Today we’d like to introduce you to Jose Ordoñez Jr.
So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. My dad was in the TV comedy industry at the time. I grew up attending sets and going to his post-production facility after elementary school to work on animations and sound projects. I would ask the animators lots of questions and would ask them to teach me. Looking back, I think they were pretty bothered, but you can get away with a lot when you’re the boss’s kid. One of the first times I knew I wanted to be in the film industry was when my dad had me sound mix an entire skit for his show. I was eight years old. I also attended a film and robotics club and made silly spoofs with my cousins mostly about video games and movies.
I moved to the United States at the age of twelve and attended high school in Fort Lauderdale. My high school had a video program and that’s when I decided to take film more seriously. I made a short film a year, and they were pretty decent for my age. My junior year I won the High School category for Best Film at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, and that felt like the biggest accomplishment at the time. A 17-year old winning $1,000 is a huge deal! I bought a longboard and speakers with that money. I thought – “Hey, I’ve got $1,000 at seventeen. I could definitely make a living with this art!”
I attended film school at Biola University in California. There I met wonderful artists and filmmakers and really honed in on my skill. I made seven short films while attending school, and with the accessibility to equipment, I was always looking forward to the next project. My senior thesis made it to a couple of great festivals, including the Miami Short Film Festival. I definitely learned a lot with that short, and it leads me to re-evaluate how I would make a living as an artist.
I moved back to Florida in 2017 and began teaching film at a high school level. This job has taught me the most, both interpersonally and artistically. There is something about teaching film every day that teaches you a lot. I kept maturing in my craft and took my story abilities to the next level. I started watching more and more movies, learning from filmmakers like Jean Rouch, Jean-Luc Godard, and Vittorio De Sica, and some contemporary ones like Sean Baker and Barry Jenkins. They really encouraged me to become a film rebel, and I started thinking to myself “I don’t need to wait on anyone to make a movie. I’m just going to make a movie.” So, I did.
I wrote my first feature in the summer of ’18. I would force to write three pages a day, no matter what. I moved to LA temporarily before my wedding and would spend a couple of hours writing here and there. I had completed the script in no time. However, the obsessiveness over the project definitely took a toll on me. I remember waking up in the middle of the night on my honeymoon in Portland. I was overthinking the story, and I realized there were a lot of flaws with the script. So, I put the script on the shelf and forgot about it. I knew I wanted to make a feature film at the age of 23, and I knew I had the summer for production. I kept writing, this time I changed the setting back to my hometown in Colombia. Right after I finished the outline, I realized the project was too big for me to handle. I needed to take a small production so I could really focus on the story. So in October of that year, I had another idea.
I took a short I had written in 2017 and turned it into a feature. I woke up at 4 am every morning for three months working on the story, and I fell in love with it. The production seemed simple and manageable, so in January I decided that this was the film I would make. I started gathering a lot of artists and people to help me with the project. We will be shooting my debut feature “Three Bedrooms” in June over the span of a week! The story takes place in a house as a family four stays back while a hurricane passes through the state. I’m really excited to see where this film goes, and I so damn proud that I’ve been able to take such a crazy idea and stay on course for success.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Absolutely it has not been a smooth road. If you’re not constantly questioning if this is the thing that you want to do, you might not be doing it right. The biggest challenge is coping with the fear and anxiety that comes with realizing that things may not work out, and yet you are sacrificing time and money that you may never see again. There have been a lot of times when I have wrongfully denied my wife of time because I’m workshopping a challenging scene, and I can’t figure out how to get it to work. And if it doesn’t work then I get cranky. So then I’m not only denying her time, but also not in a good mood, and that affects her. She’s been a baller for being so patient throughout this whole process.
It can be really frustrating knowing that I could have been an engineer (which I considered), be making easy bank and coming home to watch Netflix with the wife. Nope. I get home and it’s time to work on your side project until bedtime. You have to be intentional about balancing your life, but it almost never is balanced. And then it might not work out! Poof. All that time that you could have spent drinking margaritas with your wife somewhere in the Caribbean got wasted because it just didn’t work out. That’s a huge fear of mine.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Wish Creative – what should we know?
In March of this year, my wife and I decided to open a movie production company called “Wish Creative.” Our focus is to get to make all these damn movies and creative projects in our heads! We want to make authentic content; the things we care about. No corporate BS. We just want to express ourselves using filmmaking and photography as a tool.
This is a very new startup, so we are navigating what this really means for us, but one thing is clear: we want to be honest about the art we are putting out there. Wish Creative is here to aide the development of the arts in South Florida. We want the community to have a place to turn and look and say “these people are having fun and creating quality content.” “Three Bedrooms” is our first company effort, and we can’t wait to get this movie out into the world.
What’s your outlook for the industry over the next 5-10 years?
The movie industry is going through a transitioning stage. The development of technology, accessibility and industry monopoly has put the movie industry in the weirdest of spots. It’s so easy to make a movie nowadays so that now there is too much available content. Big Hollywood players are competing against middle school YouTubers for eyes, and it cannot get weirder than that. People only go to theaters to see the big Hollywood films, and yet the big players in Hollywood are playing it way too safe. Everything is becoming the reboot of a remake of content that was developed last century. I think Hollywood is being too shortsighted and if the big studios don’t do anything about it soon, they might be, without realizing it, falling into irrelevance.
Wish Creative is here to offer authenticity in moviemaking. We are a tiny production company, and yet you know that we care a lot about the stories being produced. We cannot account too much for all the big shifts and instability of the movie industry, but we can do is make a damn good movie that our audience will enjoy. That’s what we’re here to do.
Contact Info:
- Website: wishcreative.co
- Email: jose@wishcreative.co
- Instagram: @threebedroomsmovie
- Facebook: @threebedrooms
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