Filmmaking is Problem-Solving
Filmmaking is Problem-Solving
Joshua Reed ’15
BY JESSICA HALSTEAD
Name a creative pursuit, and there’s a chance Joshua Reed ’15 does it pretty consistently. He’s a writer, director, editor, videographer, and photographer. He’s the creative force behind a few short films, one Vitamin Water commercial, a handful of music videos, and a feature documentary that’s still in development. All that, and he’s still figuring out exactly what he wants to do in the industry.
“The goal right now is to make, write, and direct films full time,” he says. “But I think I also like doing commercials.” So there’s another option. Since finishing up a graduate program at New York University last October, Joshua has been freelancing, peddling his talents where they’re needed. Sometimes, that’s at an event that hires him as a videographer. Sometimes, he’s editing for someone else’s film. “It just depends on the project and who calls,” he says.
Joshua doesn’t plan to freelance forever—even though he enjoys the flexibility, the “up and down nature” can make it unpredictable. So between gigs, he tries to keep a day-to-day routine of waking up early and spending time in NYU’s recording and production facilities, which he still has access to. He spends time connecting with other people in the industry, working out at the gym, and casting a wide net when it comes to job applications, including those in arts education. Soon, he’ll begin a part-time job teaching kids how to do animation. He’s also beginning to edit content for social media channels on the side. These pursuits are enough to keep creativity flowing, while still giving him the flexibility to work on his own projects.
“THE GIFT”
It’s one of those projects—a full-length documentary called “The Gift”—that Joshua hopes to get in front of many, many people soon. The film tells the story of Robert Smith, a Black billionaire philanthropist who spoke at Morehouse College’s commencement in 2019. (Joshua, not coincidentally, was wearing his cap and gown in the audience.) At the end of the ceremony, Smith made a commitment to pay off the student loan debt of that newly-graduated class. And Smith has made good on that promise.
The documentary—for which Joshua is credited as the writer, director, and producer—follows some of the students who received that debt relief, and explores how it changed their lives. But it also takes a hard look at the student debt crisis in America and how it got this bad, using Morehouse as something of a case study. Joshua notes that Morehouse is a very specific institution, as an all-male, historically Black college. “But the implications of having your student loan debt cleared, I mean, that speaks to everybody across this country, across age ranges, race, and religion,” he says.
Joshua (right) working on “The Gift.”
Joshua came up with the idea for “The Gift” about a year ago, around the time his five-year class reunion at Morehouse was coming up. “I was like, is anyone doing any follow-up on this?” he remembers. At the time it was announced, Smith’s gift was a big deal, making national news headlines. Despite student debt relief and the failures by Congress to bring widespread debt relief to students who needed it being a fairly consistent news item, Joshua says Smith’s gift and how it impacted Morehouse students has faded a bit into the background. “I sort of did wake up one day and say, hey, there needs to be a movie about this,” he says, laughing.
Documentaries aren’t typical for Joshua, who says he is usually drawn to narrative fiction films. “I don’t normally like to directly make movies about my life,” he says. “I need to put some distance between myself and the story.” But his documentary story took on a life of its own. He hopes when it’s finished, he can shop it around to buyers—with intention. It’s a story that he wants a lot of people to see and potentially be impacted by. So going straight to a platform like, say, Netflix—stuffed with its ever-changing plethora of content—may not be his first move. “We all watch things on Netflix, and it’s just a sea of movies and TV,” he says. “So with this, I’m going to be very intentional with the distribution.” That means looking first to film festivals, and then facilitating additional screenings for folks who may not frequent them. In short, he wants to bring the film to the people, rather than people to the film. He hopes the documentary will be complete in 2025.
SHORT FILMS
Joshua already has several short films to his credit, including two created during his time at NYU, along with the kind of industry experience that builds a lasting career. Before the pandemic hit, Joshua had the script ready to go for “My Friend Lucius,” about a young man who argues with the personification of his depression and anxiety. When lockdown came about, plans to film it were shelved. But when Joshua took a year off from NYU during the height of COVID—with plans to return when in-person classes could resume—he realized he finally had the time to make the film. “I was like, maybe I could still do this,” he remembers. “If we can do it safely, I thought it could be done.” With a modest amount of prize money from a contest he’d won, plus some help from a GoFundMe, Joshua got to work. But first, he acknowledged his parameters. “I figured we had enough to do it within three days, with a tiny crew,” he said. “And we did it.”
Joshua (center) on the set of “MIC DROP.”
The shoot wasn’t without its challenges. It was scheduled to take place the weekend of January 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Just days earlier, an angry mob had stormed the U.S. Capitol, leaving the city—and country—in disarray. On that day, Joshua had been talking with his producer, discussing the prices of equipment they could get for the shoot that weekend. Joshua had decided to cancel his initial rental of a camera, thinking he could get another, less expensive camera somewhere else. “I was on the phone with my producer, and he said, ‘Are you watching TV right now?’” Joshua remembers. “He told me to go step in front of a TV.” When he saw the news about the insurrection, Joshua says his first instinct was, “Wow, that’s crazy. And then my second instinct was like, no, I need to see if I can get that camera rental back.”
