Jake Williams

How it started.

Jake began on YouTube with gaming videos. In his Defunctland interview, he recalled finding Adam the Woo’s video about Disney’s abandoned River Country water park. His own Something Neat: River Country video grew from that curiosity, and the idea behind Abandoned was to gather information scattered around the internet into one place.

Finding his audience.

Documentary making began as a high-school hobby. By his 2018 Adventures in Design interview, Jake had more than 400,000 subscribers and had turned that hobby into his career. Abandoned, Bankrupt and Cancelled became the recurring series through which he explored forgotten places and failed ventures.

Taking it to film.

Closed for Storm tells the story of Six Flags New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Jake directed the documentary, which screened at the New Orleans Film Festival in November 2020 before its wider 2021 release. He later served as an executive producer on Joshua Bailey’s Stolen Kingdom.