WSKI 106 Trailer (2005)

Profile and significance

Eric Iberg is a pioneering freeski filmmaker and culture-builder from Edina, Minnesota, whose fingerprints are on some of the most influential ideas, crews, and events in modern skiing. At 21 he quit college, picked up a 16mm camera, and released Royalty (2001), a tightly focused movie that helped define the early-2000s style era. He followed with Stereotype (2002), and within a few years was embedded with the riders who would push park, street, and backcountry in every direction. When a new athlete-led ski brand was born, he was there on day one: the original AR5 rider group teamed up with photographer Chris O’Connell and videographer Eric Iberg to launch Armada, effectively giving athletes the media voice inside a manufacturer. A decade later he co-founded Inspired Media Concepts with Tanner Hall, producing films and web shows that blended skiing, music, and street culture while touring to meet local scenes. Add his role in the B&E Invitational at Les Arcs—a rider-designed park gathering that rewired how contests could look—and you have a career that moved freeskiing both on screen and on snow. By any cultural metric, Iberg sits in the small group of creators who changed how the sport is filmed, marketed, and celebrated.

Competitive arc and key venues

Iberg’s “results sheet” is filmography and event architecture. The early 2000s projects (Royalty, then Stereotype) were made around North American park hubs and spring venues, with long editing sessions that privileged rider identity and soundtrack curation over bloated cast lists. Mid-career he helped launch Inspired’s touring shows and web series, taking the sport directly to communities while releasing feature projects like The Education of Style (2012), the Tanner Hall documentary Like a Lion (2011), and the two-year B-Dog & E-Dollo showcase Be Inspired (2016). On the event side, his collaboration with Henrik Harlaut and Phil Casabon produced the B&E Invitational at Les Arcs, where the course looked more like a sculpted skatepark than a traditional slopestyle line. In Europe, creative blocks leaned on Innsbruck’s city-adjacent terrain—Nordkette and Axamer Lizum’s Golden Roofpark—while Sweden’s Kläppen (home of Kimbo Sessions) became a recurring canvas for style-driven sessions. In North America, spring filming and athlete development tied back to Oregon’s Timberline on Mt. Hood, where long seasons and repeatable jump shapes let ideas mature.

How they ski: what to watch for

Though best known behind the lens and on the production side, Iberg’s imprint on skiing style is unmistakable in what he chooses to film and how he frames it. He prizes clean approach lines, locked grabs, and legible axes on jumps; on metal, he favors full-feature usage—presses into swaps, redirects, and exits that square the shoulders. Watch any Inspired-era project and you’ll see these values repeated: tricks are designed to be understood on first watch and studied on replay. That editorial discipline shaped a generation of viewers and riders; it trained audiences to care about initiation, hold, and landing quality, not just spin volume. The result is that Iberg projects are often used as reference clips when coaches, judges, or filmers explain “what good looks like.”

Resilience, filming, and influence

Making ski films that last requires stubborn patience. Iberg’s career is a study in resourcefulness—building segments on limited budgets, keeping small teams motivated through weather swings, and protecting rider identity when marketing pressures push toward homogeny. The Inspired years broadened that playbook: not just movies, but tours, web shows, radio and live events, often threading music into the story so edits felt like culture, not just highlight reels. The B&E Invitational proved that rider-designed venues could be the headline, not an afterthought, a lesson later seen across style-driven gatherings. Long after the premiere lights fade, his work keeps getting cited because it left a toolkit behind: shoot with a point of view, let style lead difficulty, and build formats that showcase creativity rather than punish it.

Geography that built the toolkit

The map behind Iberg’s output connects the right places to the right moments. Minnesota winters and Midwestern rope-tow parks built an appreciation for repetition and community. The Wasatch and Sierra spring cycles added long-runway jump timing (Mammoth and Timberline). Europe expanded the palette: Innsbruck’s city-to-park quick-hits at Nordkette Skyline Park, the shaped-for-style lines of Kläppen, and the B&E era at Les Arcs. Each venue contributed something specific—speed control, feature variety, or creative course design—and together they explain why so many Iberg projects feel both rider-centric and visually coherent. The geography isn’t background; it’s a production tool.

Equipment and partners: practical takeaways

Two partnerships define the public story. First, the athlete-founded brand Armada, whose original riders—JP Auclair, Tanner Hall, JF Cusson, Julien Regnier and Boyd Easley—teamed up with photographer Chris O’Connell and Iberg on day one. That arrangement put a filmmaker inside a ski company at the founding moment, aligning product with the style and media that actually moved culture. Second, Inspired, the studio/label he co-founded with Tanner Hall in 2010, which released films and shows while touring to meet local scenes worldwide. For skiers and small crews, the takeaways are pragmatic: keep setups consistent so tricks look the same from training to shoot days; tune edges for the day’s task (detune contact points for rails, maintain underfoot bite for icy in-runs); and invest as much in sound and edit pacing as you do in the biggest shot—because the way a project feels often determines how long it lives.

Why fans and progressing skiers care

Iberg’s legacy is a playbook. He showed that a small, opinionated crew can make work that outlasts bigger budgets; that rider-designed events can set the agenda; and that films can be both stylish and fundamentally instructive. If you’re a fan, that means edits you want to rewatch years later. If you’re a skier (or a filmer) trying to level up, it’s a clear path: plan approach lines first, favor tricks that use the whole obstacle, and cut footage so viewers can read each phase—set, grab/press, spot, stomp—without guesswork. It’s no accident that coaches and judges still reference those choices; they’re durable. The projects aren’t just entertainment; they’re templates.

