JXN Film Club - PODCAST REVIVAL

As a film lover in Jackson, I’ve felt compelled to identify the people in my life who love talking about movies. A few years ago, the thought had crossed my mind to start a film club and try to create some community around this shared love. I asked some friends and started organizing events, and eventually was approached about starting a podcast. That’s the brief history of Jackson Film Club (aka jxnfilmclub or JXN Film Club).

When The Fairview Sound studio was located in Belhaven, I worked with Brennan White to release 2 seasons of podcast content under the banner JXN Film Club The Podcast. My co-host was Sam Graef, a current film student at Belhaven University and co-founder of Escape the Wolf Productions. Both Brennan and Sam have moved on to other phases of life and so I am going to do something new to continue this podcasting project on my own.

If you’ve never listened to the podcast before, here’s the last episode we recorded with Brennan, featuring Brennan! It’s a great introduction to our style.

Are you on Discord?

There is a chat and social app called Discord which was initially created for the gaming community. If you’ve ever used Slack or IRC, you’re going to be familiar with the channel structure of Discord Servers. I have owned and maintained a personal Discord I use for development since 2017. You can join my server using the widget under my bio on this page.

Moving forward starting with Season 3, all episodes will be generated from recorded conversations taking place on Discord. This will enable a regular schedule since guests will be completely remote. This does require that guests are registered Discord users and have access to a camera and microphone. The great part is that the Discord app lets users use the camera and most people who have a smart phone have earbuds or headphones. All the recording logistics are handled seamlessly and the only thing guests will have to do is join a voice channel at an agreed upon time.

Topics

Previously, we collaborated with our guests to come up with general topics we could have some freeform discussion about. I don’t know how well this really worked as far as exploring intellectual takes on films or the film industry, but I had fun doing it.

In addition to topics, we had a throughline of Top 20 episodes. These conversations focused on a guest’s Top 20 favorite movies, a list they compiled ahead of time. I’ve collected all of the lists we turned into episodes on my Letterboxd. I’ll continue to catalogue JXN Film Club podcast content on Letterboxd as is appropriate.

Considering that Seasons 1 and 2 were primarily recorded in the living room studio of The Fairview Sound, the conversational nature of our topics relied a lot on in-person chemistry. I’m not concerned that chemistry won’t be possible using Discord but I do believe it will feel very different. I look forward to exploring the challenges to recording a podcast using this digital platform.

Be Our Guest

So far we’ve had lots of interesting local guests, but I am excited about the potential of opening the podcast to feature guests from anywhere in the world! If you think you’re up for the task and want to learn more about the podcast recording schedule, please respond to the form below!