[Mobile: Tommi Ollikainen. Photo: Matt Georges]
Riding with your crew, pushing each other and having a blast is one of the cornerstones of this fun old experience we call snowboarding. Now, since the democratisation of videography, more and more crews are producing edits from their exploits and some of them have gone beyond the traditional ‘bro-cam’ cuts to produce entertaining, imaginative, or just downright hammer heavy video content. We’re stoked on that, so over the season we’ll be throwing the virtual Shakas to some of our favourite Euro crews, and up this time it’s the panoply of pan-Global homies, Snackbreak. We sat down with OGs Tommi Olllikainen and Joonas Eloranta…
Tell us how the Snackbreak Crew started. Tommi you’re The Captain, maybe you should take this one.
Tommi: It all started in Whistler, B.C, when I moved there in 2013/14, or something like that, and we just started filming with anyone that was down to film basically.
Joonas: I think we go way back, further than that. I had this crew called One Season, Four Reasons, which goes way back to like 2011 I’d say, so that’s when we actually started filming together for the first time. We did two movies I think, can’t remember, but we certainly filmed together for two seasons. That’s how Snackbreak kinda started from that.
Who did you meet out in Whistler that are still part of the Snackbreak crew?
Tommi: Johan Rosen is still around, we haven’t managed to meet up with the other boys like Jesse and Andy [Stewart] but they’ve been filming in Canada anyway. For example this winter when we went to British Columbia, they were all out East and couldn’t make it over. They’re still filming and sending us all the footage

What made you want to start filming and making movies?
Tommi: Yeah, it is more or less for me. I guess when I was 13 or 14 I borrowed my Dad’s old video camera and started filming homies on the hill; did the same thing with skateboarding in spring and summer.
Joonas: We have the same story there, we both picked up our first camera at around 13 or so, and have been involved with skateboarding and snowboarding ever since then. I think it’s natural to have the camera so you can just film your homies and see what you’ve done after the season. We didn’t start making movies until like 2007, then after that first one we probably made a movie every second year. It wasn’t until Snackbreak became a more professional thing that we upped the output.
Your last movie, Honyos, was sick. How do you feel about the next one?
Joonas: It’s going to be a lot better that Honyos.
Tommi: Yeah, it’s definitely a step up from the last one. Everything is better. It feels like we’re better at filming, and I guess we put in more work before the season to find new spots that hadn’t been hit before. We paid attention to finding new ways to hit old spots as well, whereas last season we just basically stayed here and filmed all the famous spots here.
Joonas: We didn’t really have a plan when we produced Honyos because it was just filming each other. We knew we were going to make a full movie but we didn’t plan what kind of a movie it was gonna be. This year it was all different. We knew, even pre-season, that we were going to make a stand out movie with a lot of new spots, a lot of bigger spots and a different approach to how to ride them. We actually had a plan.
[Joonas Eloranta. Photo: Matt Georges]
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