We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joel Austin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joel below.

Joel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I’m actually in a seemingly ever-shrinking group of people who think it’s better that I have have a regular job in addition to my creative work. Now, don’t get me wrong, I too fantasize about the day when I can lay all my annoying obligations down and pursue the creative life fully. But were that day to actually arrive, I’m not sure I’d be able to take it. Here’s why.

Something I’m keenly aware of is that I draw a lot of inspiration when I’m not trying to. Life just has a way of filling the artistic well if you’re trying to be present, at least some of the time. Paying attention to life is an especially invaluable asset for an actor (read some Stella Adler if you want a wiser person than me to substantiate that claim). And, being essentially forced to adhere to the standards and practices of an entirely different industry every day by way of a job is a great way to ensure that the font of inspiration never ceases, especially if it’s a public-facing position.

For this reason and others, the 9-5 world and the creative world are intertwined in my mind. I’ve actually made a concerted effort in recent years to more closely unify them so that many of the skills learned in one are applied to the other. Establishing similar processes in my respective fields frees my mind to engage with the work itself, not the methods by which to achieve it.

In this way, I’ve essentially been paid to concretize the “regular job” skills of time management, workflows, task breakdowns, occupational social dynamics, and many more and then apply those exact skills to my creative work. This perhaps paradoxically makes me a more available artist because I have a good grasp on how to do pretty much anything I’d want to do. And I have my day job to thank for that.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Joel Austin and here’s a somewhat comprehensive list of the things I currently do:

• I am an actor in Los Angeles, CA. I do about 3-5 projects per month on average.
• I am an instructor at UCLA Ext. where I teach post-production and motion graphics, typically one class per semester.
• I am a content creator and contributor to several online brands, most presently the tech brands Altium and Octopart. For these brands, I do some combination of writing, directing, producing, starring in, editing, and releasing ten videos per week. In this capacity, I also steer the video content of both brands and manage a small team of editors who help get things over the finish line (ten videos per week is far too much for one man haha).
• I am a writer-director and am currently in the late stages of preparing to co-pitch a vampire horror series titled “15 to Sunrise.”

These may seem like disparate enterprises, but to me, they’re really not. I’ve learned a ton about screenwriting from releasing so much video content, for example. I’ve learned a ton about directing actors from teaching editors. Everything in my life serves something and for that I am incredibly grateful.

I got into this world as a pre-teen, when three pivotal introductions occurred around the same time.

The first was that I got access to a VHS camcorder and editing deck at my high school. My earliest films with friends came out of this period, as well as my love for editing.

The second was that I began acting in school plays. This morphed into acting outside of school and even competing. One such competition essentially opened the door for me to pursue my undergraduate degree, which was a future I hadn’t entertained as possible prior to its arrival.

And the third was that I began to play around with the internet and became obsessed with its possibilities (the early oughts were a very different time for the internet).

These three early obsessions would each go on to flower in their own ways and become foundational to the man I would ultimately become. While web content, performance, and editing seem like obvious bedfellows these days, I promise you it wasn’t always so. There were a good many years in which I was the only one of my friends equally engaged in all three of these pursuits.

Now I am very much not alone in this regard, much to my amazement and gratitude. It was only ever instinct that guided my deliberations on this front and I have found it enormously gratifying to have that instinct rewarded in recent years.

I think what sets me apart from others is that I tend to view things from the perspective of pursuing the highest order goal.

In web content and editing, for example, I’m always asking myself what the essential component is of the piece we’re making. What are we trying to communicate and to whom? Everything in my content is oriented around the answers to those questions and, therefor, nothing is purposeless.

In performance, I seek to deeply understand my character’s relationship to the story as a whole. I want to know precisely how my character influences the movement of the narrative and do my best to situate myself appropriately as dictated by the script, not my own preferences or artistic inclinations. I have lived and worked with actors in the southeast, New York City, the Pacific Northwest, and Los Angeles and trust me when I tell you that the lack of awareness of a character’s proper positioning within the narrative is the single most common detriment I’ve seen among my fellow performers. So, in response, I do my best to act with purpose and be guided by the script above all else.