The shoot went on, despite being blocks away from the Capitol building. “I’m proud of that movie, because of the weird circumstances I shot it under,” Joshua says. He can sum up how the film got made in one sentence: “Filmmaking is problem-solving.”
The problem-solving paid off. “My Friend Lucius,” with Joshua as both writer and director, was an official short film selection of the Morehouse College Human Rights Festival, the Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival, and the Lakefront Film Festival.
“Any time I’m able to solve a good problem on set, about how I can make this happen, I feel proud about it.”
When Joshua returned to NYU after most pandemic restrictions were lifted, he made a second short film, “MIC DROP.” Joshua says this film, which had a larger cast and crew than “My Friend Lucius,” was “a sort of step up in the scale” than his previous endeavor. It told the story of an aspiring rapper who has to come to terms with his jealousy of his ex-girlfriend, herself on her way to pop stardom. “I think I was trying to grapple with being in grad school, a very competitive environment,” Joshua says about the origin of the idea. Unlike “The Gift,” the thread between Joshua’s short films and his own life isn’t exceedingly clear. Instead, “I take things from my life and I put them in different contexts,” he says. “’MIC DROP’ went on to a handful of festivals, but it is Joshua’s process of bringing the film to life that he is most proud of. “Any time I’m able to solve a good problem on set, about how I can make this happen, I feel proud about it,” he says.
PEOPLE CAN DO THIS FOR A LIVING
Pride in his work—and his problem-solving ability—were both honed in his early years. “I was always watching TV,” Joshua says of his childhood. “PBS Kids” and “Veggie Tales” were particular favorites. His parents would watch Joshua watching TV and worry he was watching too much. “They encouraged me to write and do other things,” he says. “So I do comics. I do little short stories. I doodle a lot.”
By the time Joshua came to St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes in sixth grade, he knew he had a creative streak, but wasn’t sure where it belonged. “The arts were a big part of my identity and what I liked to do, and what I got enjoyment from,” Joshua said. “But during that time I still thought my future was in the sciences.” Joshua got the same enjoyment from being in a lab, “where you have test tubes and you’re doing experiments,” as he did from writing and making art. In other words, he was an exceptionally well-rounded middle schooler.
Joshua (center) on the set of “MIC DROP.”
As middle school ended and Joshua transitioned to the Upper School, he began to hone in more on his creative pursuits. High school brought more in-depth writing courses, plus an unforgettable in-class screening of something Joshua had never seen before—“The Colbert Report.” “I thought, ‘Whoa! You can make a show that’s very satirical, and makes fun of politics?’” he remembers. “That late-night political comedy thing was very interesting to me.” A high school friend also introduced Joshua to “The Boondocks,” which naturally spurred a love for animation. He remembers a film assignment in Mr. Joe Wenger’s English class that started his wheels turning. “I think for me it began to really crystalize that people can have successful careers in this,” he says. “It’s not something they do for fun. It’s their lives.”
Outside of Joshua’s classrooms, the world was changing. In 2014, Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. “Everyone was thinking about politics, and what we do as a nation,” Joshua says. He realized then that you could analyze society, scrutinize it, and ask questions about it, but all through a creative lens. “That’s when I thought, ‘Okay, I want to do this.’ I didn’t know how. But I just knew, this is a world that I wanted to be in.”
Joshua took that dream with him to Morehouse in 2015, where he pursued a degree in the Cinema, Television, and Emerging Media program. While at Morehouse, he took advantage of a domestic exchange program that allowed him to spend time during his junior year at New York University. The school would reprise its role after Joshua graduated from Morehouse, too. He got his master’s in cinematography and film/video production from NYU.
Joshua says what he learned at SSSAS has had a significant impact on his work and career. “I would say that my writing regimen started there,” he says. “My teachers really pushed me to see writing as a practice that you have to dedicate time to.” In short, the school taught him how to write, and write well.
Filmmaking may be problem-solving—with the ability to be broken down into digestible pairs of problems and solutions—but it could also, arguably, be about being where you’re meant to be at the perfect time. Like the time Joshua was walking down a hallway at NYU wearing a Morehouse sweatshirt, when a Morehouse alum took notice and stopped him. It was none other than Spike Lee. Lee eventually offered Joshua a spot on the set of the second season of “She’s Gotta Have It,” the series based on Lee’s original 1986 breakout film. “So I got my first big production experience from Spike Lee directly,” Joshua says. “Just ran into him in the hallway.” That’s the type of serendipity you can usually only find in Hollywood scripts.