We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joe Kendrick a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Joe, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

I’m Joe Kendrick, a Filmmaker & Musician based in Nashville, Tennessee. As a filmmaker, I work as a videographer, editor, and direct my own projects, like original short films. As a musician, I compose and produce orchestral music and perform and record as a pianist in town, playing for all kinds of different bands, from pop to country to worship services.

Filmmaking and Music have both been lifelong passions.

I grew up taking piano lessons, and kept that up through High School as well. I studied Classical Music, but my dad also encouraged me to study some of the great jazz pianists like Oscar Peterson. My dad was a bass player, and so we would play jazz together, and we played all of the classic standards. In my lessons, I was just reading sheet music, asked to play Beethoven the way it was written, but with my dad, I was improvising. I could play anything I felt. Both settings taught me important things about music.
As I got older, I became interested in writing my own songs, in composing. I started learning how to produce digital music in a DAW, using FL Studio to create beats for my friends at school who wanted to rap, or using it to create soundtrack-style orchestral scores on my own. I realized that I had a knack for production, and that was my first inspiration to move to Nashville after High School.

Now, as a little kid, my first ambition was to become an actor. I was so excited as a ten year-old when I finally got to be in my first play. A local Shakespeare group was putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they needed to recast one of the parts, and so I was brought on late into the rehearsals to fill in for the part. I got a dramatic death scene, and I milked it as much as I could. It got a lot of laughs, and that really lit a fire under me to keep up an interest in dramatic storytelling.
As I got older, I became interested in writing my own stories, and I learned that with even just a little bit of equipment, I could start making short films. I figured that everything that interested me about the stage could be filmed.
In High School, I made several short films, and I really enjoyed telling my own stories, writing my own scripts. It was a chance to be creative in a way that used all of my skills. When making a film, I could become a Writer, a Director, an Actor, an Editor, a Composer, and a VFX Artist. I enjoyed wearing all of the hats, and it was a way of bringing together my love of music and my love of storytelling.

I have continued to make films, taking them to different film festivals across the Southeast, and playing the piano has taken me on gigs across the country. Some people advise me to specialize, and I think it is okay not to: to be an artist and just express what you have to express. Passion and inspiration are gifts. Those are things to be shared, not squandered.
Ultimately, I think to an old adage. Some people remind me that a “Jack of all trades is a master of none,” and I have to remind them that the original adage is a bit longer, as I understand it. To my memory, it is: “A Jack of all trades may be a master of none, but that is better than a master of one.”

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As a non-specialist, clients come to me for a variety of services. As a filmmaker, I provide videography for events and edit for different shorts and shows as well. As a musician, I produce original music, focusing on orchestral music, and am available for hire in the Nashville area as a pianist for live performances and studio recording.

I think all of these skills elevate the others, and that my multi-disciplinary perspective sets me apart from my competition.

For my video clients, I can deliver an edit with my own original music without further outsourcing. My background in storytelling also means that I’m not only editing with the technical limitations of a project in mind, but I have a perspective on how a video can help to best communicate its message.

As a pianist, I have a perspective as a producer of music on how a part can fit into a piece creatively and technically. I can also pull from a variety of genres. Having grown up playing classical and jazz music trickles down into the way I might solo over a country or pop song.

I think the themes I explore as a filmmaker sets my work apart, too. For my passion projects, it’s been rewarding to hone in on different subjects that I really care about. My recent short film “Through Fire & Brimstone” explores themes of Faith and Grief. It tells the story of a young preacher plagued with seemingly prophetic visions who shares his misguided revelations with a manipulated congregation. As a Christian, that’s something that’s personal to me. I also explored my faith in a musical short film I produced last year called “Christ in the Wilderness” that retold the story of the Temptations of Christ. If I believe Jesus was fully human and fully God, I wanted to explore that human side and show a man facing real struggles.

I’ve also told stories using science fiction, fantasy, and superheroes. Those are all genres that interest me that Hollywood doesn’t always do justice with, in my opinion. I think sometimes I’m motivated to create simply from seeing a niche that hasn’t been satisfyingly met yet, in my eyes. If I can create something that finally achieves something I think is missing in the zeitgeist, that’s fulfilling and meaningful to me.

I try really hard to make sure that my work is authentic. As an artist, I believe art is only worth making if it’s honest. Sometimes you have to make something to discover what you have to say, but I believe it’s only worth making with the intent to say something. Perhaps that’s paradoxical.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Every project I’ve ever done has had its own challenges, especially my filmmaking projects.

