YouTube was invented in 2005. Salomon Freeski TV in 2007. Since then, Salomon has had great success producing a revolutionary web-based series centered around the people, places and stories of skiing. Now entering Freeski TV's sixth season -- the first episode dropped on Tuesday -- I sat down with the man behind Salomon Freeski TV, Mike Douglas, to talk to him about where the show is going has been and where it's going.
Why start Freeski TV?
Our main goal was to inspire people, to get people off the couch and go skiing. We've been successful in that. We've gotten comments from around the world how Freeski TV has changed their lives, inspired people to move to the mountains and got people stoked on skiing.
How has the show evolved over the last six years?
What we were putting out four years ago would get lost in the shuffle nowadays. Our goals as a show and production company are to always be challenging ourselves, creating something with more substance and more quality. We've moved away from the TV show style of content to make episodes that stand alone as short films.
Why change it if the formula before was so successful?
We never want to rest on our laurels because web content moves so fast -- faster than ski films and TV shows -- that if you're not on front you'll get lost. Plus the guys at Salomon won't let us stand still. They are continually asking how we are going to challenge ourselves, push our stories and increase our artistic presence.
What are you doing to stay out front?
Well, each year it gets tougher. This year we had a single episode that had three to four months of post-production work alone. We have two goals with each episode and that's to either tell a really good story or to artistically stand out. We've been lucky to bring in a guy like Blair Richmond who is a Hollywood level VFX artist to work on the show. We're quite lucky to have a guy with that kind of experience want to come work for a ski show. With Jeff Thomas and myself being very ingrained in ski culture, we as a team work really well together to achieve those goals.
[Missed last season of Freeski TV? Check it out here.]
