We recently connected with Jenny Waldo and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Jenny thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
The most meaningful project I’ve worked on would by my debut feature film as a writer/director, Acid Test, which premiered at the 2021 Austin Film Festival and will be available on digital platforms fall 2022. Acid Test is a coming-of-age rebellion story fueled by Riot Grrrl music, a dysfunctional family, and LSD. Set in 1992 and based on true events from my own tumble through adolescence into adulthood.
The feature film began as a short film, also called Acid Test, that I started back in 2015 after going to the Cannes Short Film Corner with a short film I produced, Next Exit. I had been producing other people’s content and watching other people direct their first features and I wanted to get back into my own voice as an artist. Watching the pinnacle of cinema at a festival like Cannes, I wanted to challenge myself. I had never worked with visual effects, I had never shot something so large as a concert, and I had never made an autobiographical film. More than the professional challenge, it felt terrifying and personal to capture such an important era (Riot Grrrl), and how influential it was to me, in a real and authentic way and tell a story where I admitted to doing drugs, being a jerk of a teenager, and portraying my family’s dysfunction. I’m a mother and a teacher! But the story of the time I dropped acid at a concert and went home to tell my parents I was tripping, sparking a hallucinogenic family meltdown, took on a life of its own as we cast actors and hired crew and everyone shared their own stories and we really used the short film as an exploration and experimentation for what we could possibly do in a feature film. Because the feature film was always the goal. Do a short film, do well on the film festival circuit, use that as proof to get your feature off the ground.
Through the success of the short film, the people I met along the way, the community in Houston, and more, we were able to get the feature film off the ground! Writing the longer version, pulling from more difficult memories of my youth, was one of the hardest parts of the process. It’s a psychotic exercise to take painful moments from your own life and have the perspective and creativity to shape a narrative arc. The structure of the feature didn’t fit into my original idea from the short, so I had to think beyond what “really” happened. But after a wonderful Table Read event where we workshopped the script and got feedback from an audience, the script was ready to shoot. I pitched a class idea to the Chair of the Filmmaking Department at Houston Community College where students would sign up to be Production Assistants on the set of Acid Test and gain valuable experience while networking with industry professionals we were hiring, which gave us a 5 week window to shoot. We also secured a fiscal sponsor, From the Heart Productions, because of the educational, political, and diversity aspects of the film. With Riot Grrrl and women’s rights central to the story and the 1992 Presidential Campaign as backdrop, and the diverse cast and crew including a Latina lead, female director, female cinematography, Acid Test is a rebellion both in its story and how it was made, allowing us to fundraise through charitable donations.
Production was a dream, we finished on time and on budget, but Covid hit as we were getting into post, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen with the festivals. It was a long, hard road to finish the film in an isolated world, but I had a great team and I was so thrilled to premiere the film at Austin Film Festival in person, in front of a packed audience. Navigating distribution has been the biggest learning curve, but we are excited to bring the film to a broader audience.
Directing a feature film is a dream and a goal for every filmmaker I know. I’ve been in the film industry in one way or another since 1999, so I’m not exactly a newbie. I went to USC School for Cinematic Arts for my MFA in Film Production and even won a Directing Scholarship, but life took me away from Los Angeles and over to Houston and I’ve had to navigate how to be a filmmaker in a city without my industry. There are many talented filmmakers here in Houston, and there are other forms of media production – commercials, industrials, music videos – but my life in Houston didn’t make free-lance production work viable. In many ways, I realize now I didn’t need to wait 20 years to make my first feature film, but everything that I’ve done and learned up until this point made it possible and gives me the confidence to do it again.
Jenny, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I grew up in Washington, DC and was exposed to a ton of culture, art, and (obviously) politics. My mother is an immigrant from the Czech Republic and my father was from Florida, and I grew up dancing, playing piano, and developing black and white photographs in my basement with my dad. They both loved film, but while my dad loves Star Wars and Star Trek and every big blockbuster to come out of Hollywood, my mother loved Czech and Italian New Wave cinema. Think Darth Vader meets pantomimes. My dad has always been politically active and worked as a lobbyist and then for environmental agencies while my mother had fled a Soviet-controlled country that was still behind the Iron Curtain of Communism. If you don’t know DC, and I know it’s changed a lot, but it was a poor and segregated city that had a minority-majority and a terrible crime rate when I was a child. All of this fueled a love and curiosity about people and how they lived, and I loved movies (not so much the ones with pantomimes). I loved taking photographs and capturing a moment in life. I wasn’t a strong reader at the time and math was my best and favorite subject, if you can believe that. I grew up interested in a lot of things, but my greatest passion was dance at the time. I loved choreographing pieces, pairing movement to music, and staging them under lights. I started college intending to double major in dance and math, but then I nearly flunked post-Calculus math, and I didn’t really care for the dance department. So I majored in English by default and ended up taking a class that included film theory. A lightbulb went off. I have never really thought about analyzing film as text, and I had never thought about film as a route to a job. I interned at the Paramount Lot my senior year and fell in love with Los Angeles and never wanted to turn back.
