Make a thing every day with Jesse Driftwood

Injecting personality and making yourself constantly produce content makes you a better filmmaker. Meet Jesse Driftwood, a photographer and filmmaker who got into it all because of Instagram Stories.

When Instagram launched Stories, it offered Jesse - and all other creators - the opportunity to create content and make something new every single day and not be so precious about it, because it was gone tomorrow. Jesse learned how to tell stories really efficiently because you only have so much time to cram all the information in there.

With this and all of the express, daily creativity opportunities, Jesse found himself craving more time with the camera to tell a story and to offer his perspective and vision. A relative newcomer to YouTube, he then set up his own channel and since has been creating longer-form weekly uploads for the last two years.

“What make you unique is your perspective on the world,” Jesse advises, “that’s the special and personal thing about filmmaking.” Jesse is all about injecting his own perspective into his films. Not bogged down with the tools of the trade, the seamless cuts, snazzy pans or added graphics, he’s more about demonstrating your unique vision and viewpoint on screen.

Music is integral to Jesse’s filmmaking. He explains, “when I find the right song I finally get this momentum, I start feeling like there’s a flow and a pace and it’s like a dance between the music and the visuals and it kind of works together in order to portray the same thing”. Countless times, Jesse has had an idea sparked from finding a song on Epidemic Sound alone. Music, for him, is at least as important as the rest of the process - the visuals, the concept, etc.

“Step one is that you understand yourself,” he continues, “you can put things out into the world that you’re proud of, not necessarily because of the quality but because it’s better than you used to be, it’s better than the thing you made last week. You keep doing that long enough, people are going to relate to you and that creative process. You’ll inspire them and so seeing you going through that process and seeing growth as a filmmaker can often times be more inspiring than your film itself.”

You can follow Jesse Driftwood on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. This video was edited by Dan Mace.