Gibson Hazard is a visionary.
Hold on, I know what you’re thinking. Words like “visionary” and “innovator” get thrown around so much these days that they’ve damn near lost all meaning. But in Hazard’s case, they’re spot-on.
The 27-year-old director is the kind of person who thrives when he’s breaking new ground, trying batshit-crazy things that no one else would ever dream of. He’s been like that for as long as he can remember. As a teenager, he started bringing his camera to concerts, and instead of making the same old boring recap videos as everyone else, he put his own surreal twist on it and reinvented the format.
Watching a Gibson Hazard video is like going to a Christopher Nolan movie on acid. Every few seconds, the camera will invert on itself as a clap of thunder shakes the screen, revealing a surreal new window into Hazard’s mind. When he made a tour recap video for Lil Pump, for example, Hazard used his visual effects skills to turn the rapper into a Godzilla-sized superhuman who stomped around a city as he performed. Everything he creates is full of over-the-top effects and dramatic sound design, and they’re all completely absurd (in the best way possible). Without even trying to, Hazard cracked open everything you thought you knew about concert videos. And he did it all himself, completely DIY.
Before long, everyone wanted a Gibson Hazard video. First, 6lack came calling. Then Billie Eilish, Lil Pump, and Future. Hell, he even made a Drake tour video. And when Hazard wasn’t on tour, he found time to make mind-bending videos for brands like Nike, Call of Duty, MTV, and the Grammys.
Now he’s throwing himself into a completely different type of video. Some people call them “album trailers.” Others refer to them as “short films.” No matter what you want to call them, I promise you’ve never seen anything like them. It all started with a video for Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, in which Hazard was tasked with making a trailer that introduced fans to the aesthetic universe around the album. What he ended up with was a cinematic work of art that featured Uzi levitating into an alien craft.
Since then, Hazard has made another trailer for Uzi (the Pink Tape movie), plus two album trailers for Metro Boomin’s Savage Mode II and Heroes & Villains. He’s become the go-to director for artists who want splashy trailers for their albums—a secret weapon who can build an immersive visual world around any body of work.
And if you ask Hazard, he’s just getting started. Just this week, he won a BET Hip Hop Award for his "Just Wanna Rock" music video with Uzi. And he's shown versatility, bringing his unique, mind-bending style to awards shows like the Grammys and VMAs, where he was tapped for creative direction. At this pace, anything feels possible for Hazard. Don't be surprised if you see his name in lights at a movie theater soon.
Sitting down with Complex, Gibson Hazard explained how he got here and what’s next. The interview, lightly edited for clarity, is below.
How did you get your start?
I was in a photo class in Boston, and they gave me a camera. I wasn't even interested in photography at the time, and concerts were the only thing that I wanted to take photos of. But I didn't have a way to get passes, so I was literally just bootlegging them and making fake passes. I would email openers and figure out any way that I could take photos. From there, I just started taking photos in Boston and meeting artists. One of my friends went on this tour and brought me along as his photographer. While we were on tour, he asked if I could make videos, too, and I'd never made a video before, but I was like, "I'll figure it out. I'm down." So I was just watching tutorials on tour, and I made a video every night. And I just went from there.
There are thousands of kids who bring cameras to concerts and make videos. Most of them look similar and they’re usually boring as hell. But you figured out how to turn concert videos into surreal, cinematic pieces of art. How did you find your style?
It was such a gradual thing. The first video I saw that really had an impact on me was called “Watchtower of Turkey,” where this guy went to Turkey for a few months. It was just him and a camera and he put together a three-minute video with all these insane transitions and crazy sound design. At the time, I’d never seen anything like that. It felt so immersive and visceral. So I felt like I could do something like that at concerts and make people feel like they were actually there.
When I went on tour, I was making a video every single night, and my rule was that every video had to be better than the last. So I was making 20 to 30 videos a month and I was just constantly trying to push myself to learn new things. I didn't have budgets, so I had to do everything myself. Even for lighting, I was literally carrying around a light myself. I was learning how to shoot, edit, do sound design, and make visual effects. I would just be in my tour bunk, watching tutorials and trying to learn as much as I could. I would watch a tutorial one night and then put it in the video the next day.
Is there a moment when you started to figure out the aesthetic we know you for today?
When I went on tour with 6lack. That was a big turning point because his music worked really well with the way I like editing and doing sound design. Those were the first videos where I started taking the sound design more seriously. I started adding these thunder sounds and it wasn't anything insane, but those were the first videos where I started to make something that felt a little more cohesive. I was also able to slow down a little bit on that tour and take my time on each video. Instead of having to make a video every night, I did a video every 7 to 10 days. That was the tour when I started to get some traction and people started to recognize it as its own thing.
