The Making of ORNADA, Armada's Bold, Two-Year Film Project

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

Space Time Continuum

In the spring of 2023, the Armada ski team visited Absolut Park in Austria for a video shoot alongside the artist Mark Paul Deren, best known by his nom de guerre, Madsteez. Deren had an out-of-this-world plan. He wanted to construct and paint enormous murals imbued with his signature, spray-can brush strokes. Then, once the cameras started rolling, the skiers would soar off jumps and float past Deren’s creations, their figures etched against the abstract, multi-colored wooden monoliths.

As they often do, the mountains complicated matters. A blizzard whipped through Absolut Park during the shoot. At times, the snow piled up so fast on Deren’s spray-cans that he couldn’t see what shade of paint he was using. But the wild scheme worked, and somewhere in the flurry of vivid color and snow was the approximate birthplace of Ornada, an ambitious movie that chronicles the exploits of Armada’s expansive roster of skiers, with a few twists on the traditional ski film mold. The hallucinatory shoot in Austria featuring Deren’s artwork serves as an introductory segment.

“Watching it, I couldn't even believe it," said Deren, who has worked with numerous high-profile clients and even designed the art for a Nike shoe. "It was probably actually one of the coolest things I've ever created, like, in my art career."

While filming for Ornada launched in Austria, efforts to gather the brand’s skiers and make a movie that includes the whole team go back further. More than a decade ago, Armada released the team film Oil & Water, which won two POWDER awards. Compared to Ornada, though, it was small in scale and budget. So, as time passed, senior Armada skiers and collaborators pushed the brand to support another team video and make it even better. Armada funded the idea and, for more than two years, a group of athletes and filmmakers have been working to realize that vision. 

“We just thought it was time, you know, to really take a good chunk of budget and create something special that can last,” said Tom Suesskoch, Armada's vice president of brand.

Armada was one of the major ski companies created amidst the meteoric rise of freeskiing in the late 1990s and 2000s. A group known as the AR5—their ranks included the legendary freeskiers Tanner Hall and JP Auclair—launched the brand in 2002 alongside a few others, catering to skiing's boisterous, trick-oriented next generation. Street skiing, off-axis flips, and creative descents comprise Armada’s lineage. The brand’s historical motto puts the mission succinctly: “What skiing will become.”

The titular Ornada, in the movie, is a fictional planet and a nod to that motto, explained co-director and filmmaker Corey Stanton. Throughout the film, the skiers are journeying to this distant realm among the stars, which depicts the liberated place that Armada has steered skiing towards. For Stanton, though, the motto's verb tense has changed. The cultural shift Armada played a role in effectuating is now part of the modern skiing zeitgeist, double corks, twin-tip skis, and all. Ornada is "what skiing has become,” Stanton said.

Ornada does eventually appear thanks to another grand experiment in practical effects from Deren (the visuals for the planet, Stanton noted, are “out there. It's bizarre”), but this isn’t a narrative movie. Rather than leaning too heavily on metaphor to demonstrate what the sport looks like in 2025, Ornada largely sticks to what’s self-evident: the skiing. Ultimately, it’s painstakingly crafted ski porn meant to elicit a dopamine rush, facilitated, in part, by the breadth and talent of Armada’s team. Tanner Hall, now in his 40s, is the old guard, still charging. Relative newcomers like Kuura Koivisto, Olivia Asselin, and Rell Harwood are up next.

In total, Ornada stars more than 20 Armada skiers across numerous segments, from rail wizards to backcountry crushers. “The hard part was kind of giving everybody their shine for this movie,” said Phil Casabon, a longtime member of Armada’s ski team and co-director alongside Stanton. “All of the athletes that are on Armada are killers.” 

That wasn’t the only hurdle the Armada crew faced in the creation of Ornada. Rather than using pre-existing songs, the movie has its own original score, crafted by a group of musicians. But last summer, when I spoke with the Ornada team ahead of the film’s October premiere, that score hadn’t been recorded yet, leaving the editors with a puzzle; they had to build a ski movie without a finalized musical framework. The band was set to record the soundtrack in September.

“It’s really tricky. I've never done it like this before,” Casabon said, also detailing why the payoff will be worth it. People attach moments in their lives to specific songs, he noted, like the time one of their best friends got married. When they watch Ornada for the first time, however, those mental pathways will form anew, unclouded by previous memories. During the movie’s flagship premieres, the novelty will be more dramatic, with the band providing a live musical accompaniment on stage. They’ll play jazz instruments, bend genres, and improvise as skiers surge across the screen behind them. Those in the crowd at the shows, Stanton said, “are going to experience something they probably never have before watching this.”

With its bold take on ski movie music and hulking, acid-trip sets, Ornada is mainly of the present. Still, countless threads connect the movie to Armada’s past. Like the Salomons, Atomics, and Blizzards of the world viewed through a funhouse mirror, the once-fledgling brand is developing its own freeskiing-flavored origin mythos. Stanton was Armada’s first intern in the 2000s. Session1242, a classic, genre-defining ski movie from that same era, deeply inspired the team behind Ornada. Deren, the artist, designed the graphics for some of Armada’s early AR5 twin-tip ski lineups, kicking off a decades-spanning relationship. He also painted a mural of the rapper Eazy-E wearing skis as he executed a backflip on the front wall of the original Costa Mesa, California, headquarters.

The live showings of Ornada duly include an intermission segment with archival shots that acknowledge the brand's roots. The film’s trailer, which Casabon edited, peers backwards, too, with old posters and grainy footage from Armada’s inception.

“We have to educate the children by showing them what happened and who they should look up to,” said Casabon. “There's so much richness in this history that might be overlooked and forgotten.”

In Japan, during one of Ornada’s shoots, the invisible, usually immovable barriers that separate one era from the next wobbled. The group, which included Stanton and Casabon alongside a few others, was identical to the one that visited the country about a decade earlier to film an episode of the Armada web series SNOWCIETIES. The skiers were older, but they were still working together, shoveling features, and, presumably, hoping to capture the best skiing footage they could.

Among them was the street and park phenom Kim Boberg. In talking about the creation of Ornada, he chose a fitting, sci-fi tinged analogy to describe the experience. “It was pretty awesome,” Boberg said. “Time machine stuff.”

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.