Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jordin Goff. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Jordin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I’ve always seen TV and movies as magic, and as a kid I admired the magicians, but seeing a book called “That’s A Wrap: How Movies Are Made” at an elementary school bookfair made me consider that I wasn’t too young to start learning some tricks. When my parents bought me a Tyco video camera (a cheap black and white camera that had to plugged into a wall and VCR to work), I started making skits with my brothers, cousins, and a rotating cast of action figures and Halloween masks. When DVD came along, with its endless supply of director commentaries and behind the scenes featurettes it was all over, I enjoyed them just as much as the films themselves, often even more so. Computer editing and animation came along at exactly the right age, and after the prerequisite stint of teenaged depression and medium hopping I picked right back up where I left off and haven’t been able to stop since.
When YouTube came along it jumpstarted my informal film education. I was free to endlessly devour tutorials on an ever expanding list of VFX and editing software. Film encompasses every medium, this is both the most overwhelming and most exciting thing about making them. I love learning new ways to look at the components from people with experience, like the game changer of watching my favorite films ad nauseum but focusing on a specific element each time. Editing, for me, is the most important. It often feels the most like work, but pacing and shaping the rhythm and flavor of the performances from seemingly endless takes and angles accounts for so much of what makes a film feel “right” or “wrong”.
Jumping into the deep end allowed me to get our first feature made, but I wish I’d known the importance of an optimized workflow before I finished. I probably would have sprung for the Adobe suite earlier and preserved some sanity instead of rendering videos from an ancient bootleg of Sony Vegas, only to open them in other software, tinker, re-render, import, export, ad nauseum. Not only did I waste time, I compromised the quality of already just-barely-HD camcorder footage. We live and learn.
Sometimes the biggest obstacle is not knowing what you don’t know, but that inevitably comes out in the wash as you go make your movies and have problems sneak up on you. If you can learn to articulate the problem, anything that can’t be solved by you or your crew thinking outside of your tiny beginner’s box, can be solved by one of the thousands of nerds with YouTube channels or blogs, some of which could even afford to go to film school. Getting your film out into the world can lead to meeting more people who are just as excited about making things as you are, the only resource better than a nerd on YouTube is a nerd in real life who knows exactly what you’re trying to do (more or less) and can help you do it even faster!
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 make microbudget genre films with my friends under the JambleVision banner. We have completed one feature to date, our accidental opus, Dinosaurs in a Mining Facility. It started as a joke, a fake trailer based on an idea by our two leads, but with each shoot came more excitement and confidence. Before we knew it, a lark ballooned into a multi-year feature film production, during which I learned writing, directing, editing and visual effects out of necessity and a desperate desire to actually finish something for once.
The end result is a sprawling D.I.Y. science fiction epic, steeped in intrigue and metaphysical mythos. A collaborative tale of betrayal, self discovery and the cosmic perils of corporate conspiracy. During its lengthy festival run, Dinosaurs in a Mining Facility has been awarded Best Sci-Fi Feature at the 2019 Motor City Nightmares Film Festival, Best Comedy Feature at the 2020 Bare Bones International Film Festival, and Best Feature overall at the 2021 Great Canadian Sci-Fi Film Festival. The film is currently available on limited edition Blu-Ray through Toronto’s Gold Ninja Video. This release includes an exhaustive feature length documentary, chronicling the film’s overly ambitious 5-year production.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Combining convoluted lore with sketch comedy sensibilities and shoestring practicality with digital compositing. I want to present both sincere conviction and outrageous absurdity, often simultaneously. I want to embrace the special kind of tonal dissonance that can only be found in independent film. Micro-budget directors are unburdened by the bottom line of monocle-clad, cigar chomping, studio executives, so we better embrace our freedom! If our production value falls short of our ambition, we can call it charm.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
It’s a toss up between the unparalleled joy of being lost in the minutiae of the process and having an audience immerse themselves in a world that we built from scratch. I love looking at a shelf and seeing 5 years of focused work in a beautiful package that can be interpreted in an infinite amount of ways by any number of curious viewers. I love knowing that the inner-child hasn’t died, but has become so empowered by whatever meager capability and funds adulthood affords us that it is now immortal.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @JambleVision
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DinosaursInAMiningFacility/
- Twitter: @JordinGoff
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jamblevision
- Other: BluRay purchase link: https://goldninjavideo.com/products/blu-ray-dinosaurs-in-a-mining-facility Movie trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-piXZgTp-Q
Image Credits
Personal Photo by Shiloh Wrobel