Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jabari Jenkins. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jabari, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

The biggest risk I took was deciding not to go back to my job at Ross when businesses started opening up after lockdown. My manager knew that I wasn’t the best employee, constantly showing up late or not at all. He had to text me from his personal phone to let me know that they wanted me to come in. I took about two days to respond and told him “I won’t be able to come in. My career is doing good.” My career actually wasn’t doing anything. But, I knew that going back to work would not make me happy. This decision pretty much forced me to make things work with my film career. Fast forward to today and I haven’t had a job since. I guess we can say things turned out pretty well.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a 23-year-old director in Atlanta, Georgia and founder Split Image, a production company based in Atlanta. I’m originally from Stone Mountain, Georgia. That’s where everything started with my film career. Back in 2017, I left college with the intention of becoming a Youtuber. It was going pretty good until it wasn’t, and I had to go back to school. I didn’t know what to go for; my original plan was mechanical engineering, but math kind of forced me away from that. I ended up deciding to go for film since I was already into cameras because of Youtube. Music videos sparked my interest and I eventually shot and directed my first one on July 28, 2018.

Fast forward 4 years later and I’d say I’m well established in my field. I’ve worked with plenty of people/brands, from Cantrell to Summer Walker, Puma to Savage Fenty. In these 4 years, I’ve grown to be the director that I planned to become. Of course there’s a very long way to go, but my creativity and ability to create a world for people to temporarily exist in is crazy. Through the different projects I’ve done, whether professional or personal, I would say that they all exist within the same world which is the mind of Director Bari. Sometimes I wish I could explain how my mind works, but if I can’t say then my work will definitely show it.

How’d you meet your business partner?

So, Dezmen Alexander is my business partner and the person that I work very closely with. Dezmen moved down to Atlanta from Maryland back in June 2020. We got introduced through a couple friends of mine, who he met not too longer after moving. I found out that Dezmen was into film and was actually filming a TV show. At the time, I was looking for people to join Split Image. During our first real conversation, I found out that he wanted to be a DP (director of photography) and that’s exactly what I was looking for. He asked what are we going to call ourselves and when I told him about Split Image, he immediately agreed. Since then we’ve worked on a handful of projects, the most recent being a music video for “No Friends” by Cantrell. Dezmen and I have grown to become very great friends, in fact he’s definitely my best friend. He’s the first person that saw something in Split Image and wanted to join. Good luck catching us not working on projects together, regardless of how many years down the line.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think non-creatives will probably never fully understand what it even means to be a creative. Yes, we get to wake up and pretty much do whatever we want to do everyday. We make our own schedules, set our own prices, etc. The life of a creative is very glamorous on the outside. We can go through moods/seasons where we feel as if we aren’t good enough. There’s been times where I dropped the best video ever and it received so much love, but now I feel as if I have to do better. Or I’ve just created the best video ever and now I can’t seem to find the creativity necessary to keep that going. Sometimes, we get down and sad because things aren’t moving the way we’d like. Just because I’m putting out work consistently, that doesn’t always equate to my bank account. I feel as if non-creatives should allow us to go through the motions of being a creative and understand that every up is not an up, and every down is not a down. I’ve been the happiest person ever with $0.62 to my name and the saddest person ever with plenty of money. Being a creative is something that we’re all just constantly working through. Don’t look at us and think that life is always amazing and what is there to be sad about. Really, just remember that we’re human, too.

Contact Info:

• Website: directorbari.com
• Instagram: @directorbari
• Twitter: @directorbari
• Youtube: Director Bari

Image Credits
All photos shot by Jarel Walker, @whoisrel