Performing with this orientation in mind also allows me to narrow and deepen my focus, as opposed to an approach less grounded in the script which tends to be broad, but shallow. Personally, I enjoy the former far more than the latter even if it is much, much more difficult.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I can only speak to this from the perspective of film-making and web content.

In both ecosystems, large and moneyed interests have consolidated power and implemented their own distribution networks, which preference certain kinds of media over others. And in both cases, the reasoning behind this consolidation is essentially the same: Advertising.

In film, it’s far easier to engage an audience member if they already know how the film they haven’t seen yet will play out. It’s an advertisers job, therefor, to support films that don’t deviate from the cinematic forest’s most well-trodden pathways. This leads to a kind of blockbuster monoculture in which no one is very surprised or entertained by the latest cinematic entry in pop culture, but they are validated, either in their support or rejection of the same piece of media. It’s not cool to hate Joker 2 or whatever. It’s cool to work against the thinking that would tend you toward being interested in it in the first place. But I digress.

A similar process is underway in web content. The age of categorization is over and now, large language models herald a new dawn in which no one is declared the creator of anything and, in the place of artistic ownership, what is now valuable are the models themselves. And why? Advertising. In the early days of YouTube there were no ads and, therefor, little money for the platform. Google bought it, suddenly there’s ads, money, and new rules. Do you really think it will be that long before ads show up in your GPT prompts?

So, to me, what society can do to influence the most good here is reject the ad model entirely in favor of a state-supported art ecosystem. Such systems disincentivize lowest-common-denominator creativity and, crucially, radically alter the entire concept of celebrity, which is something that really needs to go in my opinion.

But yes, this is a socialist thing. It’s also better for everyone – so I guess get over it?

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I’m the sort of person who tends to play my cards close-to-the-chest. I aspire to walk softly and carry big sticks. I don’t necessarily know if it’s better to be that way, but it does suit my personality.

There are a lot of people who know me, but almost none who know me well. I take no pride in that, it’s just the truth. People tend to talk more than listen. And the vast majority of people in my life speak much about themselves and ask little about me.

This reality might tend one toward bitterness or an over-exertion of the ego into realms in which it really shouldn’t tread. And I’ve certainly dabble with both of these corrections in my time, as well as other, more destructive ones. But I’ve leaned toward a more generative way in my 30’s and it’s proved better for me so far.

These days, I get a lot of private joy out of the games I play with and for myself. I have pages and pages of scrawled notes on characters no one will ever see. I have entire relationships and mental mansions hidden from the world forever. Spaces in which I dwell the most purely. Where all daemons present are reciprocal, decent, and beautiful. These are among my most cherished relationships.

And the only time these private pleasures find their way into the material world is by way of artistry. When I’m performing or writing, these little tuplas are not only allowed to emerge, they’re encouraged. In this way, I am the most myself when performing a character.

I feel much kinship with a theater troupe of old in this regard. Much of what I do creatively is bred in the darkened recesses of my apartment’s office – with eyes closed and in the company of the assembled entities who I birthed and who birthed me in return. We snicker in the dark, dreaming our silly dreams, then reveal the fruits of our wanderings to any who might care to come watch. And, while one certainly hopes that the audience gets something out of their engagement, no one will ever get as much as my cohorts and I do.

This, to me, is a sacred bond. And it is the thing that keeps me coming back time and time again. I love it dearly and it is my life’s purpose to pursue it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://joel-austin.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whyisjoelaustin/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/proctors.hedge.5
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelhiggins6/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@joel_austin
• Other: IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1792430/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
  Acting Reel: https://youtu.be/BfFu0z4ietA
  Acting Resume: https://resumes.actorsaccess.com/joelaustin
  Current UCLA Ext. Classes: https://www.uclaextension.edu/instructors/joel-austin-higgins
  Octopart YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Octopart
  Sample Octopart Video: https://youtu.be/h4hOvkj7g3w
  Altium Academy YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AltiumAcademy
  Sample Altium Academy Video: https://youtu.be/DDr6_mRRE6Q
  Other Web Content Brand Sample Video: https://youtu.be/kYGZES5tR60

Image Credits

Photographer Sawyer Alcázar-Hagen ©2024