Stuck in the Desert

When a bank robbery gets botched, The Gravities have no choice but to destroy the money, or risk being killed. It's a cinematic, high-octane premise for JWMedia's first official music video — and it almost didn't happen the way anyone planned.

In July 2025, Jacob Willett set out to make filmmaking his focus — juggled alongside a full course load at SDSU — with no guarantee it would work out. A few weeks later, at the Black Star Polo Bene-Fest in mid-August, he reconnected with Jacob Clement, a childhood friend from elementary school who now runs No Corners Cut Productions alongside him and was there that day too, shooting BTS and photography for the bands. Together, the two Jacobs met The Gravities and the other San Diego Music Award-winning artists they still work with today. Founded by Sante Prince, Black Star Polo brings swimming and water polo to African and African-American communities that don't always have access to the pool — a cause that hit home for Jacob, who played water polo in high school.

Not long after, he went out to film a rehearsal with The Gravities for the Black Star Polo documentary he was producing. That's the first time he heard "Stuck in the Desert." He went home that night and wrote the treatment. He was still a film student at SDSU, and this was the first time he'd ever written and directed a music video.

The band shot it in a single day at the end of September, at Duck Camp — a family property out in the desert near Westmorland, California, next to a stretch of farmland in the Imperial Valley. Jacob's dad and grandfather built it from a dirt lot decades ago as a hunting campsite, and he spent a lot of time out there as a kid. It's an intimate place for him — they'd have "Smokey and the Bandit" running on a loop in the trailer, which is why it's playing on the TV in the film.

Behind the camera was Austin Harris, a cinematographer whose credits include drone and 1st AC work on Hollywood features like Black Panther, Baby Driver, and Barbarian — brought on for this shoot, but the writing, direction, and production were entirely JWMedia's. The rest of the crew was mostly film students, and Riston Diggs — the San Diego hip-hop/rock-hop artist and two-time San Diego Music Award winner featured elsewhere on this site — plays one of the two on-screen robbers. Jacob's dad, Jeff Willett, and his lifelong best friend, Travis Trotter, pulled double duty: running gun, live-ammunition, fire, and boat safety on set, and playing the bodyguards facing the robbers down.

It was Jacob Clement's first time on a film set, too — his own leap of faith, taken alongside his childhood friend's. He handled behind-the-scenes and key photography throughout the shoot.

The video moves fast: Isaac and Riston blast wads of cash into the air with a clay-pigeon launcher at Duck Camp, cutting between performance and action shots at a junkyard and aboard a boat on the Salton Sea, before closing it out with Sam Triston Pierce playing guitar in front of the van as smoke pours from its engine — right before the gasoline trail ignites in slow motion for the final blaze. An announcer's voiceover introduces Sam Triston Pierce mid-song as "the biggest... the baddest guitar player in all the land" — the kind of over-the-top, not-taking-itself-too-seriously energy the whole video runs on.

"Stuck in the Desert" won Best Music Video at the 2026 San Diego Music Awards on May 6 at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay, two weeks before Jacob graduated.