There are many skiers out there, including some of the biggest names, claiming that Markus Eder is the best all-around skier in the world right now. His new video, ‘The Ultimate Run’, has been seen by millions of people already, but Markus says he made edit to show his skiing to other skiers.

“I have never had a segment where I could show all of my skiing. The closest I got was a season edit, with all shots coming together, but I never had street in there.”

When shooting with Scott Gaffney —for MSP's Ruin and Rose— Markus did get invited to the park shoot, but he says he “never really had everything in there at once". Riding the resort is what I do most and that’s also what I like the most. Just to randomly go skiing, really getting the legs burning and hitting all those side-hits. Skiing from top to bottom, straight down the lift.”

“I actually first tried to shoot this project with Gaffney, in 2015, so six years ago. Gaffney also loves skiing and he loves every part of skiing. I dislocated my shoulder at the very first shoot. He'd had come over to Europe and the idea was much simpler back then. It was much more ‘shoot what we find’. Years went by and other things ended up taking priority for me.”

The 2019 FWT Champion did really want to make the edit with Gaffney “I’ve learned so much from him and he’s an amazing filmer, super creative. But the ideas became so complex, it was going to take a long time to film. I would have had to take over a lot of the production side as well.”

Luckily, he’d already shot with Legs of Steel for several years too, “they’re also awesome and super passionate about skiing. Ultimately, I had to just be like ‘I’m sorry Gaffney'..."

"The script and ideas of what I wanted to do, were quite elaborate, but at the beginning, we thought the filming would be much easier than it turned out to be. I went to Legs of Steel and the way they’re set up is it’s all freelance filmers and they try to find the best crew to fit the project. They hit up Christoph Thorsen and he was super down from the beginning. He really pushed the filming side of it. He’s been shooting for Legs of Steel for around seven years, doing the droning. I knew him from that, so I knew he’s cool! I was stoked when he was stoked."

They did learn valuable lessons from that first year. “We started off just filming everything. We built so many jumps and hits, we had such a good start to the year, the whole of November, we built stuff. We would always need the same sun/light and we were scared there would be like a month straight of sh*tty weather, then the whole thing would need to be sh*tty weather! At the start, we just took every opportunity possible. Then Covid came around and a lot of the stuff we built we didn’t even get to hit.”

The next year they had so much stuff on the hitlist but knew if they started out down the same path, they would never get the project done. “We took more time scoping everything, figuring out how long each shot was going to be. The second year, we knew which features to shoot, so didn’t waste time shooting extra hits.”

He had the idea sorted, more of a solid plan and there was a team to produce it. And luckily, most of the spots in the edit are very close to Markus’s actual house!

Teamwork: Ralph Welponer helped out with the skiing and building for the urban around the castle

“Maybe the castle section is my favourite. Even when Gaffney was over, I had drawings of the way in, out and exactly what I’d do. So that’s been an idea for six years. I liked that there’s some pretty heavy urban stuff there. My dad was actually born in that castle, so that’s quite a nice personal note too. It’s five minutes from my parent’s house.”

However, they had to switch countries (Google says it’s a nine-and-a-half-hour drive) to shoot the cave and glacier part in Zermatt, Switzerland.

“I’m pretty stoked about Zermatt. That whole section looks perfect in the video, but it was actually quite a hassle. It was a super low snow year and there was ice sticking out everywhere, glacier cracks were opening. The shots are great, I think, but it could have been easier.”

The ski resort segment was very much home territory though and was pretty much all off one lift at Klausberg. “I’ve basically been hitting those hits many times and I always thought it would be sick if we put a jump here or a cannon rail that we put on a snow cat.”

“I hit the cliff every year. The hit where I do the dub 10, usually the landing only fills up on a big snow year and only at the end of the season, because it’s all rocky and gets a lot of wind.”

“There’s a bunch of lines that I’ve skied on my Go Pro POVs, so they’re in there. I’ve built jumps there for many years and some of it is my ‘training run’ when I was getting ready for the Freeride World Tour. Whenever there was fresh snow, I’d just hammer them back-to-back-to-back. There were lines I’ve always hit and next to it there’s maybe a spot where I’ve thought about building a pow jump for ages. So, this was the perfect occasion!”

Klausberg -his home resort- were very accommodating, as he had already shot quite a bit there. “We had built our own park and done quite a few projects. The boss of Klausberg, if he knows that you’re working your ass off for it, he’s going to do everything for you.”

The second year, like most of Europe, that lift was always closed, except occasions where Markus and co. needed it to run. “They needed people to put the gondolas back in because the resort was shut down all season. We were always quite a small crew, so that made it a lot easier. Whenever we needed a sled or a snowcat to build something, we always got it.”

“We definitely didn’t overdo it; we didn’t want to spend too much time on the mountain. We just waited for those good days, where we knew we’d get something. You need the credibility from the resort, it’s kind of hard for them to understand what the video was going to look like. So, we didn’t want to burn our chances.”

The music in The Ultimate Run is as diverse as the skiing, going from Classical at the start, skiing through powder up on the mountain, to 90s hip hop in the park. Each section, and type of skiing, has a different style and mood of the music. Picking the music definitely wasn’t easy!

“The music was a huge deal. It’s insane to think how much thought you can put into music. I knew that I wanted classical music at the beginning. My original idea was to have it composed especially for it. We actually had someone making a song for it —for like a month-and-a-half— it wasn’t the way we wanted it, so it eventually went to the ditch! Music, editing and everything was all teamwork of Legs of Steel and Christoph.

Christoph actually found the first song and composed it himself, like different instrument lines, so he arranged it how he wanted it. The music was definitely teamwork.”

Just before publishing this, The Ultimate Run had more than 1.7 million views. Markus says he appreciates all those people watching it, but “especially the comments from people saying how it’s getting them hyped up for winter and skiing. Just everybody wanting to go out and ski.”The Ultimate Run was made for skiers and many on NS would have appreciated some of the details.“I put a lot of thought into which tricks I wanted to do where and how. I wanted to make sure that there were switch landings, both axis spinning in the air, different grabs and giving the shoutout to JP with the backflip mute.”

“The mainstream and views are obviously nice to see but what got me most stoked was comments or messages from heroes that I always looked up to. In a Poorboyz movie, way back in the day (Propaganda) JP did a 360 mute over a gap between roofs, I actually found that spot and it was on the initial list as well, to do. I definitely wanted to do a 360 mute there, just like JP. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, but that spot is super sick.”

Because he couldn’t quite get that spot into the edit, here it is:

Who knows how many views the video will have by the time you read this, but as a skier, know that it was made for you. Now, you might as well give it one more view...

https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/1016212/The-Ultimate-Run