Milwaukee is filled with successful, low-key individuals like the Emmy-award winning filmmaker Jeremy Bessoff.
Bessoff, 33, is a multimedia producer and instructor who served as the producer for The Strive Media Institute’s Gumbo Television, an urban teen magazine show made almost entirely by teens for teens. In 2006, Bessoff won an Emmy Award for his work on a Milwaukee County Transit System commercial called “Bleep Bus.”
Today, he works as a freelancer on a variety of creative professional and personal projects. OnMilwaukee.com caught up with Bessoff and asked him more about his life and creative work.
OnMilwaukee.com: Tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up?
Jeremy Bessoff: I moved here from The Quad Cities. It is a sort of a midwestern way station between Des Moines and Chicago. My mother moved us there from Calgary, Alberta, because she fell in love. There wasn’t much to do there, so we made our own fun. A lot of my early activities took the form of some kind of creative expression. It was there I realized what I wanted to be. The contours of the valley landscape channeled my interest to art.
OMC: What were your earliest artistic endeavors?
JB: Every kid makes art of some kind. They scribble something on typing paper or become expressive with their mashed potatoes. All parents prize mad gestures fueled by yet-uncontrolled motor skills. They hang it on the fridge in self-inflated pride. My folks did that, as well. It wasn’t until late in high school that I first became aware of the fact that I could control those marks and gestures. I started getting excited about how I was able to coerce those marks into something that reflected my internal imagery and ideas.
Things started getting really interesting for me when I discovered an old Super-8 camera at a thrift shop. Wow! I could make hundreds of images in seconds. And when you dropped off the cartridge at Walgreen’s, it came back a week later as an actual, real-life movie! That’s when art -- though at the time I had no idea it was art -- became an external, social thing for me. I could entertain my family and friends. They could also be included in the creation of it as well. Everyone wanted to be a movie star! Then came a video camera …
JB: Marycrest International University (MIU) in Davenport, Iowa. The brunt of my education came from videotaping angst- fueled shenanigans in coffee shops, self-built basement animation studios and the guidance of Lane Hall (who currently teaches English at UWM.)
OMC: What neighborhood do you live in these days?
JB: Riverwest representin’! I don’t think I’d like to live anywhere else in Milwaukee. Except maybe in a tree house in the domes.
OMC: Are you married?
JB: I am currently engaged to my kindred spirit / brilliant animator / filmmaker / chef Kate Raney. I have a funny little dog named Aldous Huxley.
OMC: Do you have a day job or do you support yourself solely via your art?
JB: Right now, I try and support myself through freelance video work and design the occasional Web site.
OMC: What are you working on right now?
JB: I’ve been working on this huge, ever-expanding-in-length-and-complexity video project called “Ghost Conversations.” It started as one of those, “Hey Jeremy! Do you want to make a video for my band?” sort of projects. Now it’s a 10,000-pound buffalo pacing in my basement. It started growing because I started to become infatuated with the mythology I created for it. In order to do the mythology justice, I had to create so much more than what was originally planned for the simple version of the project.
Also, Kate and I are working on a project together based on a recent “Free People” clothing catalogue. The premise of the catalog is so ridiculous we had to comment on it. It “stars” this totally all-American supermodel teen and puts her into some kind of Eastern Indian environment. We took one look at it and thought, “Here comes neo-colonialism masquerading as a fashion catalog.” The project is taking shape as a cutout animation using the catalog elements and covert, yet publicly recorded conversations about discontent.
There’s also a group video project with The Archaeology of the Recent Future Association and UWM theatre’s Locally Grown film series. It’s an “exquisite corpse” style project where everyone submits a film or bits of video then re-edits each other’s footage and presents it with a live soundtrack.
OMC: What are you most proud of that you've created?
JB: This might sound strange, but I’m most proud of something I haven’t done yet. The idea behind that is I’m always interested in what I’m doing now, but also how I’m going to improve on what I’m doing and how the next project will be better.
OMC: You won an Emmy.
JB: The Emmy win was a very proud moment. I’m probably most proud of the fact that after all these years, I have managed to keep my passion for creating motion pictures alive.
OMC: Is Milwaukee a good fit for you and others in your field?
JB: You can make a living here. It is cheap to live here with motion picture skills, but becoming increasingly less so. There are wonderful pockets of creative communities you can network and collaborate with. I’ve met tons of wonderful, like-minded people here busying away in private on magnificent art. Simply for the love of it. But this isn’t an industry town. Unless you are in education or contracted with a corporation, I’ve found it’s a bit of a rat race to pay the bills.
OMC: What are your goals for the future?
JB: Future? As Albert Einstein once wisely said, “I never think of the future -- it comes soon enough."
Molly Snyder started writing and publishing her work at the age 10, when her community newspaper printed her poem, "The Unicorn.” Since then, she's expanded beyond the subject of mythical creatures and written in many different mediums but, nearest and dearest to her heart, thousands of articles for OnMilwaukee.
Molly is a regular contributor to FOX6 News and numerous radio stations as well as the co-host of "Dandelions: A Podcast For Women.” She's received five Milwaukee Press Club Awards, served as the Pfister Narrator and is the Wisconsin State Fair’s Celebrity Cream Puff Eating Champion of 2019.
