Martin Joe

Interview 2011.

Who are you? Oh my god… Martin Joe, that’s me. That’s it, that’s all I have to say.

What do you do? Um… you should’ve prepared me for this!

I did! I said ‘I’m going to interview you’ and you said ‘ok’. Ah... So what do I do... I don’t know. People know me as the dude who takes videos, I do that. And that’s about it. Oh it just turned off.

Nah it didn’t, we’re safe. Ok well, yea. If I’m ever to be known for something, it’ll be taking videos, hopefully.

Cool. Yea that’s it. 

Who have you taken videos of so far? Um, well it all kind of started with skate videos, because I’m a skater. So yea I started with skate videos, and with the whole culture of skating there’s always the dude getting the videos, photos and videos, the coverage. And there wasn’t really one in Palmy, so when I got my camera I though I’ll do that. I started putting them on YouTube, didn’t expect anything to happen, but just like normal people started to watch them, not just skaters and then I don’t know, people started to get me to do other things. So I’ve done a couple for like other things, Massey and stuff. Now I’m trying to do music videos. Yea, yep.

Cool. Do you have any particular influences? On my videos?

Sure? Or life?

Either or, both… Well there’s a really cool video, it’s called ‘how bad do you want it’ you should YouTube that, and it’s about this motivational guy that’s like ‘how bad do you want it’ like, I don’t know, ‘if you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, that’s when you’ll be successful’. That’s probably the biggest inspiration of my whole life, just that one quote. So yea, look that up and be ready, oh just get ready to be really inspired aye. Yea. It’s the best video out.

Sweet. So do you want to take your video stuff further? Yea yea… um, I don’t know. My main passion was actually photography so I’d prefer to do that but when I got a camera that could do video I was like ‘oh I’ll chuck the video on as well’ and now everyone one like knows me for my videos, and not really my photos. So it didn’t really go as planned, but yea. I knew this would be awkward.

"I’m just the guy who chills out at the back and you know, just gets stuff done."

It’s not awkward! I’m having a good time. Ok, cool. I don’t like the lights on me, I’m just the guy who chills out at the back and you know, just gets stuff done. I’m not really the type to have the lights on me. Anyway, yea.

So what else do you get up to? Take photos, you probably deducted that already. And I skate; you’ve probably deducted that also. I like to make music. Oh yea, so that’s my next little thing. I’ll make videos of people playing songs; maybe I’ll do some videos for my own songs. Well I’ve done one already actually. No ones probably seen that, it’s got like one hundred views. 

That means a hundred people have seen it. Yea well, ninety of them are probably just myself looking back. Critiquing it. 

So you know with the show things you’re doing, what made you want to do those? My original big passion was music, probably before I’d even picked up a camera. It was kind of like, my first expression of myself. I’ve always still been in there, with the music scene so it was kind of natural I suppose. Just join two and two together. 

Cool, so where can people look at your stuff? Um, YouTube.com/xjapan yea, that’s my channel. It’s all just skate videos so far though. I hope you like them. Or look me up on Facebook, be my friend, that’d be good. 

Cool, that’s it! Yay, five minutes.

Yep. You should probably cut like eighty percent of that out.