After that, you went on a wild run, making cinematic concert videos for everyone from Lil Pump to Future to Drake. What was that experience like?
It's hard to put into words, because I wasn't thinking that much about it. I was just going. That was such a crazy time because I was just going from tour to tour to tour. I got off the 6lack tour and went straight to the Future tour and then went straight to the Billie Eilish tour and then straight to the Lil Pump tour. It was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all in a row. I was just trying to make every video better than the last one.
When you went on tour with Lil Pump, you turned him into a Godzilla-like figure who stomped around a city. Have you always been drawn to that surreal style?
It was always based on the artist that I was working with and the music. That's what I was saying about working with 6lack... His music felt very cinematic and dark and moody, so I was able to tap into that tone with the editing I was doing. Then, when I was with Pump, his stuff was so eccentric and over-the-top and colorful and insane. So it was the perfect storm of motivation to get into crazier editing and more surreal ideas. The Pumpzilla thing was so funny.
These aren't simple edits. They're full of 3D renderings, animations, and effects. For your Drake video, for example, you figured out how to crash a car through the Staples Center. At the time, you were just a one-man operation doing everything yourself, right?
Yeah, that was, like, the last video where I was doing everything myself.
How long does a video like that take you to make?
I mean, that video was crazy, actually. It was different from the others. At first, I got brought on by this guy Willo Perron to help art direct the stage visuals for that tour. So I went out to Russia and I was working on it with this company out there for two or three months. Then, right before the first show, the whole thing kind of imploded and the guy I was working for got thrown under the bus, and then he kind of threw me under the bus and I got fired off that tour. I don't think anybody even really knew. Like, Drake didn't even know I was working on that shit. I was just this little VFX guy, you know? That's the first and only time I've ever been fired off of something.
So I went home and I felt like I had lost momentum in the tour world because I'd been away for months, and I felt like I'd blown it. I didn't even have anything to show from the whole past three months or whatever. So I got home and I was basically just like, “I'm gonna make the craziest video ever.” I had shot one of the shows, so I spent, like, six weeks and made that video entirely myself. That was the video that totally changed my career. Before that, I was just on tour, making tour recaps. And then after that, the next video I did was a Nike commercial. And after that, it was all big budgets and big projects.
More recently, you’ve become the go-to director to make album trailers for artists. The first one you did was Lil Uzi Vert's Eternal Atake trailer in 2020. How did that come together?
At the beginning, Uzi wanted to do a trailer, and I was kind of confused at first because I assumed that they would want to do a music video. I hadn't really seen many album trailers like that before. So I was a little confused, but I think it worked perfectly with the type of videos that I'd done up to that point. It was shortly after the Drake video.
The ideas that Uzi had were UFOs and girls. Those were the two themes, and I had to come up with a narrative around that. We had this whole idea and it was all written out and then Uzi got to set and changed this one thing that basically created a domino effect that ruined the whole script that I had. So in 15 minutes, I had to rewrite the entire thing from the beginning. [Laughs.] But honestly, it ended up being even better.
Whenever I work with Uzi, it's always like that. It's so chaotic but it always makes it so much better. Every idea that Uzi has always makes it so much better.
Do you have a favorite memory from shooting the Eternal Atake short film?
The second day. The first day was out in the field in upstate New York and the second day was at the Roc Nation office, and that day was really fun. Even when Uzi first pulled up in that outfit, I remember being like, "Damn, that's crazy. This is gonna be insane." We were just running around the Roc Nation office, shooting a bunch of crazy stuff. He had this Beats pill, just blasting Eternal Atake, and running around. It was so much fun.
The first day was honestly a really stressful shoot because everything was changing so much, and we were trying to get as much as we could in the time we had. We were trying to figure out how we could make something cool out of it. So it was stressful, but it was still fun.
What is your goal for these short films? Is the whole idea to introduce the album cycle and start building a world around the music?
Yeah. That's what I love about album trailers in general. You really get to create an entire universe around the album. It relates back to the tour videos that I was doing where I would get to mix all these different songs together, sound design it, and really create a world.
