Meet Jamie Fenn | Filmmaker/photographer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jamie Fenn and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jamie, what do you think makes you most happy? Why?
What makes me happy is being able to create content I love to inspire others to do the same.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’ve always been a creative person doing art in school since I could remember. I also was a percussionist in band throughout high school. Then during summer breaks I transitioned into taking photos and videos of friends doing extreme sports when I was 15. After going to college and deciding to drop out, and working for a couple years, I decided to do a solo trip to Indonesia for a month. I saved up some money and needed to push the reset button and get a fresh perspective on life. I bought this little camera and decided to document my whole trip with photos and videos of my experiences while posting on instagram. (During this time I also decided to make my instagram stand out by doing something nobody really does on that platform. Check it out and you’ll see what Im talking about.) After the trip I posted a couple videos to youtube about my experience and they really didn’t do well. So I decided to make my first tutorial video using this program called Davinci Resolve. No body was really making tutorials using this so I figured I’d try it out. The video tanked and didn’t do well at all for the first couple weeks. Then all of a sudden the video started to take off and pushed my channel over the thresh-hold to become monetized, where I could start making money from ad revenue. From that moment I knew I was on to something. I started to post more videos as my account started to grow more and more. I started to become natural in front of the camera just recently. I was SO awkward at first and really didn’t know what I was doing. Something that’s interesting is that I just passed 100,000 subscribers on youtube and still feel like I make videos for just a couple people. One really important thing I have learned since uploading videos to youtube is you can’t associate the amount of hard work you put in to the video with how well it performs online. It’s really hard on you as an artist when you put a lot of hard work into a video and post it, and it gets a couple thousand views, but for other videos where I may spend an hour working on it, it gets a couple hundred thousand. I’ve learned to remove any expectations when uploading videos now. But it was tough to get this point. I still feel a little discouraged when my new videos don’t perform at their best, especially when I try my best.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I live in a small resort mountain town so it depends on when they visited and what kind of activities they like to do. In the summer, some of favorite places include Maroon Bells, hiking up near Ashcroft, and mountain biking in Snowmass. If they came during winter then I’d most definitely take them snowmobiling up independence pass and surrounding areas. As far as the food in town, all the bars and restaurants are amazing so you really can’t go wrong with any of them. For live music, Belly Up very intimate having a capacity of 500 people, and is iconic for having some of the best artists in the world perform.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
To be completely transparent, there wasn’t a lot of support in the beginning. No body really understood the career path I was taking. But once I started to show success, family and friends started to see what I was doing and came around to be fully supportive.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamie_fenn

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiefenn/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamiefenn

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imjamiefenn

Youtube: https://youtube.com/jamiefenn