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

Hi Jackson, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I knew I wanted to pursue an artistic path from a really young age. I wrote a few books when I was 5 years old, and started shooting little short films in the back yard with my cousins when I was 9. Creativity has always been a part of me and as I’ve grown up it’s just continued to get stronger and stronger. When I was 13 or so I was involved with a company called Youth Digital that taught kids how to make games and animate, and while I’d been making games with them for a while, I started to discover I really cared about the storytelling aspect and that’s when I made the switch to film. Now I’m working on my second animated feature.

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?

My name is Jackson Buckley and I’m a 20-year old filmmaker working on my second animated feature film, an action-mystery called A’Taka.

When I was 14, I released my first feature film, which was a minecraft-animated movie called Remnants. From there, I’ve been working on my second movie — A’Taka. Making it has led me to learn a lot of new things, from raising over $100,000 thru private investment and Kickstarter, running a social media campaign for casting that resulted in over 1000 auditions, and recording over 40 actors in studio earlier this year.

We’re currently in the process of starting to hire animators.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

As an animation filmmaker, a huge inspiration have been the movies of Hayao Miyazaki & Studio Ghibli. I saw a behind the scenes documentary on the making of one of their movies, and I love their feeling-first approach to filmmaking. Don’t get me wrong, they’re always very technical and make each move airtight, but they focus on the feel/energy of the movement moreso than the realistic version of it.

I think as creatives we can get caught up in making something technically perfect but can fall in the trap of not making it with our heart, which is ultimately the point. That doesn’t mean we’re not striving for technical perfection too, but I’ve found that making sure my mood and vision are aligned with what I want to do first makes everything I make work much quicker.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

In our casting process, we listened to over 300 auditions from traditional voice over websites like Backstage and Voices123. But after a few months of effort, we were only hearing very over the top voices, which went against what we were looking for — naturalistic, real sounding vocal performances.

It wasn’t working. But I remembered that earlier in the year, we had recorded social media shorts for our Kickstarter campaign. They didn’t really do anything for us then, but they worked well enough where I figured I might as well give it a shot. So after failing on Backstage, we had to pivot into doing a pop-up social media campaign.

During that time I shot a bunch of shorts for Instagram, edited them and posted them. The first few only got a few thousand views, which for Instagram is low, but after a while we had some videos start to succeed– one getting almost 300k views, which led to us getting over 1000 auditions. (We promised we’d listen to all of them, so after a while, we were really grateful but very tired!!)

The point is that as a creative doing a bunch of different stuff, a lot of times we inadvertently plant seeds to successful ideas long before they happen. So don’t be afraid to try things, and fail at them. Because doing nothing nets nothing. Trying something and failing might lead to a success down the road.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://atakamovie.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mobius_studios/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-buckley-042a93208/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MobiusStudiosJack

Image Credits

Just me