Comfort Zones

The brief

Comfort Zones had no client and no brief. It began from a question that ski films almost never ask, which is why anyone skis terrain where a fall has consequences.

The genre has a standard answer, and the standard answer is a montage. Fast cuts, a soundtrack, and the implication that the reason is obvious to anyone worth explaining it to. That is a satisfying film to watch once and it explains nothing, because the interesting part is not what the skiing looks like but what the person is doing when they decide to drop in.

Answering that properly meant treating risk as a subject rather than a texture, which is not something a montage can carry.

The approach

The film brings two academic philosophers into a ski film. Dr Philip Ebert and Professor Laurie Paul appear as contributors on the psychology of risk and the motivations that draw people toward increasingly demanding terrain, alongside the skiing itself at Glenshee.

That is an unusual combination and it sets the structure. The skiing has to be good enough to earn the audience's attention, because nobody watches a ski film for the talking. The thinking has to be genuinely interesting rather than decorative, because otherwise it is a montage with a voiceover. Neither element survives without the other.

It runs to just under twelve minutes, which is long for a film with no commissioner and no distribution guarantee. The length is the argument: a shorter cut could show the skiing or state the idea, but not do both properly, and doing both was the entire reason to make it.

I filmed and edited it alone. Steep ground puts the camera operator in the same conditions as the subject, which limits what can be carried and where it is safe to stand, and means the shot has to be chosen before the position is committed to rather than after.

The outcome

Comfort Zones was selected by six festivals in 2019: Kendal Mountain Festival, the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival, the International Festival of Outdoor Films, the 4S Skate Surf Ski Snowboard Film Festival, the Adventure Shorts Film Festival, and IFMF in Poprad, Slovakia.

Festival selection is a useful signal because it is judged by people with no commercial interest in the outcome, against a field of films made for the same audience. For a self-initiated piece with no budget behind it, six selections is the closest thing available to an independent verdict on whether the approach worked.

It also settled the question of what kind of documentary work Morrocco Media is for. The film sits where landscape, sport and ideas overlap, and that intersection has stayed the most interesting territory to work in since.