Known for his otherworldly rotoscope animations and short form comedy videos, YouTuber and filmmaker Joel Haver embarked on a grand mission at the start of 2024: to make twelve feature length films in just twelve months. With his knowledge from previous low budget features and enough creative friends to fill a dozen improvised plots, the films have a sense of originality from each other and the wider system of film production. Here, he explains the project and creative ethos.
What made you decide to start the project of 12 films in 12 months?
I think the easy answer is that I had made 12 features at that point and I would do roughly one, maybe two a year. And doing weekly uploads on YouTube, which I did for five years, didn’t allow me to get more lost in a world and explore the emotionality that I love to see in film.
Looking back at the features I had made, I had such a deep pride for how emotional I was able to get with that more focus and time span. After years of doing goofy shorts, I realized that I was selling myself a little short – pun intended. I wanted to give myself a year to just fully dive into a project.
I think I’m an artist that is hell bent on showing people they can do it and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. And I don’t think taking a year off to make a movie or even two movies would have been a statement, you know? I knew if I pulled off 12 movies in 12 months, it would prove a lot of my philosophies about filmmaking being possible fast and cheap.
And did you have the idea for all the films at the start or after the previous one was finished?
Yeah, I’m not an ahead of time guy. I find if I have an idea, I need to make it when I have it. More than anything, I had ideas for people I would want to make movies with. Like my friend Eric, who I did the stop motion movie with, he’s such a cool artist. My friend Drew and Noah, they’re in Oregon.
So it was more like people and places sort of dictating what I was wanting to make at the start of the year. And the first movie is really the only idea I had.
If there’s one thing I splurged on for myself, it was just giving myself the opportunity to just visit friends for extended periods of time. I feel like that was the gift to myself from this project since I kind of knew going in I wouldn’t make any money off of these films. So I think I needed that joy of seeing people I missed and making stuff with them. And I think that was worth it for me.
So the films have varied settings, but they also have different emotional aspects or genres or formats. Was a large part of it trying to make 12 different films?
Yeah, I really wanted each film to be very different. If I’m on one thing too long, I need to shake it up. I’m just getting back into doing my animations and I’m finding they’re really fun to do again because I gave myself such a long break.
My goal for the year, more than anything, was to create 12 films that stand on their own. I didn’t want each film to be necessitated with this caveat, “just so you know, this was made as a 12 movies in 12 months”. I think all of them are more impressive knowing that, and each individual film has a separate artistic value, but I wanted to treat each as a standalone project that I’d make anyway. Not something that I was just doing out of obligation to some grander goal.
And do you have any favourites among them?
I think I like them all. I like them all for different reasons, but there are ones that I think are ambition wise the best. The stop motion one is sort of the crazy one. That one took three months of nonstop work.
The project was sort of fun in that way because the time is a fun limitation, and the second that I let one movie take three months, I was sort of adding new limitations to all the subsequent films.
But yeah, the stop motion one to me, story wise and thematically, is the best. I think that feels like as ambitious of a story as you could ever make in one room. But it doesn’t feel like a chamber piece, because we built this whole city. Eric and I are both these crazy artists and he has a very dark side that allowed the darkness to come out of me a little. And it’s a very pessimistic film about humanity. I’m not really a pessimist at all, I see the best in people, but the movie is very much about how we are used and abused by people who are just lonely and unloved.
How were the scripts written or is it more improvisational for some of them?
It’s all improvised. This is the crazy thing about me. I haven’t written a script in maybe 10 years. And I just simply fell in love with this process that was birthed from this inclination.
In college, we were encouraged to write scripts and rewrite scripts and polish scripts and then fund those scripts. That whole process drained so much spontaneity from filmmaking. I remembered making films with my friends growing up where we would just grab a camera and say the lines from behind the camera. I don’t think that process was just a stepping stone.
After college, opening myself back up to that and doing weekly shorts made me realize I was on the right track as a kid.
I do improv because it gives the film such spontaneity. The whole stories are improvised. It becomes this fun puzzle. Say we shoot a scene at the two thirds end of act two, but otherwise we only have scenes from act one. You now have this benchmark goal. It’s sort of like script writing with footage.
I did the movie “Hiccups” with my friends Patrick and Hannah, which is a rom-com, and both of them brought so much of themselves to those roles. If I recast any of them or the side characters it would be an entirely different movie. A lot of the actresses in that movie were Hannah’s friends and Patrick brought just as many people. If Hannah wasn’t in this movie, we wouldn’t have entire plot arcs, which is so interesting because it makes the people on your project such active contributors.
I still give notes. I’ll still say “play this a little withheld, you’re laying it on too thick.” But relinquishing a bit of control and allowing my friends to be active contributors is important to me.
How do you think the project will affect your future filmmaking and what kind of lessons have you learned from it?
I’ve had a thousand boot camps in my film career. Weekly short films was a huge boot camp to hone my craft, from cinematography to editing to acting. I became a much better performer through my weekly shorts. I probably have 100 or 200 shorts that are just me, and that gave me so much freedom to create without waiting on other people.
Making features over the years was another boot camp. I did a movie called “We Are Sasquatch” in 2016. It was set in my hometown with friends and family, cost about 200 bucks, and was all props and costumes. Feature length storytelling teaches you so much that shorts don’t.
Movies are my favourite things in the world. Watching them and making them. Doing 12 in 12 months was giving myself another boot camp.
I think the goals are a little less clear now that I’ve already made 12. I do need a break, but I would love to make another rom-com. I had so much fun doing that. Rom-coms are my guilty pleasure, and indulging in that with my friends was a delight. It furthered my confidence that I could pull ambitious ideas off quickly.
So much of art and performance is just confidence and exercising that confidence. I always preach quality by means of quantity. Musicians practice every single day. But filmmakers often view film as all or nothing.
My movies are a reaction to Hollywood. I hate the industry and how it’s structured as an exclusive club. Feature films are a beautiful thing that everyone should be making regardless of resources. I could have made a YouTube channel complaining about Hollywood, but instead I’m pursuing creativity, filling my life with it, and encouraging others to take that path instead.