Short film Seeing Flowersis as much an inward journey as it is a showcase of raw freeriding, terrain park lines and unfiltered style.
An experimental showcase for backcountry and park standout Jonah Williams, Seeing Flowers was shot in multiple locations over the course of one winter. But the short film (just over 10 minutes long; every second counts) reflects a deliberate shift away from location-driven edits and toward something more open-ended and introspective.
Williams and filmmaker Andrew Mildenberger built the concept without relying on dialogue or overt explanation. “We wanted the underlying theme to speak to people in different ways,” Williams told Newschoolers.com. For him, the idea centred on the tension between distraction and awareness (a feeling he experiences constantly). Life, he explained, is full of distractions, and not all of them are bad, but moments of awareness often arrive suddenly, sparked by a person, a conversation or even something as simple as a flower.
“That snaps you back and reminds us who we are,” he said. The goal was never to dictate meaning, but to leave space for interpretation, and Williams was surprised by how deeply viewers connected with the film in ways he never anticipated.
Moments of awareness often arrive suddenly, sparked by a person, a conversation or even something as simple as a flower.
Music played a major role in shaping the final edit. Throughout the season, Williams listened to music and imagined how it would accompany the footage they were capturing. A deep dive into Radiohead (and vocalist Thom Yorke’s solo work) led to “Weird Fishes,” a song that had been stuck in the skier’s head all winter. “It just ended up being the one,” he said, adding that song selection is one of his favourite parts of the filmmaking process.
Location scouting followed a similarly unconventional approach. Rather than anchoring the film to iconic spots, Williams and Mildenberger intentionally de-emphasized place. Both based in Utah, they travelled where the snow was best and where it made sense to be, choosing landscapes that felt playful and open. “So many ski films are location-based,” Williams added, “and we wanted our concept to be the theme of the video and not have location matter so much.”
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Williams pointed to the film’s final shot as his favourite, though not for the reasons viewers might expect. As he’s grown older, his perspective on progression and performance has shifted, including what an “ender” should look like. Rather than trying to outdo what others had done on the spot before him, he wanted to strip away that pressure and “do more by doing less.”
The final shot was also the most intimidating trick Williams attempted. The line required skiing between trees, with a takeoff set far enough back that speed and trajectory were difficult to judge. Clearing the step-down gap left little margin for error. In contrast, some of Williams’ favourite clips, he told Newschoolers, came from moments when fear faded into the background, like the sequence shot on a fisheye lens, where pure creativity took over.
In the end, Seeing Flowers stands as more than a 10-minute ski film to consume and then forget soon after. It’s a memorable reflection of an evolving outlook on the moments of clarity in the outdoors that cut through life’s constant noise.
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