For me, the albums that are the most memorable and iconic... It's about the music, but it's also so much more than that. It's really about the whole world around it. It’s more of an experience than just a collection of songs. The cool thing about the trailers and short films is being able to create a visual world that goes with the songs. It's interesting how they've progressed. At first, they were more just trailers that gave you a preview into the world, but didn't go much deeper than that. But with the last few short films, we've been able to make these huge, epic things with characters and cameos. They bring people deeper into the world.
For these projects, you have a whole production team and a budget, which is very different from your days as a one-man operation. What was that adjustment like?
Yeah, the video I did for Nike [in 2019] was the first real shoot that I'd done with an actual budget, and this was the second one. It was definitely a crazy adjustment period, not knowing what anything was called on set and not knowing anybody's roles. I didn't even know what an AD or an AC was, or anything like that. I was figuring it all out on the fly. People were asking me so many questions that I didn't know the answers for. Every shoot that I'd done before that was just me and my handheld Sony a7S, so I didn't know anything about lenses or cameras or anything like that. All I had was my idea and I tried to figure out how to make it happen somehow.
It's been a big learning process for me. Because I take so long with post-production, I don't get to do that many shoots. A lot of directors have been on set hundreds of times. But I've gotten good at the post-production side, and I do so few videos because it takes me so long. So I don't feel very comfortable on set yet. It feels like a foreign world to me, versus the editing and VFX side.
You're not alone. You’re part of a whole generation of kids with cameras who are very DIY and self-taught. Then all of a sudden, you blow up online and get the resources for a full production, so you have to learn on the job when it comes to working with a crew.
Yeah, exactly. I think of the videos I was making in 2017 and 2018. I had these crazy ideas, but I had so little knowledge [of] 3D effects and stuff like that. I was trying to do these insane, over-the-top concepts and if I brought them to a producer, they would’ve said, "This will be $2 million," or whatever. But I was trying to do it all myself and learn how to do it on every video. A lot of them look kind of trash, but the ideas are still there. I was able to figure out a way to bring those ideas to life, even if they weren't at a Hollywood level of quality. So now it's cool being able to have the resources to execute those ideas on a bigger scale.
That's what's cool about people that started out super DIY, especially from that era, like Cole [Bennett], who started [around the same time as me]. When I was doing those Lil Pump videos, he was doing the music videos for Pump. We were both doing handheld, run-and-gun videos, and it's cool seeing people like him evolve to being able to execute those ideas on such a high level.
These days, everybody likes to talk about how attention spans are shorter than ever and albums are less important than they used to be. But it seems like the artists who you’ve been working with are the exception to that rule. For example, Metro Boomin had a lot of success by creating a world around his album, which was kicked off by the trailer you made. Have you noticed that?
Yeah, it's world-building. If you can get people to feel like it's an experience and there's a whole world that they're entering, and not just a collection of songs, it can have such a powerful effect. There are different types of artists. There are some artists where it's all song-driven and having a big single, and that's one approach. But some of the artists that I really like working with are more interested in creating something bigger, where it's not about any of the individual songs. Together, they all create something bigger. For Heroes & Villains and Pink Tape, those were albums that came out as a full thing.
Yeah, the trailers came out first.
The trailer was like the single. That was crazy. So people would hear the trailer and hear all these snippets [before the album]. I think it makes it feel like more of a cohesive body [of] work. There's a world and a universe.
What about your specific skill set lends itself so well to these album trailers?
It all comes down to the ideas, and the structure of the videos that I've done up to this point. It started around the time I did the Drake video. Up until that point, I was much more focused on the technical side of editing and making these really stylized videos that felt cool. But when I made that video, I realized that people don't really care about that. At the end of the day, you aren't supposed to notice good editing. It's supposed to be in the background. So when I was really focused on editing, it became a strength of mine, but there was a ceiling to that. People gravitate to good ideas much more than good editing. So after the Drake video, I got much more focused on coming up with ideas that people would connect with.
With the trailers, the most important thing is having really magnetic ideas that draw people in right from the beginning of the video, and keep them there through the whole thing. It's really important for a trailer to have a big idea that's gonna get people talking. The things that make good music videos are very different from the things that make good album trailers.
And the most fun thing about VFX is being able to do crazy world-building, coming up with these insane ideas for buildings and cities that bring it to life. With VFX, it's really fun to come up with something in your head that doesn't exist in real life and bring it to life. I like shooting stuff in real life, too, though. At this point, people know me as the VFX guy, but I like shooting stuff in real life, too.
You also made the Savage Mode II trailer for Metro Boomin, featuring Morgan Freeman. How did that come together?
