Picture this: adorner in a Spider-Man costume, Drake shoots a basketball into the cosmos. It orbits the earth twice before crashing back into the stratosphere, picking up speed until it swooshes into the net inside an empty stadium, bringing the hoop down in a raging inferno. Now, you can keep watching this in your head, or head to YouTube and watch Gibson Hazard’s music video for Drake’s “First Person Shooter.”

The five-minute film has racked up some 27 million views in its first month—on par for Hazard’s viral hits. There are songs off an album that, as he explains, live best in the medium they were recorded for. “And then there are others that are just very visual and lend themselves to being a music video,” Hazard says. “With ‘First Person Shooter,’ as soon as I heard it, I was like, ‘This needs a video, a crazy video.’” Hazard texted Drake right away with a couple of ideas, who was keen to maximize the momentum. Drake inquired if they might shoot it Monday. Hazard was on a flight to Toronto the next day.

In just six years, the 20-something has revolutionized the music video landscape, using stunning 3D renderings to create a distinct language of visual storytelling. Hazard’s trailer for the 2018 Aubrey & The Three Migos tour catapulted him into the public eye, using jaw-dropping post-production visual effects to create a scorpion set piece ripping apart the Hollywood sign. He’s gone on to collaborate on tour trailers—a new medium within the music video landscape—with the lion’s share of Billboard Charting acts, from The Weeknd, Future, Shawn Mendes, Lil Pump, Billie Eilish, Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky, and G-Eazy.

Hazard’s journey into the crux of the music video scene began with a curveball. When an injury ended his baseball ambitions in high school, he quickly picked up a camera and went all-in. “I always had a little bit of a one-track mind where I would have something that I wanted to get insanely good at,” he shares. Hazard combined his interest in photography and music, first in an unsuccessful teenage side hustle selling bootleg band posters on eBay. “I got a cease and desist,” he recalls and cracks a smile, “actually from my current manager.” After a real-life lesson on image rights, “My solution was to go to concerts and take photos myself and turn them into posters.”

The posters weren’t selling, but that didn’t matter. The Boston native dove head first into creating tour content for musicians, which at 18 years old, brought him to Los Angeles. Hazard began working with artists like 6lack on The Weeknd’s Starboy tour. He’d shoot a concert every night, edit the “mediocre footage” until 6 AM, and publish the video the next day. And the cycle would repeat, on and on, for the entire tour. “I had to be very creative to figure out ways to make it entertaining and to encapsulate the insane energy of these shows,” he explains. “When I was at the shows, I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is like, the craziest thing ever.’ But then when you have this, let’s say, not the best footage—that’s why I got so into VFX and editing. I could sort of compensate. My whole mission statement was that every single video had to be better than the previous one.”

Honing his skills night after night on tour pushed Hazard, leading him to cultivate a creative tool bag that he has continued to expand. Today, he’s an undeniable silversmith in the digital world, leaning into the porous creative boundaries between filmmaking, commercials, and music videos, developing projects like the short film for Metro Boomin’s second studio album (which featured Morgan Freeman and LaKeith Stanfield), a Kobe Bryant memorial with Dr. Dre, and a cameo filled commercial for Activision’s Call of Duty franchise.

Despite the astounding creative credentials he has amassed, Hazard is just getting started. With countless other projects, music videos, and commercials percolating, the young director is now setting his sights on his first feature. “That’s probably one of my biggest goals right now,” he reflects. “I don’t want to rush it. But I also don’t want to wait too long. But most importantly, I just want to make sure that when I do it, it’s the best version of the best thing it can be—that it builds on everything that I’ve been doing and learning and it feels like my movie.” 

Photographed by Alex Currie

Styled by David Gomez

Written by Isaac Dektor

Grooming: Emma Croft at Exclusive Artists Management using Chantecaille and Bumble & Bumble