We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jodi Norton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jodi below.

Jodi, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

It’s a rather simple story- in high school I was heavily involved in the business chapter at my school, and I loved to write. When I applied to college, I was running through interesting career paths and realized that a producer was a great combination of business leader and creative, leading me to running my own productions today.

Each and every production is an individual business. Each one requires its own account books, tax write offs, permits, etc. And much of learning how to run each production as a business comes as trial and error, building each production off of what you learned from the previous one.

I began to learn this first hand my senior year of college when I wrote and produced my first short film, Playing God. Much of the learning period included figuring out where to get funding from, delegating where to spend it, how to staff a project, and what licenses I needed to acquire to get the short film off the ground.

The more productions you do, the more you realize what repeat products and services you use and you eventually develop a kit out of these, which becomes part of your business. For me, once I started producing projects at a pretty frequent rate, that’s when I decided it was time to develop an LLC. Right now, I’m currently in the legal stage, signing the registration documents.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was lucky enough to figure out early on in my school experience that I wanted to work in entertainment. I grew up LOVING reading and writing, which pushed me down the path of wanting to be an author. In high school, I got super into our business chapter around the same time the movie La La Land came out. It was that combination of events that pushed me into a love for screenwriting and entertainment. On a college tour, I was introduced to the career option of being a producer, and I quite literally never considered anything else after that.

After graduating Penn State in May 2023 with an honors degree in Telecommunications, I moved to Los Angeles to develop my career as a producer and my production company, Good Bones.

Good Bones got its name after Irish poem of the same name by Maggie Smith. The poem speaks on how the world may be dreadful, but holds the foundation to also be a place of joy. My production company is inspired by screenplays and stories that have the same potential. While there are no bounds under genre or even medium (film, music video, commercial, etc) everything produced under the production house fits under the brand by being motivated by human stories.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

It’s been about a year and a half since I’ve graduated college and I’m sure I have hit triple digits (and counting) in rejection letters from various production and entertainment companies. No surprise there, the entertainment industry is notoriously cutthroat. But regardless of its reputation preceding it, it’s difficult to face that rejection time after time. What I’m grateful that experience taught me has been that in order to be a director, producer, etc, you need to cut a path for yourself in the job market.

For me, this started with small short films between friends, but really began to grow this past summer when I developed a docuseries on female Olympians and the intersection of feminism and sportsmanship. As someone who is 23, with only small film credits, I started reaching out to Olympians via DM, asking if they would be interested in sitting down for an interview, which has now snowballed into several videos with distribution.

So much of starting a business or a project in the face of adversity or rejection is just that- starting. It is the choice of completing a task or not that gets you closer to your goal. A big thing that I’ve learned in the last year and a half is how important mindset is to the completion of goals- especially when you start working for yourself rather than a school or company that gives you deadlines or structure, you need to be able to create that for yourself.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding part about being an artist is seeing your finished project and knowing that you have now put something out into the world that didn’t exist before. That’s why I think artists are so invested in passion projects and so much more fulfilled by them- there’s a sense of pride being able to take a step back at the completed work and know how much time and collaboration went into it. These pieces of work become a time capsule and piece of history, which I think is such a fun perspective to have on the art you make.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goodbonesproductions/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodi-norton-a3ba05141/

Image Credits

Michael Kuznar

Ellie Franklin

Abby Tarpey