading to his partnership with Vital Films and a short film set to debut Sunday.
“The premise of the film is to go to a new country in a whole new culture and be able to ski with them and interact with them and tell a travel dialogue story almost,” Ferreira told The Aspen Times. “It was cool to be a part of. It was my first real film.”
Vital Films, a video production company based out of Aspen, accompanied Ferreira to Japan for roughly six weeks last winter for filming. Presented by Columbia Sportswear, one of Ferreira’s main sponsors, the final product is a 22-minute film about their excursions. Called “The Scenic Route,” it’ll premiere as part of the World of X Games series Sunday at 2 p.m. mountain time on ABC.
“It was absolutely amazing. We met with some great people and some weird things came out to us,” Ferreira said. “We ended up staying on a dairy farm in very northern Japan. We ended up going to see katana-kaji, which is a master swordsmith. We skied some powder and we just did kind of an unconventional trip.”
Ferreira was in Japan from mid-February to mid-March last winter, his trip coming after his X Games gold medal and after the World Championships in Park City, Utah. The Vital Films crew is made of mostly Roaring Fork Valley locals, a crew that has worked on some big projects over the years, including with National Geographic.
“This is actually our first ever project. We’ve talked about it a little bit in the past and we finally had the time to collaborate on something this year,” Ferreira said. “The overall experience was really positive. We put a lot of hard work in. We’ve been editing for the past three, four months, just shrinking it down. I wrote the script, so we’ll see if it’s any good.”
Ferreira said if you can’t watch the show Sunday on ABC, it will go live on both his and Columbia’s social media channels by the end of the calendar year.
“We had a lot to work with and I’m actually really proud of what we made,” Ferreira said, “and what we can put out there to the universe and hopefully inspire little kids and just more connection with human life and people.”