I graduated High School in 2018, and so that summer, I was planning to shoot my most ambitious short yet. It’s not much today, but at the time it seemed gargantuan – it felt like maybe the thing to take filmmaking from being just a hobby to something more. It was a 70 page script featuring a half-dozen or so main characters, and it was a musical. We filmed as much as we could that summer, but we were running out of time, and so we prioritized the most important scenes, and in the end, it became a 40 minute short film with about half of its music cut, but it got done. We just had to be realistic in the end about how much we could get done, and I was naive at first, but I learned. In the end, it got done.

The next year, in 2019, I was in production for a short film when the hard drive storing the project’s footage overheated and I lost all of its data. This meant that the source files for several major scenes – all of their footage, all of the on-set audio, everything – were all gone. Luckily, I had already completed rough cuts of the scenes as we were shooting them and had emailed those cuts out to the cast for reference. I was able to re-download the lost scenes from those emails, re-edit them to the best of my ability, reshoot one of the scenes, and finish shooting the rest of the short on schedule, and in the end, it got done. Since then, I have respected the practice of creating backups as soon as possible.

In 2020, I was preparing to shoot a sci-fi miniseries called “Star Boys” when March came and the Pandemic was upon us. We had worked for almost a year on writing these scripts, and were hoping to film that summer with a whole cast and crew. With the Pandemic in mind, we agreed that the series could still be produced with a Micro-Crew. Instead of our vision of an army on set, there would be only three of us, and we would all be playing multiple parts in the cast and crew. The scope of the series would shrink, but we still wanted to get it done. We had spent so much time on these scripts, and even the scripts needed to be rewritten in the wake of the Pandemic with location and casting restrictions in mind. We pivoted, and it was hard to do, but I was proud that we were still able to make the project we set out to make.

My newest live action short film, “Through Fire & Brimstone,” features a character that had to be recast within a week or two of shooting, and my current in-progress short film had a tight due date on its edit to get it in before the deadline for a film festival submission. There are always challenges like this on big projects.

Ultimately, I could make excuses and provide disclaimers for each of these projects about their challenges and how they weren’t made in perfect circumstances, but projects are rarely made in perfect circumstances. I think as artists, we have to get used to the fact that our work will be judged as it is. We can share these stories and provide context for a project’s hardships, but we have to make peace with the fact that challenges aren’t the exception for how a project will be seen – they’re the baseline. Ultimately, a successful artist is someone who can succeed despite their challenges, not without them, I believe.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There are so many things I find rewarding about the creative process.

Firstly, creative inspiration is inherently spiritual. When I sit at my piano and search for new melodies as I compose new music, that’s a form of prayer, and through inspiration, those prayers are answered. That process of improvising on a piano, especially, feels like confronting the divine. I really don’t feel like my compositions are my own – rather, they feel like gifts.

Secondarily, to me, creativity is incredibly freeing. It can be painful to hold a project inside for too long. You want other people to understand what you have to express, recognize your talent, and engage with your ideas. To deny that for any reason is hard, and so having an outlet is incredibly important.
I remember how I felt as a teenager before I started making short films or officially distributing my music. I wanted to show everyone what I believed my potential was but I didn’t have a platform to. At first, I think I wanted someone else to come along where we could merge our talents in order to finish projects, where it was okay if my talents were only supplemental, but that never happened. I had to find it within myself to finish projects on my own, to be able to express myself on my own terms. If I wanted to be a filmmaker, I needed to be able to carry a project from start to finish. If I wanted to compose music, I couldn’t wait for someone else to ask for it. I just had to make it.

I don’t say this to deny the impact of my collaborators. Throughout my creative journey, I’ve felt incredibly lucky to work with some very talented people, and I’m thankful for that. I just recognize as well that it’s up to me to make sure my own projects are finished.
I find it very rewarding to collaborate. If I know how meaningful it is for me to have an outlet to express myself, I hope that I have made projects that offer that same meaning for the people who work with me.

Thank you for giving me the chance to discuss all of this and to reflect on my story. If any new artist out there is looking for a push to get into finally making their own projects, whether you’re a musician, or storyteller, or actor, or anything: I hope you can feel encouraged by my story! Sharing art is a beautiful thing, and through it, we can know better each other, ourselves, and something bigger than ourselves. That’s pretty incredible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://joekendrick.weebly.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joek.media/
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@cupajoe99
• Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/71aLR8NktRgzPlLqLPIGnq?si=5cQmG7ANQg6w7km42xKXYw

Image Credits

Sierra Scott
Talin Goebel
Eli Silva
Ann Kathleen Williams