3 minute read
Videographer
Videographer Will Joseph
ISHIKI + music + dreams
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Will is an inspiring young creative film hustling dude. We caught up with this vibrant young videographer, filmmaker and aspiring musician in the online world during lockdown. It’s been a few years since Will’s last digital exhibition at our Substation Art Gallery, but boy has he been movin’ and shakin’ since! We find 23 year old Will in Melbourne now, chatting from an incredible production warehouse! Read on for contagious energy and smiles …
Where are you in the grand scheme of things and what are you up to in the current COVID situation?
I’m living in Kew at the moment and working on two music videos with the master MC Soul Manic, and I'm using the lockdown time to really do some nitty-gritty editing. For example, as I posted on Instagram recently, I’m currently on the 25th edit of the latest music video (haha)!
How did you get into music video production? Can you tell us a bit more about your business?
I started a small video business with just myself last year, called ISHIKI, which in Japanese means ‘awareness’, and I really want to take the company into a thoughtprovoking landscape to bring up ideas and make people think about stuff. Like when a video ends, they go ‘Wait, wait, what does that mean?!’, and they watch it again! Eventually I want to be doing film and cinema, but right now I want people to be getting off that YouTube video and thinking, ‘Damn that was something different’, ‘That’s actually really cool’, and then they don’t just follow my YouTube account, they actually search something it got them thinking about. I really want to push that with ISHIKI. So that’s why I went with the name, because it means awareness and consciousness.
Tell us a bit about your first music film project. It would probably be a CLOSE COUNTERS gig. I think it would’ve been a 420 gig at 808, which I think was the bar in Hobart back in 2013! I just rocked up with my Canon 60D and shot their gig of about 100 people and it was a lot of fun! From there I did another gig with them at Mobius, then had a bit of
a break for a couple of years finding my passion for music and writing music. Then I moved to Melbourne for uni, which didn’t really gel with me, so I dropped out, and I re-found the passion for videos and did a couple of videos in Melbourne with some friends, which was fun. It was a good learning experience!
After that I moved back to Tassie and did some more work with CLOSE COUNTERS. Through that work I scored a gig with What So Not, which was great! That led to even more work down in Tassie through the Goods Shed. After that I did more gigs like Alice in Wonderland, PNAU and The Goods Festival, and moved back up to Melbourne, where I thought, ‘I can actually do this life and career path!’
I guess it felt like it was right in front of me from there, and that I could really do it. Being in Melbourne meant a lot more and bigger gigs too. After about a year of living in Melbourne, my friend Hannah couldn’t attend Groove in the Moo to shoot a gig, so I filled in for her. It was for two Melbourne DJs called The Mai Sisters, who really killed it!
After that set, I sent a photo of me with my camera to one of my favourite DJs (who was headlining that show) called Flosstradamus and about 40 minutes later I received a text back on my Instagram saying ‘Come on through!’ I ran through Groove in the Moo as fast as I’ve ever run before (haha). I jumped up on the stage and just started filming!
It’s amazing how one minute you’re in class listening to music and a couple of years later, you’re up on stage next to the guy! You’re filming him, getting a really nice tight shot, like walking in front of the DJ! You’re the barrier between one of the biggest Trap DJs in the world and his ten thousand audience members! It was definitely one of the greatest experiences ever. When that happened, I just thought, ‘THIS IS IT! THIS is what I want to pursue, lock down and turn into my career!’
