Meet Jay James | Film Writer and Director

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jay James and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jay, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
The videography field has blown up in the past few years thanks to social media and other emerging technologies such as drones. Businesses and artists have had to develop a strong online presence in order to get the word about what they’re doing out into the world. After the pandemic, I felt a strong sense of community, and knew I wanted to do my part to help out my fellow artists and entrepreneurs, so it made sense to take advantage of the growing demand for video and provide a service for them. On top of this, there was mutual benefit in developing strong business/creative relationships as I would have people in my corner for when I wanted to start working on another film.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My art has always been a way of processing, expressing, and working through the internal and external challenges I’ve faced in my life, both through film and music. Because of how personal my art is, I contemplated not doing it professionally because I actually found it quite challenging to share it with people. I had to become willing to showcase my vulnerability.

I was really drawn to 60’s psychedelic and 70’s progressive rock music for doing that, being vulnerable. Bands like Pink Floyd and Supertramp really felt like they were speaking to me. Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd is definitely the biggest influence on my work because it inspired me to keep leaning into the ideas I was just beginning to explore in my art, and also take on a colorful, psychedelic aesthetic with a strong emphasis on the relationship between the music and the visuals. I’d describe my films as being classic rock albums turned into movies with shots intentionally made to look like album covers, and dialogue that blurs the line between sounding like something someone would actually say or something that a Bob Dylan knock-off wrote.

It’s funny in a sad way how we sometimes think we’re alone in our struggles and the way we feel, and it’s not until we put ourselves out there that people come to you and say “That really connected with me” or “Damn, that was relatable.” and you realize that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m excited to be able to say that my work has been able to connect with the community I’m apart of. It took me a long time to figure out how to speak my voice through any sort of artistic medium, but I think I learned how to do this by doing music videos for local artists. When I started doing that, I would always listen to the song and get visuals in my mind, then ask them for lyrics so that whatever I came up with had some sort of alignment with every part of the song, even if the final idea did deviate. Representation is a big thing in film. It always has been. It’s so rewarding to feel validated or see a part of yourself on screen, or hear it in a song. It’s what makes art so special; the way it unifies us.

The biggest thing I want to showcase in my work is the perspective of Generation Z or Zoomers as we’re now being called. We’re kind of in the center of this weird turning point in history. I talk to a lot of people my age who spent way too much time on the internet growing up, myself included, and this is something that we’re slowly realizing is having interesting psychological effects on us. Billie Eilish has touched upon this a little bit. I’ve talked to a lot of people older than me about this too, and they’re often very curious to discuss this and hear the perspectives of myself and my peers. A lot of us are scared for future generations who have known nothing but this and have been absorbing all the blue light essentially since they were born. We’re also at a point where the sins of the past are beginning to catch up to us, and it may be up to the Millennials and Gen Z to figure out solutions to these problems. The most important thing for me to express about all this is the optimism I have for our generation. It’s very easy to absorb everything and feel like there’s no real hope or to think we’re just meme loving idiots, but I want my films to show in a pragmatic fashion that it is possible for this generation to be incredible, and that it many ways, it already is.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Oh man, the Griffith Observatory is a must in my opinion, especially if you’re a space geek like I am. The beaches of course are also amazing. I learned to surf at Venice Beach and I knew there was no turning back after that. I come from the Midwest, so the fun thing I did when I first visited was find all the West Coast versions of the fast food places I knew at home. Something that I don’t hear about frequently when LA is discussed is just how many museums there are, and how it’s one of the cheaper activities to do. On Hollywood Boulevard, you got the Wax Museum, World of Illusions, Icons of Darkness, just to name a few. They usually have great deals going to attend three of them for only thirty bucks, and it takes up a bulk of the afternoon.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I have to give a shoutout to the supportive friends I’ve been blessed to have over the years. When I was just a kid making goofy action movies in my backyard, I was really lucky to have reliable friends who would always come and be apart of them. They really cared about making it good, and a few friends I made through martial arts classes really committed to making cool fight scenes. We hurt ourselves a lot due to being amateur stuntmen/fight coordinators, but it was worth it to see the final product turn out so real (at least for the time)! Those little movies kept our friendship strong into adulthood, and to this day they still support what I’m doing, which I’m endlessly grateful for. Even the friends I’ve made through doing music videos more recently have had a profound impact on my journey. Bands such as Black Wine, Trading Faces, and Diet Lite along with solo artists like Dobs and JustHANO were shopping me out to artists and small businesses they knew after we worked together.

Website: jayjames@jayjamesfilms.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-james-8ba973148/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOn58PxqbVNFPhsVRFyj4yQ

Image Credits
Tanner Smith- Plane photos Jolanta Young- TCFF photos Bridgette McAlpin- On set photo