Introduction: Jake Holt

Hello! I’m Jake Holt and I’m very excited to be in Editing this semester. Just a bit of background on myself: I’m 24 years old and I’m a senior here at Weber State. I’m a communications major with an emphasis in digital media. The emphasis of my emphasis is video production. I’ve been filming things since I was 12 and basically stole my parents’ VHS tape video camera, and I’ve been editing since my first year of high school when I was 15.

It’s something that I’ve always loved doing, and I’m fortunate enough to have found a way to turn that passion into an income. I currently work as a video production specialist at Clearlink Technologies in Salt Lake City. My after-graduation plans include staying employed with Clearlink full-time, if they’ll have me, as well as building myself a network of consistent freelance clients.

The reason I’m taking this class is not just for credits. It’s because, all throughout my life, storytelling has been, probably, my number one passion overall. All forms of it: video games, movies, books, comics, short stories, and the like. Storytelling takes writing, and writing takes technical precision. That's what I hope to progress toward in this class.

I realized at age 12 that I needed to have a video camera in my possession at all times. I would film everything. My friends and I would make goofy Star Wars spoofs and we would write and film our own short stories.

This fire never went out. To this day, I still write and I still film. The latter has become much more difficult as of late, because of time and money constraints, but the writing part is amazing, because with writing there are no limits. During the Summer of 2015 I found myself having a decent amount of free time. No summer classes on top of working a flexible part-time job allowed me hours to spare. I had it in my head that I wanted to write a fantasy story. Not like Lord of the Rings or anything that deep just yet, but something funny, light, and relatively easy to film. I grabbed my laptop and headed to Starbucks one morning. I ordered my coffee and I started typing up character descriptions. Soon, I had my leading cast fleshed out. I then started creating the villains and the supporting cast, which lead me to start laying down a plot outline.

Three hours later, I’d written the first ten pages of a comedic fantasy miniseries that I would finish writing within that month of May. By the end of June, I’d saved up $500, ordered props and costumes on Amazon, and gathered a cast of committed friends to be my cast and crew. Between the end of June and the beginning of October we filmed the six-part, 70-page miniseries. Between October and December I edited and created the effects for each episode while a friend of mine composed the score. On December 20th, 2015, we premiered all six episodes at the Ziegfeld Theater in Ogden for a modest audience of about 40. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. But I’ve already come a long way as a filmmaker and as a storyteller since then. And I’m sure as hell glad we did it. Some of the greatest memories of my life came from that Summer. We didn’t make any money. We didn’t get famous. But we had a great adventure with friends. And we told a story.

Here's the poster from the miniseries that my dad designed.

That’s why I’m in this class. To become a better storyteller by learning how to convey more clean and effective ideas via the written word.