Valhalla Transmissions: Todd Jones on TGR’s iPhone Ski Film
Valhalla Transmissions: Todd Jones on TGR’s iPhone Ski Film
https://www.tetongravity.com/valhalla-transmissions-todd-jones/
Publish Date: 2026-06-05 10:30:00
Source Domain: www.tetongravity.com
For more than three decades, Todd Jones and Teton Gravity Research have built a reputation around pushing action sports filmmaking forward. Big mountain lines. Helicopters. Phantom cameras. REDs. Massive lenses pointed into hectic winter environments.
Now, they’ve released something completely different.
TGR’s latest project, VALHALLA TRANSMISSIONS, marks the first time the company has shot an entire ski film exclusively on iPhone. Not as a joke. Not as a behind-the-scenes side project. A full-scale TGR production filmed in the same environments, with the same standards, and the same expectations as every other film they’ve made.
“We basically ditched all the cameras we normally use,” Jones says. “We grabbed two of the best skiers in the world, Kai Jones and Sammy Carlson, and went and did our thing the way we always do it; but only using iPhones.”
How Apple and TGR Came Up With the Idea
The idea started after Apple approached TGR through its “Shot on iPhone” program. TGR pitched multiple concepts, but one immediately stood out.
“The one I loved most was just the pure challenge of it,” he says. “Forget the REDs and the Phantoms and all the normal cinema setups. Go into the mountains with only the iPhone and see if we could still make something that felt fully TGR.”
For Jones, that challenge wasn’t about proving a phone could shoot pretty images. It was about testing whether a device people carry in their pockets could survive, and perform, in one of the harshest production environments imaginable.
“We work in such a specialized environment with snow, weather, action, long lenses, follow cams, all of it,” he says. “We’ve refined our filmmaking process for decades. So stripping all that away and rebuilding it around the iPhone became really exciting.”
Building a Cinema Workflow Around an iPhone
But the production wasn’t as simple as pointing a phone at a mountain and…
