Travis Rice films are the essence of snowboarding. They remind you why snowboarding feels so addictive and meaningful. Every project he touches carries intention and emotion. Big lines. Mother Nature. Human vulnerability. His movies make you want to grab your board and chase something deeper in nature.
Here are the top 5 we feel here at SnowBrains that really capture the soul of the sport.
5. That’s It That’s All – 2008
It’s crazy that this film dropped in 2008 and still feels like a staple today. Snowboard movies have changed and evolved so much since then, but the cinematography in That’s It That’s All still hits with a freshness that’s almost unfair.
This film is the moment snowboard filmmaking changed. Watching it now, you can still feel how groundbreaking it was the first time those huge helicopter tracking shots swept across New Zealand. Storm days in Jackson Hole look like nature documentary footage. Alaska’s spines look sharper, cleaner, and more intimidating than anything captured at the time.
Visually the film is stunning. Wide aerials that show the unimaginable scale. Cuts that let the mountains talk. It’s one of the first snowboard movies that felt like it deserved a theater screen, not a TV.
That’s It That’s All broke the mold. It proved snowboard films could be cinematic without losing soul. It built the global audience for Travis Rice and pulled snowboarding into a bigger conversation about adventure, nature, and storytelling.
4. The Fourth Phase – 2016
The Fourth Phase takes a step inward. It’s still massive with global travel and huge terrain but there is a heavier emotional layer woven through the film. Rice ties the film to the water cycle of the North Pacific and it gives the whole movie this natural rhythm of storms forming, drifting, and dissolving.
If That’s It That’s All, laid the groundwork and The Art of Flight blew the doors off the genre, then The Fourth Phase is where Rice tries to answer the bigger questions hiding behind every storm cycle and every line he’s ever dropped. The film is part odyssey and part science experiment. It’s about motion, weather, friendship, obsession, disappointment and the strange pull that keeps people chasing mountains even when the cost gets high.
Rice follows storms from their birth in the ocean to Japan, across Russia, over the Aleutians and finally into Alaska, riding the mountains shaped by the same water that moves through clouds, storms and rivers. It’s a simple idea that turns brutally complex once he tries to live it. Weather collapses. Plans fall apart. People get hurt. Routes close. That honesty becomes the heart of the film.
The Fourth Phase matters because it refuses to hide the hard parts. It blends science, philosophy and snowboarding into one arc that doesn’t pretend adventure is easy. It shows that the mountains don’t care about your plans. That big dreams come with real emotional cost. That sometimes the journey reshapes you more than the destination ever could.
3: Ikigai – The Story of Shin Biyajima – 2023
The most peaceful and aesthetic snowboard film I’ve ever watched. It’s smaller than his major productions yet somehow hits deeper.
Japan’s forests look soft and ancient, with delicate birch trees rising out of deep powder that hangs off every branch. Rice and Shin Biyajima move through those woods with this calm, almost meditative flow. Their turns are slow and intentional and the snow settles quietly behind them. The whole film feels like an exhale.
Rice talks about the meaning of ikigai in Japanese culture, the idea of one’s “reason for being” and the movie reflects that completely. It’s about presence, purpose, and finding meaning in the act of riding.
The visuals are gorgeous in a quiet way. Hakuba’s backcountry is captured with soft light and slow pacing that lets the terrain do all the talking. The aesthetic is earthy and honest, no mega heli shots or giant builds, just riders moving with the land Mother Nature has blessed us with. And the soundtrack is elite…Two of my favorite tracks: “Windows” by Sugar Candy Mountain and “Fall In” by Young Magic, tie the whole tone together. They make the film feel dreamy and perfectly in step with the snow floating around the riders.
Ikigai shows the side of Rice people don’t always talk about. Not the world-traveling pioneer pulling off once-in-a-generation stunts, but the guy who understands that snowboarding is also about stillness, culture, purpose, and being in the mountains for reasons that go way beyond adrenaline.
2. Dark Matter – 2019
Dark Matter feels like Alaska stripped down to its most extra-terrestrial form.
The short film takes place in that deep far-north winter where the sun barely rises and the light hits the mountains sideways. Everything glows in this soft cold haze that makes the lines look like they’re carved out of shadow and ice. The visuals are so otherworldly that you stop thinking of them as real mountains, they feel more like some alien landscape drifting at the edge of the planet.
The camera work absorbs you into the Alaskan wilderness.
Long drifting shots of giant black-white spines melt into slow rolling clouds. The snow moves in strange patterns that almost hypnotize you, the forests move in ways that make them feel alive. It’s one of those films where the terrain has feelings. Shapes stretch out forever then fold back into themselves. Every ridge looks like it’s breathing.
The riders move through it with that same trance-like energy. The flow state. Everything feels elongated and slowed down like the whole place is operating on its own timeline. The contrast the shadows the endless untouched faces make you fall into this meditative headspace where you forget you’re watching a snowboard movie.
You get pulled deeper and deeper into that monochrome world until you’re basically floating in it.
When it ends you feel like you were somewhere else entirely. Somewhere cold, quiet, and not from this planet. That’s the spell Dark Matter casts.
1. The Art of Flight – 2011
“We’ll never know our full potential unless we push ourselves to find it. It’s this self discovery that inevitably takes us to the wildest places on Earth.” – Travis Rice.
This was the spark that lit the whole culture on fire. The film that took Travis Rice from a rising talent to the rider everyone on Earth suddenly knew. The one that made people buy boards, book flights, chase storms, and fall in love with the mountains even if they had never stood on snow before.
This is the movie that made half the snowboard world addicted for life.
British Columbia stretches out like an infinite white kingdom. Chile glows with electric blue ice walls that look like something built by the wind on another planet. Jackson Hole storms feel endless and menacingly beautiful. Colorado’s backcountry rolls with pure flow. And Alaska looms in that final act like the edge of the world itself. Every location feels like a different realm and the film drifts through them like chapters of the same waking dream.
The Art of Flight changed the trajectory of the entire sport. It made snowboarding feel unlimited with endless possibilities. And it turned millions of casual viewers into snow-chasing hounds, this film genuinely was life changing.
These are the films that created snowboard addicts. And they still do, every single time someone presses play.