I think Metro had seen the Eternal Atake trailer and the Kobe video. So I went to the studio to meet with him and we were talking about doing something for Savage Mode II. I was immediately excited about doing something for it because the first Savage Mode is so classic at this point, and the world-building was crazy. Metro's music in general is always cinematic and that album specifically had such a specific tone to it. It had a dark sound and I knew we'd be able to make something really crazy around it.
The first song Metro played me from Savage Mode II was "Many Men," and that beat is so insane. It's just so evil. So I immediately knew what he was going for with it, and then my job was to figure out how to encapsulate the feeling visually. The first idea I had was doing something at the house from the "X" music video, which was in the middle of the forest. I thought it'd be cool to build on that, but give it a snowy, wintery vibe, and then bring in a graveyard outside of it. Then the second idea I had was to do something with the blood pouring down the hallway, because I thought it would be a cool reference to The Shining.
I had an early version of the video, and it was cool, but it was missing a hook at the beginning. It was just missing some crazy, dynamic shit at the beginning. So I remember we did that whole 3D intro, with everything leading up to them in the studio, in the last week.
Then one day Metro texted me and he was like, "What if we had Morgan Freeman narrate the video?" And I was like, yeah, that'd be insane. But he didn't say anything and I didn't hear anything about it, so I thought it wasn't happening. Then literally three days before I finished the video, he sent me a version that had Morgan's voice on top of it, and it was totally insane. It literally took the video up a million percent. It's crazy because he had Morgan record that for the album—originally it was going to be on the album—but he edited it and put it on top of the video. And the way it fit was nuts. It was like he had written it for the video. Metro just has so many crazy ideas. Even putting Morgan on the album elevated the world-building so much. It made it feel like you were listening to a movie.
I had never had dialogue in any video I'd done before. I'd never done a voiceover or anything, and seeing how that elevated a video was crazy. I wouldn't have thought of that before. Since that video, I've leaned into dialogue in a narrative way. That was a turning point for me.
Is there a specific part you like the best about the Savage Mode II trailer?
The way Morgan's voice comes in at the beginning is just insane. As the camera is sliding down through the studio underground and he comes in, that shit is so hard.
After the Savage Mode II trailer, you worked with Metro again on the Heroes & Villains trailer. You've also worked with Uzi on two trailers now. It's clear that these artists put a lot of trust in you. How important for artists to trust you while working on these projects?
It's so important. Whenever you're working with someone for the first time, it's always a learning curve, figuring out how they work and what sort of things they like and don't like. It's been really cool with [Metro and Uzi], specifically. After those first two short films we did together, they really trusted me to bring the albums to life and they gave me a lot of creative freedom. I had a lot of really big ideas and they trusted me to do them. I'm not the best at describing my ideas sometimes, so it does take a lot of trust for somebody to know that I'm gonna do a good job. I'll describe things in very abstract and confusing ways because there are just so many ideas and so many moving pieces. But when I work with people multiple times, they start to understand my process, and I understand their process, and we can work in tandem.
How did the Heroes & Villains trailer come together?
At first, we were talking about just doing a trailer. We were just gonna do something similar to the Savage Mode II thing, but I felt like if we were gonna do another trailer, it had to be way crazier than the last one. It had to blow that video out of the water. It had to be something that people haven't seen before. So my first thought was that it should feel like more of a short film than just an album trailer. And the second idea I had was: if we heard Morgan Freeman in the last video, we should see him in this one. It would be crazy to actually have him in person in this video. I had no idea if that was even possible, but he was down for everything and he wanted to go big with it. I think he really believed in the concept, and we swung for the fences.
When we shot it, it was supposed to come out like a month later, so it was gonna be a really fast turnaround for this crazy ambitious idea. But then the album ended up getting pushed, so I had a lot more time. I just kept working on it, adding to it whenever I had time between projects, just to see how crazy I could make it. There are so many things that changed in that video. Literally the whole intro is entirely different from how it was written at the beginning. The pyramid went through, like, four different iterations. Even the whole outro scene completely changed. I usually have a tight deadline, but since there was so much time, I kept working on it. I also felt pressure because Morgan Freeman was in it, so I was like, "This can't just be another album trailer. It was to be the greatest thing ever."
It worked. That's probably my favorite video of yours. Do you have a favorite part?
I love the fire truck scene. The fire truck shooting fire is one of my favorite ideas I've had in a video. And that wasn't even supposed to be there at first. Originally, it was gonna be a big fuel truck, but we were shooting in Atlanta with LaKeith [Stanfield] and we couldn't get one. So the fire truck was the backup and it ended up being way better.
