DETONATE: The Ladd Brothers’ First Step Into Filmmaking

For most of their lives, Dylan and Connor Ladd have lived inside the tight structure of competitive halfpipe skiing. Training blocks, travel schedules, judged runs; repeat. With DETONATE, the brothers step outside that framework for the first time, trading comp runs for handbuilt jumps, long days in the mountains, and a project shaped entirely on their own terms.

We spoke with the Ladd brothers on their new video, and their visions for the future.

Dylan: Hey! I’m Dylan and I am the older brother (24 yrs) and am on the U.S. Ski Team for Freeski Halfpipe. A couple years ago I graduated from CU Boulder and am now skiing full time. This year is a super important competition season as I am chasing the Olympics and hoping to make the team.

Connor: I’m 22 years old. I am graduating from college this December from CU Boulder in Marketing, and I’m the youngest of the family with Dylan and an older brother, Noah. Right now I’m just skiing, traveling as much as I can, and starting to figure out life.

Dylan: This has been something that we have talked about for several years but with full-time school and competitions going on we never quite had enough time to go out and make a full film. Now that I am finished with school I decided that I should start trying to get more into filming and do what I had always wanted to do. Not only that but it is also a new challenge that I wanted to take on.

Connor: Competing and halfpipe have been our whole world for years, but it can put you in a box. It’s fun to compete and strive for perfection in that aspect but we also wanted to create something that wasn’t judged. If people love it, great; if they don’t, oh well - but it’s ours.

Dylan: The initial idea started as me being so unbelievably bored with no school on my hands. So I pitched a solo backcountry project to my sponsors, since I had so much time on my hands, and it slowly evolved into a brothers film as we started to build more together and stack clips. For years we’ve talked about making a movie but it was always just talk, so to finally have a moment where I could put my full focus into filming really set it in motion.

Connor: We’ve always wanted to do it, but never committed to it. Even this year, Dylan started filming, and I was still a little hesitant until someone asked what I was waiting for. Ended up driving out to Park City to film with Dylan during Spring Break and then making up days of filming in Colorado when I had breaks in school. Have always wanted to make our own features the way we want them but it’s also hard when you’re trying to make everything perfect because nothing ever actually is. No jump, cliff, grab, or trick is going to be just the way you want and at some point, you just have to roll with it and keep going.

Connor: It’s an interesting one. Dylan is older and knows a little more, so it’s looking to him for guidance on building or doing stuff. There is a lot of stuff where you would normally have to say it or state it to another person to get them to do it, but we think similarly enough that a lot of times, there isn’t a ton of talking going on about what to do. It is definitely a brother dynamic though, with dumb stuff sometimes getting argued about, but I would rather do it with him than anyone else.

Dylan: I think Connor said it pretty well, but ultimately it comes down to trust and being able to fully believe in one another for each jump and trick. Without that there is a lot of doubt and wasted time.

Dylan: I truly wanted the movie to be more of a pow-jump movie, but as the season went on and I had less time between competitions than I anticipated, it turned into a spring jump movie. Classic straight-on jumps were always going to be included, but some of the side-hit features and up/down features were sort of in-the-moment ideas. A bunch of people and really great skiers helped make this happen, not only for us but for their projects too. Leaning into their ideas helped make some of the different jumps that are seen.

Connor: We didn’t want to film on a resort so we could do whatever. It was also having a general idea of what we wanted to do for features, but it’s always going out and finding it that makes it hard. A lot of spots get reused; we hit stuff that has been in movies or recently or got hit this year. But we also tried to do some of our own stuff.

Dylan: First off, Cedar absolutely crushed the editing and his creativity and experience really made it what it is. I did have a lot of input, but it was mostly on the shots that were being put in, and then if there were elements that I thought could be improved, he would find some other way to edit it. Cedar’s sound design was really incredible and I think that was huge for the final piece, but he also just had these small touches within that made a big difference.

Connor: I was kinda on the outside looking in. Dylan really did most of the editing with Cedar and I was getting more of an overall draft.

Connor: There had been a feature that I had hit on Loveland Pass a couple of years ago that we really liked, but we ended up backing it a good 30–40 feet from the original spot. It was also right above the road so some people would stop and watch, but we had a really good session on it. That’s where most of the big tricks were. Lots of crashes that hurt. And then we had to go to Aspen and do a halfpipe training camp the next day.

Dylan: I agree with Connor; the Loveland Pass spot was pretty insane, not just because our biggest tricks were there, but mostly because of how long of a day we had. It must have been a 10-hour day of non-stop jumping.

Dylan: My biggest hurdle has to be finding spots and making them work. There are so many ski movies coming out now and a ton that use similar locations, so being able to find a zone that has good features was a bit tough. Beyond that, the building process is way harder than most people think. Being able to line up jumps to landings and getting the angles right is an art form, and there were more than a few instances where we built jumps that didn’t work well. For those jumps we would try and adjust it to make it somewhat work, but often it would need a full rebuild to be hit properly.

Connor: Songs. Finding the right songs is so hard, and Dylan and I have certain music that we listen to individually. Trying to get his music taste and my music taste to align was a hard process to figure out.

Connor: Yes; and we have an older brother that we want to incorporate into our next one. We are focusing on competing this year, but once that’s done, we definitely want to do something. Hopefully we can actually do jumps into pow, because hitting jumps into slush hurts more than you imagine.

Dylan: Ditto. Hopefully this becomes a yearly thing because we want to show our creativity and love for the sport and keep improving each time.

Dylan:Eye-opening. Since this was our first project, there were a lot of small components that we didn’t fully know and understand that would have saved us lots of time and energy. Not only that, but the immense amount of work it takes just to even create a small project. This film really was eye-opening to the behind-the-scenes work that comes with all the other films we have watched and enjoyed.

For Dylan and Connor Ladd, DETONATE isn’t about leaving competition behind; it’s about expanding what skiing can look like when the pressure of judging disappears. As a first film, it opens the door to a different kind of progression.

Watch the film below, and stay tuned for more from the Ladd's.