Huntsville • The pioneers of freestyle skiing had a term for when fellow hotdoggers would perform a trick in front of a video camera that they wouldn’t be brave enough to try anywhere else, even in competition. They called it “Kodak courage.”

And Gary Nate’s camera was bursting with it.

Nate, of Ogden, quit jobs as a teacher and military recruiter in the early 1970s to make a ski film that he parlayed into a nearly 40-year career as a cameraman for Warren Miller Entertainment. His first muses were a wild group of Ogden-based skiers who flipped and twisted and even parasailed onto the slopes of Snowbasin Resort. The colorful images he captured of their antics — and later those of legends like Scott Schmidt and Wayne Wong — helped popularize freestyle skiing and turn it into one of the most-watched Olympic disciplines in the United States today.

Now, Nate’s son is about to have his own “Kodak courage” moment. Inspired by his childhood heroes’ willingness to risk failure in the pursuit of a passion, Colby Nate sold his software engineering company last year and — armed with no knowledge of how to make a documentary — set out to create a film about the link between his father and the pioneers of freestyle skiing.

That film, “Will Ski 4 Food” — produced in collaboration with River Hyde and Rob Tovar — is scheduled to premiere at Snowbasin Resort on Friday.

According to Hyde, who is Colby Nate’s cousin, the film is part ski flick, part documentary, part motivational video.

“It started as a Gary Nate biopic and just evolved,” Hyde said. “These stories are too powerful and they’re too big not to be seen or not to be shared.”

Freestyle skiing evolved in the late 1960s and early ’70s as a form of rebellion against the rules and rigidity of alpine racing. Skiers still tried to get down a hill as fast as possible but with personality. In 1979, the International Ski Federation recognized freestyle as an official sport. When it was made an Olympic demonstration sport in 1988, it included all three disciplines: moguls, aerials and ski ballet. Soon after, moguls (1992) and aerials (1994) were named official Winter Games sports.

Gary Nate captured the freestylers’ flair and brought it to hundreds of thousands of Warren Miller fans. Before his death in 2024, he donated most of his film reels and photos to the University of Utah. Included in the trove was his film “Skiers to Match the Mountains,” which was mostly shot at Snowbasin. That camera work provided much of the vintage footage for “Will Ski 4 Food” and allowed its slew of Ogden-based skiers to steal the spotlight.

Among them, there’s Robert Young, who won the 1975 World Grand Prix aerials championship. He once skied out of one of Snowbird’s trams midair and later skied as a stunt double for James Bond in “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

There’s Doug Coleman, who also became a stuntman. He doubled for Leonardo DiCaprio in the bear scene in “The Revenant.” Before that, he helped craft the first rules for judging aerials competitions.

There’s also “Bad Bob” Salerno. He was named “Hotdogger of the Year” by Skiing Magazine in 1974 after winning the World Aerials Championship and the World Super Hot Dog Championship to claim the overall Grand Prix trophy. In addition, he created Utah’s first aerials practice pond at the base of Nordic Valley Resort.

Ogden figures prominently in the film and into freestyle skiing’s history as well. The filmmakers acknowledge that the town wasn’t the only hotbed for American hotdog skiers in the 1970s. Still, there seemed to be something in the water — or the snow.

“We almost felt like Ogden was a character in the film,” Colby Nate, 53, said, “because, you know, it’s blue-collar, it’s a railroad town, and the generation that came before them really sort of gave them their work ethic.”

Freestyle pioneer Jeff Perkins Hyde, who is River Hyde’s father, said his peers were the type of people who would sell nightcrawlers to fishermen to pay for their $50 season pass. That pass, in turn, unlocked a sense of freedom. They kept their skis in their cars and spent every spare moment on the slopes. They’d race down moguls and regularly cajole each other into trying ever more radical stunts, including flips, spins and spread eagles.

When they took those tricks to competitions, they usually won. When they were shown on the big screen in Warren Miller films, they usually wowed.

As Robert Young’s sister Carolyn recalled in the film, “They were the G.O.A.T.s of the ‘70s, for sure.”

The “Will Ski 4 Food” film crew staged a reunion for the remaining local freestyle pioneers earlier this year. They quickly fell into their old ways, according to Colby Nate.

“They were all kind of sitting there together and laughing,” he said, “and it was like listening to a bunch of teenagers talking.”

Colby Nate initially expected the film about his father to be little more than an elaborate home video for his kids. Maybe it would be the book the elder Nate always intended to write, except on film. Then he recruited River Hyde, 30, and Tovar, 37, who worked together in video production for FanX Salt Lake, the annual comic and pop culture convention, to help. After listening to just a few of the interviews, they understood they had something a larger audience could enjoy and benefit from.

“It’s a history that would have been lost,” Jeff Hyde, 69, said.

The three filmmakers formed a camaraderie similar to that of the skiers they feature. It’s the product of a shared passion and the pressure of putting together a feature-length documentary in just nine months. Typically, such a project would take closer to two years — a factoid Colby Nate wasn’t aware of until they were waist-deep in the project.

If working on “Will Ski 4 Food” taught them anything, though, it’s that sometimes you just have to go for it and trust things will work out. Harness that “Kodak courage.”

“Even those that don’t ski,” Colby Nate said, “can take the message out of this that there’s something really special about taking a risk to follow a passion.”

Tickets for the Snowbasin premiere are available at WillSki4FoodFilm.com. Colby Nate said he hopes to “take this on the road” but hasn’t secured other venues. The filmmakers also plan to enter the documentary in several film festivals.

Warren Miller’s latest ski flick, “Days Off,” also features numerous Utahns, including Ted Ligety and Kaylin Richardson. It will make five stops in Utah in November. For a full schedule, visit warrenmiller.com/film-tour.