Over the years, I’ve specialized in producing, writing, and directing, and for those roles I pull from my history with dance, lighting, photography, piano, my curiosity for other people, and math has been essential for the skills needed to get a film done on time and on budget. Often times people are either big picture thinkers or detail-oriented technicians, but filmmaking, especially the roles I’m interested in, require you to be able to see the forest, the individual leaf, every tree in between and how they relate to one another. I think that also helps me be an effective teacher and give good constructive feedback on scripts and rough cuts. It’s always easier to do that to other people’s work than your own, though. Which is why I rely on feedback sessions for scripts and screenings.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Resilience is required if you want to be in the arts because you will be told “no” often, you will not be selected for some program or award or group, and in a saturated market like media/film, you will have to fight to get your project not only made but seen. For me personally, though, the part that took the most resilience was finding myself in Houston – not a film industry town – with small children that I needed to take care of and not a lot of resources for support like family or money. I had gone to one of the best film schools in the country, gone into significant debt to do so, and found myself in a place where I wasn’t sure I could pursue film as a career. Unlike some of the other arts, you need other people to make a film, and especially if you’re interested in a crew position like cinematography or you’re interested in post-production (editing, sound), you are waiting for someone to pick you in order to pursue your craft. Because I was a writer/director, and especially because I had had experience producing both documentaries and scripted projects, I knew how to generate work for myself. I knew how to reach out to people and gather a team. Whenever I’m in a state of waiting or wondering, in between projects or waiting on someone else’s work, or isolating during a pandemic, I start doing what I call the “spaghetti approach.” I start generating projects. I write. I take photos. I apply for grants. I apply for fellowships and labs. Because eventually, something will stick that I can then take the next logical step in the production pipeline and continue pushing projects toward the finish line. Finishing is key, but you’re never going to finish every project. Some projects just fill the time. Some need time to percolate until they’re ready to be finished. So when I found myself in a new town that didn’t have my industry and I didn’t have a lot of time or resources to engage with it, I became very strategic about generating my own work to continue building my skill sets, expanding my network, offering my skills and experience, and volunteering for whatever film stuff was going on that I could get involved with. You have to keep moving forward, and sometimes that’s scary and overwhelming so I would just do something small and forgive myself if I didn’t follow through because I had another opportunity the next day.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Social media has been crucial for what I’ve been able to achieve so far. I’m certainly not the best at it, and I have a love/hate relationships with social media because if you’re on multiple platforms (which I am), it takes so much time to post natively in each one. But, that obviously means that I believe the best way to use social media is from within the platform, and each one is just slightly different. Posting videos especially is important to do natively because it removes the barrier between the audience (on social media) and your video. No clicking involved! But to upload and create a post with proper tags/handles in different platforms just takes time, which is ironic since it’s supposed to be spontaneous and quickly moving. For me, I’ve been able to grow my audience by getting involved with groups and organizations. Twitter is great for the writing and screenwriting community. It’s incredibly active and you can easily grow your following. Since I’m older, Facebook is my most effective social media network because it’s full of people that I’ve known for years in real life. I think social media is the best when it’s building on a relationship that exists outside of the computer. I like Instagram because it’s visual, but I don’t like being stuck with that format so I probably struggle to use that one the most. And I’m thinking of branching out into TikTok once my feature film Acid Test is released to help promote the film. That is a whole new world that I’m learning from my teenage kids about. I have found that instead of people handing out business cards at festivals and events, people are connecting over social media. I find this a little tricky because I don’t always remember people as well when I’ve just friended them but don’t have something concrete like a card to trigger my memory of meeting them. So when I meet new people and we connect over social media, I also make sure to message them like I would a follow-up email after getting someone’s business card and that helps me remember. And then I keep up with people like I would any other friend. And while posting your own content is certainly important in social media, interacting on other people’s posts is the best way to foster a real connection, even if it’s just over the internet. Finally, be nice! It is so easy to say nasty things when you’re not looking someone in the face, in real life, and it’s so easy to fire off a tweet or a post venting or ranting or arguing and it’s just not worth it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jennywaldo.com https://www.acidtestfilm.com
- Instagram: @jennywaldo @acidtestfilm
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.waldo.7 https://www.facebook.com/acidtestfilm
- Twitter: @jennywaldo @acidtestfilm