DENVER • In a downtown warehouse and office space, behind the racks of Level 1 merchandise purchased by ski fans around the world, Josh Berman wipes the dust off a camera.

It was his first professional-level camera, a Sony Handycam. At the start of the 2000s, it was the camera Berman used to capture the early jumps, rail slides and other twisting, turning tricks of a rising, new-school style. They would be showcased in a 20-year run of ski films out of Berman’s production company, which has come a long way from its ragtag beginnings.

The Sony Handycam could be called the first co-pilot of Level 1, what POWDER Magazine has called “a legendary freeskiing production house.”

Berman reminisces with the Handycam now. “I remember this being an insanely powerful camera. In retrospect, an iPhone 6 probably shoots better than this now.”

The ski film industry has changed all right, and Level 1 with it. The iPhone — it’s up to 14 now — somewhat symbolizes those changes.

“You can go to TikTok or Instagram and have your mind blown around the clock,” Berman says. “That’s the role ski films played back in the day.”

For 20 years Berman and a small crew spent winters filming and summers editing, all the while selling DVDs and marketing feature-length pictures for global tours. Maybe the likes of Warren Miller Entertainment could keep doing it. But for a smaller shop like Level 1, the model by 2019 had grown unsustainable.

Berman and company were done with their annual films, done with selling merchandise to afford the productions. The luster had been lost, says Freedle Coty, Berman’s longtime creative partner.

“You could spend a year on something and it would matter vs. just making a 15-second (social media) reel that just goes into the ether almost instantly,” Coty says.

Well before 2019, “the sun was setting,” he says.

And questions were being asked of Level 1’s future. Would it be more merchandise and branding? More commercial, promotional work?

“Is Level 1 done?” read the POWDER headline.

The answer, it turns out, is a resounding “no.”

Netflix is set to release “Full Circle” — what Berman describes as Level 1’s most ambitious and “all-consuming” project yet.

“And really the single piece of work that I am most proud of,” he says.

Nearly four years in the making, “Full Circle” follows the journey of Trevor Kennison as he returns to Vail Pass, the scene of a life-altering injury, for a world-record attempt on a sit ski. Berman, 45, says he had never cried on a shoot until that day.

It is not a “ski film,” Berman emphasizes — not that high-octane action playing out to stoke music fit for Level 1’s typical premier parties. “Full Circle” is rather a quiet human interest documentary, “a far cry from anything we’ve ever done before,” Berman says.

And with Netflix, it will be the most circulated.

“For any filmmaker, your aspirations aside from paying your bills and the bare minimum is to be able to get your work out in the world and share it,” Berman says. “We’re gonna be in 250 million households around the world, which is pretty wild.”

Wild, especially considering where he started.

He started in 2000 with a VHS called “Balance.” That was the name of Level 1’s first movie, featuring mostly Berman’s friends on the slopes of his native northeast. He basically filmed with one leg; ligaments in the other knee had been torn in an injury that ended his professional skiing dreams.

The next best thing, he figured, was film. He’d been studying the art at Dartmouth College. He studied between winter; he of course took the season off to ski.

Berman wasn’t as interested in chasing powder as he was in chasing big air. He was a product of a rebellious era defined by snowboards and twin tips and Wu-Tang. He was a product of Vermont’s Stratton Mountain Resort, where as a youngster ski patrol chased him for building jumps off cat tracks.

Berman’s approach was this: “Not wanting to follow all the rules and making my own path.”

So went his approach to filming. Berman’s fourth movie was called “Forward,” which spoke to his move to Boulder to grow Level 1.

He was traveling half the year, boarding Greyhound buses and surfing couches. He kept a long list of ski shops around the U.S. and Canada, and he’d get up early to start a long day of cold-calling for partnerships.

“I was scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he says.

He didn’t have the money for the 16-millimeter cameras used by the likes of Warren Miller pros. The likes of the Sony Handycam would have to do. The focus remained: urban tricks and jumps while the rest of the industry took to big mountains.

Level 1 “was not taken seriously,” Coty says. “We were kind of the scrappy, younger brother to the more established media world.”

“Scrappy” was the word, says Georg “Schui” Baumann, another early collaborator.

“I always joke about doing it the Level 1 way, meaning we can do it the scrappy way,” he says. “When others used very expensive equipment or accessories, (Berman) always preferred his creativity and effort to get to the same result without wasting a lot of time or money in the process.”

Baumann came on board in 2008, when Level 1 had moved to Berman’s Victorian house in Denver. The crew lived and worked there.

“That was really the golden era,” Berman says. “I liken it to where bands are making their purist music when they’re all young and living together and cooking for one another and partying and traveling the world.”

Level 1 soon had a big breakthrough: 2009’s “Refresh” was a hit, blending the new school with the old guard representation of Warren Miller’s narration.

The Denver premiere “was a wild night,” Berman says. “Then three days later, I get a knock on my door. ‘Are you Josh Berman? You’ve been served.’”

Warren Miller Entertainment was suing Level 1 for trademark infringement. The company claimed Berman had no right to use Miller’s voice, while Miller himself soon filed a motion to intervene, arguing he was allowed to appear in the movie.

The case closed a year later in Level 1’s favor. “We probably spent $20,000 to $30,000 in legal fees, which was everything I had at the time,” Berman says.

But it was indeed a breakthrough: The case catalyzed Level 1 fans and inspired new ones drawn by the David and Goliath story that played out in the national press. Level 1 T-shirts flew off the shelves — key revenue to fund more films.

The annual run of releases was never meant to last. It lasted 20 years largely thanks to Berman’s tenacity, colleagues say. “An absolute workhorse,” Baumann calls him.

Berman couldn’t keep going like he was. “My first marriage struggled in part because of the amount of traveling I was doing,” he says.

Traveling for winter and spring, editing and other logistics in the summer — it was a “hamster wheel,” he says, that was keeping him from his growing son. That “golden era” at the house was fun while it lasted. But “people have to grow up,” Berman says.

The Warren Miller Entertainment lawsuit underscored a strange juxtaposition that only became more clear to him over the years: that of cold, hard business and the fun, free spirit of skiing.

The business of ski filmmaking has gotten harder and harder.

“For a lot of those ladder years of annual films, I felt like I was much more of a business person than a filmmaker,” Berman says.

Along came Trevor Kennison and “Full Circle” to remind him why he got into filmmaking in the first place.

Maybe the slow art of ski films can’t overcome the instant gratification of TikTok and Instagram. But a good story will always win out, Berman thinks.

He thinks he’d like to tell more of them, more documentaries. There was an idea behind the name Level 1 back when he was hardly 21: “starting at the bottom kind of thing,” he says. The name has rightfully stuck.

“Every time we do something new, there’s always more to learn,” Berman says. “That’s the beauty of the creative process.”

There’s a beauty as well in balance — that word behind his first film.

He has a little girl now. “Who I am determined to put in a backpack and take up to Winter Park this year.”