Joel Haver

Joel Haver is a popular filmmaker and YouTuber.

He has more than 1.6 million subscribers on his YouTube channel by the name Joel Haver.

Introduction-

Joel Haver was born on 14 February 1996.

He hails from Belchertown, Massachusetts, United States.

His father, Jack Haver used to work as an artisanal cabinet maker and he also acted in a few of his YouTube videos.

Joel has a stepfather and a stepbrother, Ronny.

Love for filmmaking-

At 8, Joel started borrowing his father’s camcorder and started producing films in the backyard.

He was really interested in filmmaking and wanted to grow up to become a filmmaker.

Starting many YouTube channels-

As a kid, Joel was an avid watcher of the Smosh YouTube channel and back then, this was his biggest inspiration.

So, he created his first YouTube channel in 2006 and started publishing Pivot Animator animation videos onto it.

Then, Joel started a gaming YouTube channel and started publishing Garry’s Mod animation videos and a couple of his videos accrued tens of thousands views.

He also had a few other niche YouTube channels.

On 26 September 2010, Joel started another YouTube channel by the name Making Shorts (later renamed to Joel Haver) to upload his random short videos.

Education-

Joel did his schooling from Belchertown High School in Belchertown, Massachusetts.

In 2014, he joined Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York to study for a bachelor’s degree in Film, Cinema and Video Studies.

Joel graduated in 2018.

He did a few freelance production assistant (PA) gigs.

Regaining spontaneity & filming improvised films-

Before joining the film school, Joel used to take his father’s camera and used to spontaneously film videos.

After joining the film school, he got involved in production, casting, scriptwriting, lighting, organising crew for movies, etc. and he missed his old self of lifting a camera and spontaneously filming videos.

Also, Joel felt that working on these many things slowed down the filmmaking process and made the process predictable which he didn’t like.

So, he got rid of scripting, lighting, casting, etc. and started filming improvised films with his friends and his father and his father’s friends.

Joel doesn’t hire crew members for his films but takes the help of his friends.

Except him, none of the friends attended a film school.

As Joel hates lighting, he uses the natural light or the available light and uses a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema camera.

He does all the editing for his YouTube videos himself.

Banishing roles to save time-

While studying in the film school, Joel used to attend numerous sets and used to feel miserable for spending 14–18-hour days just getting a couple of scenes done.

He realised that the reason for this is the presence of crew who are allowed to do only specific roles and so, while filming his own videos, he didn’t assign any roles to his friends and started involving himself and his friends in all aspects of filmmaking and this saved him a ton of time.

Growing as a filmmaker-

From 2015 to 2016, Joel produced a short film every week and this greatly helped him in growing as a filmmaker.

Prior to this, he had the experience of using only handycams but working for a full year served him as a boot camp and taught him about all the aspects of filmmaking like storytelling, dialogue delivery, editing, operating microphones and other equipment, etc.

Struggling as a YouTuber-

After completing his film school, Joel decided to become a YouTuber.

While studying in film school, his professors only taught him about the conventional ways of living as a filmmaker but not as a YouTuber.

But as Joel knew the potential of YouTube and observed that most of the people prefer to watch films on YouTube rather than go to theatres, he decided to become a YouTuber.

He was confident that he could earn a living by publishing his films on YouTube and could be a solopreneur.

After becoming a YouTuber, for a couple of years, Joel struggled to earn an income from his YouTube channel.

But the silver lining was that his parents were very supportive to him and allowed him to live with them in their family apartment in Massachusetts and allowed him to fully focus on his YouTube channel.

Even though Joel wasn’t earning from YouTube, he kept grinding as he loved filmmaking and eventually, as his videos started getting good views, he started earning good income from his YouTube channel.

A successful YouTuber-

Now, Joel is a successful YouTuber.

As of August 2022, he has 1.67M subscribers on his Joel Haver YouTube channel.

His first video to succeed and get a hundred thousand views is titled- How women in old movies talk to some dude they just met.

This video was published on 20 July 2019 and got on the front page of /r/Videos of Reddit.

Joel earns through advertisements on his videos, selling merchandise and receiving donations through Patreon and PayPal.

He also has other YouTube channels like goodlongpee, Making Video Essays, I’m Going to be Famous, What’s Going On? With Avery and Joel and Joel Talks About Movies.

Joel uses Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop and Ebsynth for producing animation videos.

Some interesting facts about Joel Haver-

Jason Yevgeniy Gastrow of videogamedunkey is Joel’s favourite YouTuber.
He loves the works of John Cassavetes, Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. He also likes the Iranian meta-cinema and karaoke.
Brief Encounter is Joel’s most favourite movie and he likes the Adult Swim cable network.
Even though he likes watching movies and YouTube videos, he doesn’t watch television at all.
Joel likes the works of Ming-liang Tsai and he likes his I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone movie.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Joel Haver?

Share with me in the comment section below.