Today we’d like to introduce you to Jingxi Zhu.
Hi Jingxi, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’ve been writing plays and novels since I was a kid, and I’ll ask my cousins or classmates to play the part, most of my plays are comedies, and when I was a sophomore in high school, I created a time travel drama based on the Four Great Classical Novels, and performed on the school art festival stage, this was one of the best memories in my life, also lit up my passion of storytelling. I got hooked on film when I was 16, but at that time I was too scared to tell anyone in the family that I want to pursue my career in film industry because growing up in a Chinese traditional family, anything related to art was not considered as a stable way to make a living. But I never give up my love for movies, I continued to search for creative inspiration in my daily life, books, music, even paintings became my best partners, I wrote and directed my first short film based on a song. And learning to appreciate paintings also taught me how to compose picture, which is what inspired me to study photography.
2016 was a turning point of my life, I got selected to participate in the Columbia University Overseas Study Tour Program where I could spend the entire summer in the U.S. When I actually walked on the streets in Los Angeles, and as I reveled in the purple sunset of New York City, I was determined to pursue my dream of making movies.
Luckily enough, I was accepted into the MFA program in editing at Chapman University’s Dodge School of Film and Media Arts in 2018, where I met so many incredible friends who share the same passion for film, and these three years at Dodge have been very fulfilling for me. After I graduated, I decided to start my career in trailer industry, and now I’m working as an assistant editor.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Studying film is probably one of the bravest moves I’ve made in my life so far. I didn’t get much support from my family at the beginning, so I’m really grateful that I didn’t give up at that time when people treated my dream as a joke and eventually proved myself to my parents. But when I actually entered the field of filmmaking, I realized that you can’t make a good movie just with passion luckily, I have many great professors here in Dodge who really changed the way of me seeing movies and I also learned a lot from my classmates.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
As an editor, most of my short films has been selected or won awards in many International film festival. After a short film I edited in 2019 got into the finalist in The American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival, and To Kern, short film adapted from Alexander Pushkin’s poem won the bronze award in LA Short Awards and also the award winner in Madrid International Film Festival in 2020. The best thing about being an editor is that we are the first ones to see the film take shape. I was so inspired by Valdís Óskarsdóttir’s interview in which she described her way of working, saying that she would forget the script when she started editing because editors should build the connections with the characters from the footage when you spent a lot of time with the footage, the characters become close to us like a friend or a family, then you will be able to make the right editing choice and make the audiences see the characters alive. This affected me deeply, and the most important thing I did before I started working was to connect with the characters while reading the script. I really cared about watching the dailies for the first time because I thought it was the closest experience to what most audiences would have when watching the film, so I would spend much time on taking notes about how I feel about each take which is really beneficial to me especially when I tried to make a hard editing choice after I watched the dailies for so many times.
Right now, I’m working as an assistant editor in an entertainment marketing agency named BOND, here I get chances to work with many amazing first-class projects every day which is another fun challenge for my life!
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
I was a freelance photographer for two years, I am good at portrait photography in natural light.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://jujunumba1.godaddysites.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jujunumba1_piclife/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100026522303405
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIXQ8mhXsnJ7UFVXkoR26DA/featured
