SaS Films is notably absent of advertising or commercial endorsements. What plans are there for bringing revenue into this operation? ^ If there is one thing that I can’t stand about the web, it’s the advertising. I hate going to a site and seeing a ton of banners or pop up ads. Maybe its just me, I don’t know, but that’s the reason why you won’t find any ads on our site. As far as bringing in money, I have no intent at this time to bring in any kind of profit; however, we do have some fund raisers in the works. As I mentioned briefly above, we are trying to raise money to host one or more competitions this season. I believe that competitions are the biggest thing promoting the type of skiing and snowboarding that we are into. Competitions expose athletes, draw crowds, and push people to try new things. Skiing is progressing, and we would like to help it keep moving in the direction it’s headed.
During the summer, your site abruptly went offline. What was the story behind that and what did it take to get back online? ^ Since the site doesn’t have any kind of budget, over the summer the server was running off my cable modem from my house in New Hampshire. Without any kind of warning AT&T / Road Runner (my Internet provider at the time) decided to block outgoing traffic on port 80. Without getting into details, this prevents you from hosting your own web site. Since sasfilms.com uses up over 3 gig of space, it would cost a fortune to have our site hosted by another company, so we continue to run the site off of our own computer. ^ AT&T blamed the sudden change on “code red,” saying that running web servers was now disrupting the service to others. It took about a week for us to figure out why the site suddenly stopped working. We decided it was in our best interest to just keep the site down until I went back to school. The server came back to school with me and its currently running it out of someone’s dorm room. Since the three weeks of downtime the site has gotten somewhat cluttered. I have been posting short videos without rearranging the old ones. The reason for the lack of maintenance is that we are currently working on a complete redesign of the site. We hope to have the new site up by the end of the month, if not definitely before ski season begins in late October. There isn’t any “sneak peak” available online, but the new site will be much more organized with even more content and more efficient ways for searching and navigating through the hundreds of clips available.
Where do you see SaS Films heading in the near future? And are you looking to expand your work into other filmmaking endeavors? ^ I say this with uncertainty, but every year the site will most likely undergo some sort of redesign. One thing NOT to expect is for SaS to turn into some kind of big corporate ski site. We’d like to keep it on amateur status and help promote riders whenever possible. SaS will remain true to its name. One thing that will hopefully happen this year is a lot more snowboard footage. I love to ski, and as a result the site seems to be highly bias, it’s not meant to be that way. My roommate, Chris Johnson, is going to be in charge of rounding up some more boarders to shoot with, and help me out with getting all their names and calling all their tricks correctly this season. Other than that there are no major plans for the future, just to keep having fun.
Finally…can we expect to see you at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in February? ^ Until the Olympics starts including events like slopestyle and big air (which will hopefully never happen) you won’t find me there. Don’t get me wrong here–I like the Olympics, but I think if these kinds of events start being added it would just lead to more rules and more bogus insurance policies about riders not being allowed to do inverted tricks at ski areas. ^ I think the style of skiing and boarding we film relies highly on progression. I would rather see riders trying new tricks and thrashing new terrain rather than doing the same trick better than the people that have done it over and over again in the past. This February, you’d have better luck finding me at the US Freeskiing Open in Vail.
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