How Two Filmmakers Built A Movie Studio In Florida — Jake Jalbert

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Film Courage: Did you have a goal of building your own studio before you made your first feature film?

Jake Jalbert, Cinematographer/Filmmaker: Was it before? It was probably after. I think it’s something that developed. We coined like Florida “Jollywood.” We wanted to create Jollywood and create films in Florida and we did. We were making films and we had a studio, renting an office with a cyc wall in the back and lights and all that stuff.

That was the goal. I think the biggest thing and why it didn’t work out was because we didn’t have the capital. We weren’t built up enough. We were trying to start from the ground up with no capital. We were just bootstrapping it.

We were creating these films, put them on Amazon so we had two TV shows, three movies all on Amazon that were collectively making money that were paying us that we were paying for the studio. We were trying to create a business doing films paying for a studio and just kind of growing that and that didn’t quite happen the way we thought it was going to.