Jake Burghart
Jake Burghart is a prolific editor, cinematographer and director known for his work at VICE media over the past 15 years. As one of the company’s first video hires during its transition from free magazine to behemoth news and entertainment network, Jake set the look and tone of the videos as both camera person and editor.
He got his first big break in the early 2000s shooting and editing the Against Me! documentary, "We're Never Going Home," then after joining Vice cut The Vice Guide to Travel DVD, True Norwegian Black Metal, The Vice Guide to Congo, and his own surfing shows High Shredability and School of Surf. He spent many years as Cinematographer for the Emmy Award-Winning show VICE on HBO. Our interview took place in Fall of 2020 after he’d recently completed directing, shooting and co-editing The Vice Guide to Iran and was working on a new mid-pandemic news show, Shelter in Place, with Shane Smith.
Currently based in LA with his wife and son, Jake’s lived a wild life, crossing the world many times over, encountering life-threatening situations in far-flung locations. I mean, he’s certainly my only friend who’s met both Obama and Kim Jong-Un! His insight as a director, producer, cinematographer and editor is invaluable because he sees the whole picture- which is part of why I’m really excited to have him on this episode.
The other part is that Jake also happens to be one of my oldest friends and collaborators. We first met ages ago in Florida, while our old hardcore bands were playing together; hit it off and have been tight ever since. We moved to NY around the same time where he hired me at VICE as an assistant editor. We’ve continued to work together over the years in many capacities, from co-directors to bandmates. He even filmed my doc, Coral City, for VICE in 2014.
Show Notes:
Against Me! are an American punk band originally from Gainesville, Florida, led by Laura Jane Grace, who make some of the catchiest anarchist anthems ever written.
VICE is an International Digital Media and Broadcasting brand known for its mix of counter cultural low-brow programming and hard-hitting news journalism. It was founded by Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, who are also on-camera personalities for many of the crazy stories. Yes, there’s is a third founder who won’t be named here. Vice’s original video programming was known as VBS, at which Jake was among the first editors and shooters. These days Vice has a television channel, Viceland (or Vice on TV) which includes shows like Vice News Tonight and Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, as well as the six seasons of Vice on HBO.
The Vice Guide to Travel was Vice and VBS’s first big foray into video and one that somewhat set up how the next few years would look for them: Gonzo journalists dispatched around the world looking for radioactive boars in Chernobyl or the last remaining Nazi’s hiding out in Argentina or exploring the favelas of Rio etc etc.
True Norwegian Black Metal is a fairly legendary black and white photo series of the most infamous Scandinavian Black Metal stars, photographed by Peter Beste. It was released as a book by Vice and became a 5-part doc for VBS.
Garbage Island was a multi-part series for VBS in which Jake, his now wife Meredith and journalist Thomas Morton sailed for a month or more to the middle of the Pacific to investigate a giant mass of trash and plastic covering the surface of the ocean.
Epicly Later’d is an early Vice show based on the eponymous skate centric photo blog by Patrick O’dell. It broke new ground for being a doc style series about skateboarding in a way that skate films hadn’t really approached before.
Vice Guide to Congo is the 2011 documentary, shot by Jake, and maybe edited too? He’s not sure…following Suroosh Alvi to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, investigating “Conflict Minerals” and dealing with murderous armed rebel groups and child soldiers.
