On September 8, 2011, Travis Rice premiered The Art of Flight at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Made on a budget of about $2,000,000, it stood as the highest-budget snowboard film ever produced. It reset what the genre could look like.
Nine days for one jump, two years for one film
The film was shot over two years, from 2009 to 2011, across remote backcountry terrain. A single "super-wedge" jump took the whole crew nine days to build, and Scotty Lago broke his jaw attempting it. Rice, John Jackson and Mark Landvik all rode through injuries during production.
An early trip to Nelson, Canada, in January 2010 nearly ended the project. Producer Curt Morgan said the crew "probably set off 40 avalanches in one trip, our helicopter got stuck on a ridge in fog, and we almost got stranded when ice formed on the blades." A spring Alaska shoot, deep in the wilderness, delivered some of the film's standout footage.
A sequel that outgrew its predecessor
The Art of Flight followed 2008's That's It, That's All, the film that first proved Rice could carry a full production. Before big-mountain riding, he had won X Games, Air & Style and US Open titles in Big Air, Quarterpipe and Slopestyle. The new film's success carried him to the TransWorld and Snowboarder Magazine Rider of the Year awards for 2012.
Rice was open about why he pushed further the second time. "We wanted to make Flight because of all the shortcomings of That's It, That's All," he said, calling the earlier film "a trial period of learning how to work in the backcountry within the dynamics of a bigger production."
The film's ambition pointed straight to what came next. Within months Rice launched Red Bull Supernatural, and in 2019 he co-founded the Natural Selection Tour. The Art of Flight was where that vision took hold.
