Combining travelling with creativity: Joe Allam
In this Movidiam podcast, we talk to digital creative Joe Allam , an international content creator who combines his passion for travels with photography, filmmaking and design. Having worked with design and photography at global brands such as Disney, Apple and Burberry, Joe now works independently as a freelancer, sharing his experiences through video and blogging. Joe talks to us about how he manages to merge his passions, his production process and the value of being part of a community.
Hello there, and welcome to the Movidiam Podcast. Today, we’re speaking to Joe Allam who is a sort of international content creator. Joe, welcome to the podcast.
Hello, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
So Joe, we’re actually speaking to you across the globe, you’re in Australia. But I see you do a lot of travelling and that’s really central to the creative journey that you’re on.
Yes, very much so. I think travel has been a huge personal passion of mine, and mixing that in with creativity and a photography background and film future. It’s great to kind of merge those together and give me an excuse to travel as well as an excuse to make things. So, it kind of works professionally and personally.
How do you tie that in with the likes of the clients that you have, such as Disney, Apple, or Burberry and others? How do you keep up with them and find the work and manage those projects if you’re always on the move?
Difficult, that’s definitely one thing. I generally try and travel for extended periods of time rather than constantly always on the move. Generally, what will happen is I’ll set myself up somewhere for a few weeks or something, and then work on freelance things or I may have existing contracts that have followed me from the UK.
But yes it sort of works as in when it happens, really. There’s no set formula for maintaining things. It’s just kind of when I’m in a new area I’ll maybe catch up with some local people who may be interested in work or I may have some internet-based connections that would kind of filter through. So I guess that the beauty of doing things through the internet is you can really be anywhere and it doesn’t matter for the end user.
Sure, and what sort of projects are you working on at the moment? Are they branded pieces? Is it short form, long form or is it web videos or is it the video blogging?
I mainly kind of work through personal work so a lot of it is based on my YouTube channel and with that, I may partner with brands to showcase particular things that are relevant to the audience that I’ve built. Some recent work I’ve actually completed would be with Manfrotto.
They’ve wanted to advertise their new tripod ranges particularly for travel and filmmakers so it fit me perfectly as a type of product. It’s a tripod that’s so much more lightweight than any other video tripod, so it’s perfect for the traveler, especially independent travellers rather than a film crew or anything.
Sure.
By creating some sort of short form video of that I can then document how I’ve used that tripod and how I’ve kind of leveraged it to my, I guess, best use for the video. My audience, who were then also equally interested in the creative process and travel and other things, they kind of crossover in their interests and they’re able to see that through my experience.
So it’s very much a personal amount of work but kind of tying in brands and tying in personal travel. That’s kind of one thing that’s interesting with YouTube, you have complete control over what’s published.
So to a certain extent you’re actually building a bit of a brand narrative around your own personality as a travel filmmaker which these brands are sort of celebrating by effectively commissioning you to work and be creative alongside their product?
Yes, absolutely. That couldn’t have been worded any better really.
What I find, it’s very interesting isn’t it how because the nature of distribution now is that you as you say you have a following and a community. You’re effectively an ambassador for these brands because the nature of your work is using their technology, so very integrated.
Yes, I mean I have great passion in trying new things out and learning various new things. For me, I’ve had a background in photography for the past ten years but film has kind of tickled my interest the past couple of years. So it’s great to share what I’m learning and what I’m producing with an extra community and then get the feedback from them of how they’re inspired to go and do things.
That’s really what pushes it on. It’s kind of creating things that are getting better and better and of a higher production value, but still personal, it’s just an independent project, pretty much. Just having that drive of inspiring other people is the main thing that I take away from it.
And that is slightly self-fulfilling because once you get out there, you build a community. It’s much like when you’re building a business or trying to get a reputation as a filmmaker whether it’s with an online community or as a narrative filmmaker in Hollywood. You’ve got to get work out there, haven’t you, to start that feedback loop?