The most recent album trailer you put out is Lil Uzi Vert's Pink Tape movie. How did that come together?
Uzi called me one day and said that they wanted to do another trailer. He wanted to do something crazier than the Eternal Atake one. The one thing that he told me was, "I want you to watch this movie Sucker Punch." Specifically, there was this one fight scene in Sucker Punch that he wanted me to watch. He was like, "I wanna be getting the pink diamond back. I want to reclaim the pink diamond." I watched it and that scene is crazy, so I built it from there.
It was changing the whole time, like the whole Japan scene was super last-minute. He was out at Rolling Loud in Thailand, then he went to Tokyo right after, and he was like, "We should shoot something in Tokyo." That wasn't part of the video at all, so we had to figure out how that could work in the narrative. And it's crazy because that ended up being one of my favorite parts of the video. It added so much to the whole thing.
The whole anime intro was an unexpected addition, too, because we were gonna shoot that in live-action originally. It was at the end of the second day of the shoot and we'd just done all this stunt stuff, so everyone was really tired. We had one more shot to do, and Uzi was like, "What if we just did it in anime?" And I was like, "That's awesome. We can go home, and..." And the more I thought about it, it really made so much sense. It made it 100 times cooler than if it would have been live-action. That was a really good idea. Uzi has a lot of really good ideas.
What's it like to work with Uzi in general? How do you guys work together?
He’ll throw ideas at me. They’re always crazy, but sometimes they're a little bit vague, so I figure out what he’s thinking and how it connects. Sometimes at first I'm like, "Wait, how is this gonna work? How are we gonna do this?" But it always makes the video so much crazier. He’s such a great world-builder. He has such a specific vision for his albums and how they feel. It's almost like he enters a whole new character with each album. It makes it really fun to create a whole world around that, because there are so many good ideas to work with. There are so many motifs. The diamond for this album was such a cool element to work with. It's such a cool thing to build a story around, and it's something that everybody knows and recognizes.
I saw a clip of Uzi doing his own stunts on that shoot. Did that surprise you?
Yeah, he really went crazy with it. We didn't have any time to rehearse, so we got there that day and we just did what we could. He was going so crazy with all the action stuff, and I was blown away by his athleticism. That stuff is really hard. People will spend weeks rehearsing that stuff and practicing it. And with no rehearsal whatsoever, he was killing it. Everybody was shocked. We were all just like, "Holy shit." For a lot of the shots, we only needed to do one or two takes. It was some crazy shit, like, ducking under the sword and kicking the guy, but he came ready to go.
What's your favorite part of that video?
The anime part was so insane, because it was so different from anything I've done before. We worked with a studio in Tokyo called D’Art. When we were out there shooting a bunch of stuff, I was able to work with them in person, which was really cool. That transition from anime to live-action is one of my favorite things in any videos I've done.
You did Uzi's "Just Wanna Rock" video, too, which looked like a wild shoot. What was that experience like?
That was the most chaotic day ever. It all came together in the last few days before we shot it. I was finishing the Metro video at the time and didn't even know if I was gonna have time to do it. Then I was listening to the song with my friend Oliver, and it just clicked. I knew we'd be able to make something totally insane with it. Even just with the long "daaaaaamn," I was like, "No, this is different. This is too crazy." [Laughs]. The first thing I thought about was doing a huge infinite zoom on the “damn” for as long as it lasted.
Uzi just wanted to do a dance video, but I knew that we'd be able to figure out ways to make it crazy on the backend. It was evolving every single day. Even after we shot it, we were coming up with so many ideas. I came up with the car zooming thing the night before we shot it, super late. I was like, "We need the Rhino to be flying from outer space."
You guys were mobbed by fans in New York while shooting it. What was that energy like?
That’s the thing… It was all about the energy. It didn't need to be too planned out. The fact that it was so impromptu and run-and-gun is what made it awesome. Even with the crowd, we didn't have any actual cameras there because they were at another location. After that whole thing went down, I actually thought the video was ruined. I was like, "We didn't get any footage. Fuck." But the iPhone and VHS stuff is my favorite part of the video now, because it felt so raw and chaotic and gave it such a specific feel. It worked so well with the shakiness. It turned out better than I ever could have imagined.
Outside of your projects with artists, you've worked with big corporate entities like Nike, MTV, Call of Duty, and the Grammys. How do you navigate the challenge of holding onto your unique style, and working with a corporation that will put certain limitations on projects?
