Joel Knoernschild
“Although my dad was very much a ‘60s surf-rat’, my parents are also incredibly savvy business people. My folks were working with the Billabong Surf brand here in the US, so I was exposed to a real mix of different cultures as a kid.”
“We did a lot of travel to places like Australia and Japan, and saw a lot of the best surf destinations the world has. So my childhood was pretty involved in the surf scene.”
“While I was still at school, I would intern mostly summers in the art department creating narratives for the brand, or creating content for the web. So I really grew up in a world full of branded content. Growing up like that, you soon learn the fine line between engaging content and over branding something; which can be a difficult thing to master!”
“I guess I learnt the whole branding and marking side to fashion from the grass roots, and all at a very young age. When it came time for me to go to college, it was a natural that I would do design combined with business.”
“Even though I had been working in fashion and design for years before college, I figured I could still learn a ton more. I don’t think anything creatively comes out of creating a safe space for yourself. Outside opposing forces need to be present in your life, to make something good.”
“About this time, Billabong transitioned across to a new brand called Hurley. Having just finished college, I was able to be part of the whole launch of the Hurley brand. It was all second nature to me, working on their advertising, t-shirt designs, web content and building the entire web presence for the brand.”
“I was about 22 years at the time, when I was asked to go with the Hurley skateboard team to Japan for two months. It was a big break for me, as I was asked to help to co-direct a a new video for the brand.”
“At this time, a friend of mine and I wrote this idea for a reality TV pilot. It was pretty much on a whim of ours. The idea was all about what you could do if you had a better surfboard or snowboard. It was very much about putting your money where your mouth is.”
“Now a good friend of our was working at MTV2 in programing and was looking for some alternative ideas. And that’s pretty much how we came to fall into the reality TV business.”
“We produced, shot and edited the whole thing for MTV2. And although the pilot was aired worldwide, it sadly never really made it. But that experience then led me to work on another reality TV series with Rynn Dunn from ‘Jackass’, called ‘Homewrecker’."
“MTV had us setup in their corporate offices with a p.a and all that kind of thing, writing pranks for the series. Everything we came up with had to go through the legal department, so most of our time was spent having to act these crazy pranks out to their lawyers. Talk about a weird time in my life!”
“I remember the first pilot we did, one of our senior network execs, said it was so shit that he would throw the tape under his car and run it over repeatedly! When his boss in New York said that she loved it, he and all of the other network execs suddenly thought it was the greatest thing ever. As I said, it was a really weird world to be caught up in when you are just 23 years old.”
“While all of this was going on, I was still shooting and directing a lot of music videos just to do something creative. After ten episodes on ‘Homewrecker’, I kind of knew that reality TV was definitely not for me in the longterm.”
“After that, I went back to my roots starting a new fashion label with some partners in Japan called KZO. The idea for the brand was very much a mix of fashion and video content, which certainly helped us getting picked up by the major retailers here in the US.”
“Although, fashion has always been a core experience of mine, my real love has been filmmaking. Ever since I was a kid skateboarding and shooting my friends on an early 90’s camcorder, I have felt that filmmaking is really what I want to be doing.”
“It was at this time, my friend Chris Schieffelin had this idea of a varmint kid being thrown in a dumpster. With that one image in our heads, we then spent the next 18 months making it into a short film.”
“The team we had on this project, had a lot of of commercials experience, so it was something special to work on something we all owned creatively. Everyone, really loved working on this film and cared about what we were creating here. Once you have worked in a collaboration like that, you always want more.”
“In the end, our comedy ‘Varmint’ was really a template for how we can all work together as a creative collaboration. The whole experience really became our approach to filmmaking and how we can handle bigger film projects in the future.”
“One the back of the success of this film, Chris and I then wrote a feature comedy script for ‘Varmint’. We then wrote another script called ‘Hero One,’ which we are currently trying to get off the ground. Then my friend Ramsey and I worked on another script for a slapstick surf comedy called ‘Lotus Point’, which we are currently pitching.”
“While all of this has been going on, I have been doing a lot of EPK and documentary work for a Fox Networks’ new station, FX. It’s a spin-off Ryan Murphy’s ‘American Horror Story’ called American Crime Story. The cast on this film is massive, with so many great Hollywood actors.”
“I have been shooting all of the behind the scenes stuff and doing the interviews with the cast and crew. At the same time, I have been working on a couple of documentaries for the network as well; so it has been a super busy time for me.”
“My team and I are still doing a lot of branded content for a number of surf brands and some corporates, like the car brand MINI. However, our long term goal is to do more and more longform work, with our final aim being a feature film. At the moment we are just happy to take our time refining our film craft.”
“Although I could probably be doing more fashion lines and branded content, I just love the creative freedom that comes from writing and directing your own projects. The thing I love above all else in life, is just telling a good quirky story!”