Definitely. It’s building up a portfolio, a network of people. It’s everything that’s consistently growing, and it’s exciting because it’s not really an industry that’s been around for too long; to be at YouTuber. YouTube itself is only 10 years old. Who knows where that will go or what will happen, but it’s nice to find out as it happens.
Exactly, so you’re sort of living on the edge of immediacy and the future and YouTube, as you said, is sort of a phenomenon. So how do you gage yourself across the spectrum of YouTubers. You work in a sort of industry, sort of travel, camera, hardware, equipment, sort of pirating, but there’s plenty of different genres out there. There’ are fashion YouTubers and make-up YouTubers and all kinds of different communities out there. How do you gage yourself, or do these communities link with each other?
It’s quite interesting, actually, if people were to see my viewing habits on YouTube it doesn’t always reflect the type of content that I’m producing. There are a lot of YouTubers who I would watch or I would be aware of through what my girlfriend watches or what other friends are watching, so I’m fully aware of a lot of beauty YouTubers and travel vloggers and tech YouTubers and kind of all sorts of things that kind of all come together.
The way that I fit in is I generally word it as sharing the creative travel lifestyle. So it’s all things creative whilst travelling. So there are people who are interested in the locations that I’m going to and there are other people who are interested in the gear and the creative techniques I’m using. Then one of those audiences inspires the interest in the other genre. So people then think “Actually maybe I could go travelling because I’ve seen a photographer that I like is travelling”, or other people think, “I want to get into photography because I’ve seen a traveller”. So it all crosses over.
It’s quite an interesting niche I guess, but I think the main thing is that people are subscribed to a personality rather than a genre, so I almost feel like I have a great control and a great connection with my audience that I could be quite open with anything and they’d be enjoying what they’re watching or they could gain something from it because they’re subscribed to the personality and the idea.
Sure, very interesting. How do you find managing and maintaining reader responses to comments and talking to the community? I’m presuming that’s part of the marketing of it and how you grow the network. That must become a pretty much full-time job alongside making the films.
Yes, it’s definitely tough. I mean, I guess the biggest sort of comparative that people could relate to would be kind of your email inbox. It’s a trend that just grows every day and if you’re not on top of it, it’s a downward spiral. It’s definitely a feature of my day that I have to dedicate to responding to things but I’ve also gone an extra step further and set up external communities so that people within my audience can help each other out.
This was kind of inspired from a live broadcast I did. I just generally noticed in the comments that people were very much supporting other people who had questions. If the comments were coming through too fast that I couldn’t read them, other people who were watching the broadcast were able to respond to it.
So from there, I created a simple community just based on Slack and people can essentially run it 24/7. They can join in different channels, talk about gear, talk about locations and generally help each other out. Because they’ve all got the common interest of coming through the same audience, it really relieves the stress from answering the same questions over and over again.
Very interesting, so you’ve got a sort of knowledge base there.
Yes.
And an active community of helpers who can inform the newer members.
Yes, I think it breaks it down, it kind of evens out the playing field so that I can be on the same level as the people watching it,
because essentially, we’re all just people trying to get along and make content. The fact that they’ve watched my video doesn’t put me any higher than them, so it’s great to kind of all be in a standard chat and essentially just make friends from it.
Yes, sure. Do you find that brands just reach out to you cold through the site because of the work or is it just the audience that they’re after?
No, so it’s kind of a mix of both really. Generally, the ones who I would abruptly turn away would be the ones who just see the numbers. There are plenty of people who will comment or they’ll message and you can tell that they haven’t done the research on what’s going on with the channel. They don’t really care about the audience. They just want to get to the numbers, and that will never work for me because the audience is everything to do with the content as much as what the content is.
So yes, there are people who will come through, I can’t really think of an example right now, but they want to get a particular product or they want to get a link in your description just like people are trying to add a link on your blog posts. It’s fairly easy to spot the shady ones.
