Conjure up the most dude-ish, Bill & Ted style surfer accent you can, and read the following lines:

“We were looking for the simpler things in life: goods now and good friends. So we flew, drove, walked and crawled across nine countries – four continents – drank 32,000 cups o’ coffee, ate 40 bottles of aspirin, in search of deep powder. We had become what we sought. We were: Riders on the Storm!”

Once upon a time all snowboard films started this way, with a cheesy, all-knowing voiceover to introduce the story and give further updates along the way. Movies were a kind of diary of a season, with ongoing snow reports. By the mid 90s, however, the narrative style had fallen out of fashion in favour of non-stop hammers from start to finish – in much the same way those comedy storylines of 70s porn flicks gave way to instant hardcore. “Cut to the chase!” was the mentality of film-makers like MDP. “Just give the kids what they want.”

But in recent times the voiceover has enjoyed something of a comeback, beginning with David Benedek’s 91 Words for Snow. By ditching the cheese and re-introducing a narrative in a more documentary style – with interviews for riders to tell their own stories – Benedek changed the game once again. As Lines, The Gap Session and That’s It That’s All have proved, documentaries – and voiceovers – can make watching a snowboard film less of a mindless experience. You only need to check out the trailer for Jeremy Jones’ Higher to see that it’s still around today.