The creative is so important to me. I've never wanted to do a project where I couldn't do the ideas that I want to do. I want everything to be something that I'm proud of and want to share with people. I want to be able to watch it a million times and still like it. So the projects that I say yes to are primarily based on the trust that people have in me to do what I do, and I haven't done that many commercials for that reason. I want to do projects where people want me for what I actually do, for what I bring to the table. The Call of Duty: Warzone thing was really cool because they were super familiar with my stuff and gave me a lot of creative freedom, from the casting to the music to the editing. It didn't feel that different [from my own projects]. There were a lot more people involved, but as far as the creative, I was still able to have creative freedom and do what I always do.
You won an Emmy for your Kobe tribute video. How did that come together?
That was so surreal. Larry Jackson put that together. Dr. Dre had sent him that song he’d made after Kobe passed and Larry came to me and Jak [Bannon] to make something for the NBA All-Star game that year. We had like 10 days to make it and there were a lot of moving pieces. We went to the TNT headquarters in Atlanta and dug through infinite hours of Kobe footage. We had access to pretty much every clip of Kobe ever. It was totally overwhelming how much footage there was to go through, and then trying to get all the 3D stuff done. The pressure was insane. We were on calls with Dre every couple of days and he was giving notes. He was stressed, too. Everybody just knew how important it was and we wanted to do it justice. We literally didn't sleep for the last four days. I don't think I've ever been as delirious as I was at the end of that video. We submitted it like 12 minutes before it was live. And the Emmy thing was so unexpected. I didn't even know that type of video could win an Emmy.
Do you have any advice for a kid reading this who wants to make videos and achieve the type of success you have?
Start with whatever you have and whatever is accessible. It’s all about just starting and doing something. When I was starting, I had these big ideas for videos, but obviously didn't have the resources to execute them, so I watched YouTube tutorials to get as close as possible on my computer, by myself at home. You can literally learn anything.
It's crazy seeing how many kids are going crazy with 3D out of their bedrooms, making these insane 3D worlds. Four or five years ago, that wasn't as much of a thing. But now with Blender and Unreal and all these programs that are easier to use, kids are able to teach themselves pretty quickly how to make these crazy videos. That's how I started, and it's all about how much time you put in. It's hard, but it's possible. Specifically on the 3D side, there is a really cool community of 3D kids who don't have many resources, but they’re on their laptops, making these crazy videos.
It's quickly becoming very democratized. In the past, it was a very hard thing to get into, because you need to be in the right place and know the right people to be able to make anything. And now with iPhones and Blender and After Effects and everything, you can really do it yourself.
On Uzi's Pink Tape video, there were so many 3D kids that we knew on Instagram. We were able to bring on all these people to help with the 3D scenes and we were saying that it kind of felt like the “Donda of 3D kids.” Like, it was all the Instagram 3D kids that we knew, coming together to make this crazy video, which is so different from the typical big-budget video where it'll be a director who's not that involved and goes and hires this big VFX studio and dishes it off to them. It's this very formal pipeline. But I feel like we did it the opposite way. We were just making what we thought would be fun to make, and sometimes big-budget videos have a tendency to feel very corporate and diluted because there are so many people's ideas and they cancel each other out in a way.
Looking forward, how big do you want to take things? I know you have initiatives like your Hazard House production company, and you always want to level up on every project you do…
The thing is, I've never had any sort of road map. I've never been one of those people that was like, "All this music shit is just a stepping stone to doing movies." I've never felt that way. When I was doing tour videos, I just wanted to make the best tour videos. My final goal was to make the greatest tour video ever. I didn't think it would ever get past that.
But right now, the thing that I'm most excited about is narrative and pacing and exploring different tones. Moving forward, I want to do things that are more dynamic. Instead of my videos just being on 10 the whole time, with a bunch of crazy shit happening the whole time, I want to have more dialogue and slower moments. I want to learn how to make things that are longer, where you can watch it for an hour and a half or whatever.
So you want to make movies?
Some days, yeah. But that's just one thing. I don't want to make a movie, and then only make movies for the rest of my life. I want to make a movie, but then also make a documentary and keep making shorter-form videos and album covers and everything. I want to keep doing projects that are gonna push me to try new things. I don't want to just be the album trailer guy for the next 30 years. It's all about building on everything that I've done up to this point, but finding new ways to push everything in new directions. I'm much more concerned with quality than quantity, so I'm not interested in turning this into a fucking video factory and doing a million things. I want to continue being selective and make sure everything is awesome.