That’s the way it works, isn’t it? I suppose that’s one of the challenges that you face as you build a big audience and some marketeers are less than understanding. I suppose it’s just a question of actually it’s new and they understand perhaps an older or a different way of working and they’ve got a lot of learning to do.
Yes absolutely. I think the biggest way to learn about it is if you’re involved and if you watch YouTube, then you can understand how it works. If you come at it from a broadcast background you say right, let’s go to YouTube but I don’t know the first thing. You need to research it, it definitely shows when people reach out and they haven’t.
Sure, sure, I mean broadcast is very famously about the first, the release of the numbers, isn’t it. So what’s on the horizon, Joe, what’s next?
So there’s quite a lot of travel coming up. I’m based in Australia until the middle of this year and then I’ll be returning back to the UK via a few other countries, almost doing the same route as when I got here in the first place.
Sure.
There are a few places that I’ll be heading back to and hopefully I’ll be working with some tourism boards along the way. I’m hoping to produce some higher quality, I guess short films or definitely short cinematic pieces in particular locations. That’s something that I’m pitching for at the moment and hopefully, some things will come of that. That’s quite exciting.
Good, good, well I’ll think we’ll have to keep you posted then. I know you’ve probably got a very busy time ahead of you, so I won’t keep you too much longer, but should we just talk briefly about the sort of technology of filmmaking. Based on in the hardware side of things, I know you’re obviously very familiar and know a lot about that, but also the software and what tools you use to collaborate or even range edits or visual effects and additions. Do you actually work with other people from time to time? Do you call people in to help support your operation?
So mostly, it’s kind of a one man run event. Occasionally, my girlfriend will step in with extra filming if there’s a particular video that I’m in front of camera, I guess hands free on that front. Generally, though, it is run very much independently, so I don’t have to worry too much about sharing data and whatever through networks or anything. I’m quite fortunate in that sense, but it’s also a hindrance because that means that I have to go through everything.
Sure.
I’m generally pretty strict on file management and I run every single video as a project. I have all of my files set up as projects and everything’s collated together so that I could if needs be send a project onto a different hard drive to someone else. It can literally be grabbed and sent. I don’t have to worry too much about relinking files and things because it’s all very well managed.
It’s all about discipline.
Yes, definitely. I think I’m quite forward looking when I set things up ,so I’ll generally set up a template for something and I’ll think about how it could potentially evolve into future ideas and I’ll set that up in a template before I’ve even started a project.
Sure.
That works quite well. The other tool that I use quite a lot, as I mentioned with the community, is Slack. I’ve used that with various other projects, if I’m in communication with producers or talent management who want to get you in front of brands. Then you can arrange your discussions through Slack channels rather than email threads.
Sure, it helps keep it all in one place, doesn’t it?
Yes definitely. It’s a lot easier to search as well.
I think that’s what we’ve found with some of the project management elements in Movidiam. There’s a channel and a feed and you can set sub groups and sub-teams so you can see here’s the producing team, here’s the camera unit, here’s the visual effects team. It’s not noise for the wrong people in the wrong channel if you know what I mean. Also, that comes into our revision tool and how you feedback. If you’ve got a tourism board that wants to kind of review and make comments on a film and you’ve already moved on, you can’t go and meet them. It’s the ability to annotate a 60-second film or a 10-minute film and say look, this time code here, change this or could you change the grade here. These are all features which I think help people actually get over the line quicker with projects.
Yes, definitely, the amount of times you get feedback that comes in in just a list and it’s from this second to that second.
An Excel sheet with time codes. We’ve all seen a lot of that over the years.
It’s a disaster.
Look, Joe, it’s been fantastic to talk. Thanks so much for your time. To the listeners out there on the Movidiam podcast and in the agency and brand land: Joe Allam, travelling content maker. I highly recommend visiting his various channels around the web and I look forward to catching up again soon. Joe, thanks so much for your time.
Thank you very much, its a pleasure.
Find Joe Allam online here:
Movidiam: Joe Allam
Website: https://joeallam.co.uk/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/joeallam
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joeallam
