Winterized is the name of a high school senior project filmed in Vail, Colorado in 1984. Five seniors worked through the ski season shooting film on a Super 8 camera making a ski movie. Work is misnomer; “having an absolute blast” is more accurate.
One of us was an elite ski racer who was in Europe for most of the season and another blew out his knee at the beginning of the ski season. These two contributed to editing and creating the soundtrack. The other three skied and shot as much film as possible. Other skiers joined us in the film. Winterized is the result.
Super 8 was/is a silent film, capturing 24 film photographs per second on a reel. Hence the super grainy texture, movement and vibration! The film had to be taken to a camera shop to be developed which could take up to 10 days. At some point in the early 2000s we digitized the original film reels. The soundtrack was recorded from vinyl records onto a cassette tape using a stopwatch to get the timing right. The original soundtrack cassette was lost at some point, so we recreated it and added it to the digitized version.
Showing the original film was quite a laborious process: manually starting a mechanical projector and cassette player at the same time and hoping for a decent audio/video sync! Believe it or not, in 1984, this was cutting edge for high school students on a budget. Our ski movie was very well received. At only 16 minutes in length Winterized still maintains a certain charm today.
The skiing shots were all filmed on Vail Mountain. The cross country and telemarking shots were filmed at Crooked Creek Ranch, south of Eagle, Colorado. Crooked Creek Ranch was a group of cabins that hosted a ski-in, ski-out high school trip each winter; think winter backpacking on cross country skis. The mountain scenery shots are from Vail and Crooked Creek. The ski jumping shots are from the annual Ravinos party at the top of Vail Pass on St. Patrick’s Day. The Ravinos were a tight-knit gang of ski bums that wore denim biker cutoff vests with a Ravinos patch on the back. They are going strong today!
Here’s an article from the Vail Daily about a documentary film about the Ravinos.
Perhaps the best part of making Winterized was skiing as much as possible at arguably the best ski resort in the world. 1984 was an epic snow year so there was no shortage of great ski days. We were all ski racers and training at 1:00 every day during the school week was our physical education. A few of those days (ahem!) became free-ski days to chase the perfect shots for the film. If we weren’t racing on the weekends, we were filming. Not a bad way to spend senior year!
We were the best skiers on the mountain. Hands down. Ski racers with a passion for being first on the chairlift, chasing powder, cliffs and air. And just like today’s young generation doing incredible things on skis and snowboards, we did the same. What we did pales in comparison to what today’s skiers are doing. Keep in mind that we did it on 200cm straight (not shaped, or parabolic) skis. Nonetheless, the sheer joy of it is the same and certainly evident in this ski movie on its 42nd anniversary.