Joel Makar, —

The kind of producer who plans every detail of a shoot day and then gets genuinely excited when something goes off-script, Joel Makar has been making things on camera since his school teacher told his class they could do their project as video instead of an essays. He blocked out a scene, rolled for the first time, and never really looked back.

Joel grew up in Regina, and studied film production at the University of Regina. After graduating, he moved to Fort St. John, BC, where he spent a year and a half working with a production company on projects for BC Hydro and many others across the oil and gas sector. That was the crash course: learning to shoot, edit, and deliver on real budgets for real clients. He came back to Saskatchewan and joined Tandem X Visuals. Four and a half years of producing followed, spanning hundreds of projects that helped companies across Saskatchewan and beyond tell their stories, including work for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, CAE, Canadian Western Agribition and more.

As Senior Producer with Barbershop, Joel owns pre-production and project oversight. He builds the roadmap: planning, creative direction, client communication, and making sure every crew member has what they need to do their job well. The part people don’t see is just how much thought goes into a single shoot day before anyone picks up a camera. His approach to the work is simple: if the producer does the job right, everyone else can do theirs.

When he’s not on set, Joel is either playing Ultimate Frisbee, at the beach with friends in summer, or trying to learn how to garden.