Quick reference (places)

• Les Arcs / official site
• Kläppen Snowpark / official site
• Nordkette Skyline Park / official site
• Timberline (Mt. Hood)

Principal sponsors

• Armada — founding-team creative/video partner (historical role)
• Inspired Media Concepts — production studio co-founder / films & tours

Philip Casabon, known to skiers around the world as B-Dog, is a Canadian freeski legend from Shawinigan, Québec, whose influence on street and park skiing spans more than a decade of groundbreaking video parts, signature products and era-defining style. He emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s as a rider who could make complex tricks look effortless, pairing technical precision with a relaxed body language that reads clearly on camera and in person. While many athletes built careers around podiums, Casabon built a catalog around originality and storytelling, proving that progression in freeskiing is measured not just by spin counts, but by ideas, rhythm and the way a skier uses terrain. Casabon’s breakthrough years were intertwined with a creative partnership with Henrik Harlaut under the B&E banner, culminating in invitational events that showcased style, flow and unconventional features. Those projects amplified a philosophy that still guides his skiing today. Lines are designed like sentences with a beginning, middle and end. Approach speed is chosen to preserve cadence rather than to force difficulty. Takeoffs are decisive and axes are set early so rotations remain readable and landings ride away clean. The result is footage that ages well and remains instructive for younger riders studying how to combine rails, walls, gaps and banks into coherent sequences. The contest world eventually embraced video-based formats, and Casabon became a benchmark there as well. In X Games Real Ski he delivered all-urban segments that balanced heavy enders with subtle touches: nose and tail presses that carry real weight, surface swaps performed on imperfect steel, redirected spins that treat walls and banks as extensions of the rail line. Those edits demonstrated mastery of spot selection, logistics and risk management under tight timelines. They also highlighted a symbiosis with filmer and editor Brady Perron, whose eye for pacing and framing magnified Casabon’s skating-inspired approach to edges, balance and transitions. Equipment is a central part of Casabon’s story. His signature park and street skis became known for playful flex in the tips and tails, supportive underfoot platforms and shapes that feel neutral on unknown landing angles. He is meticulous about mount points that keep swing weight balanced without sacrificing landing stability, and he is vocal about edge durability, torsional support and base speed on contaminated snow. In boots, he gravitated to progressive designs that preserve ankle articulation and rebound for presses and quick recentering after surface changes. This product literacy turns gear into a creative partner rather than an afterthought, and it informs a steady stream of feedback to designers who translate rider needs into shapes and constructions that withstand urban abuse. Casabon’s training habits reveal why the style looks so effortless. Off snow he emphasizes hip and ankle mobility, single-leg strength for efficient pop on short run-ins, and trunk stability to manage off-axis rotations without letting the upper body flail. Trampoline and air-awareness sessions break big tricks into components, rehearsing set mechanics, grab timing and spotting before full-scale attempts. On snow he builds lines from low-consequence moves, scaling them patiently into heavy features once speed, angles and snow texture are predictable. That incremental method reduces injuries and preserves longevity in a discipline where impact tolerance is often mistaken for progress. Storytelling is another thread that runs through his career. Casabon treats each project like an album rather than a single, choosing music, color and pacing that serve the skiing. He shows the process in behind-the-scenes moments: shoveling and salting to control speed, testing inruns at dawn when light is flat but traffic is light, cleaning spots and restoring environments out of respect for neighborhoods. This transparency sets a standard for urban filming etiquette and keeps doors open for future crews. It also explains why his films are rewatchable; they offer both the satisfaction of heavy tricks and the narrative of how those tricks were made possible. Community impact rounds out his profile. Casabon mentors younger riders by translating complex technique into simple cues: align early on the inrun, commit to a clean set, keep shoulders calm through impact, and ride away with purpose. He is honest about fear management, using visualization and measured increments to turn nerves into information rather than noise. In camps and informal sessions he shares the small adjustments that create big gains, from binding ramp angle to edge bevels that keep rails viable on cold mornings. As freeskiing continues to evolve, Casabon remains a reference point for authenticity. He releases tightly curated video parts, appears at select events, and collaborates with brands in ways that preserve the integrity of his style while pushing product design forward. His legacy is not confined to medals or one winter’s highlight reel. It lives in a generation of skiers who learned that creativity can be systematic, that style is a skill built on fundamentals, and that a line that reads beautifully will always matter. For fans and aspiring riders, Philip Casabon stands as proof that street skiing can be both refined and raw, both disciplined and free, and that the most enduring progression happens when craft, culture and community move together.

Tanner Hall, nicknamed “Ski Boss,” was born in 1983 in Kalispell, Montana. A true pioneer of modern freeskiing, he made history by winning seven X Games gold medals between 2000 and 2008 in Big Air, Slopestyle, and Superpipe, becoming a living legend of freestyle skiing. He co-founded Armada Skis in 2002 and helped shape ski filmmaking through his studio Inspired Media Concepts, producing iconic films like Retallack and Like a Lion. His career was marked by two major injuries: a double ankle fracture in 2005 and serious knee damage in 2009, requiring years of recovery. Despite these setbacks, Tanner returned to the top, winning more titles and taking on the Freeride World Tour, where he quickly achieved top-10 finishes. Now over 40, he continues to deeply influence ski culture with his style, creativity, and visionary spirit.