One Year Later: Foolish of Me
- Jared Jones
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
April 25th, last year, we premiered Foolish of Me, and when I think back on it now, the film itself almost feels secondary to how everything came together.
At the beginning of 2024, I was wrapping my first full year freelancing. I was working consistently as a DP, traveling bi-coastal, taking on projects that made sense financially. On paper, everything looked good. But being back in Houston, I wasn’t building the kind of community I actually wanted. Not because it didn’t exist, but because I wasn’t really available for it. I was moving too much, always onto the next thing.
So I made a decision to slow that down and actually be present here.
And in a way that didn’t make a lot of sense at first, I made myself available as a PA.
For context, as a director of photography, you’re typically leading the visual side of a production. A PA is at the bottom of the call sheet. Not the least important role, but definitely the lowest position. Still, I wasn’t chasing position at that point. I was trying to get around the right people and actually build something in Houston.
Around that time, Jay Clark had posted on his Instagram story looking for a PA on a commissioned documentary shoot. Jay and his team, now known as Slate 50 Studios, do a lot of that kind of work and do it well. I reached out, showed up, and got on set.
That day it was Jay, Frank Xavier, Jeremy Ortiz, Jordan Kelly, and myself.Everybody clicked easily. It didn’t feel transactional, and it didn’t feel like a one-off. It felt familiar, like we had already been building together.
At some point during the shoot, I mentioned that I had a full storyboard for a project I had been sitting on. Not a loose idea, but something fully thought through. A song, a visual, a story that I hadn’t made the time to bring to life yet. Jay looked at it and was immediately on board. He was like, “Let’s do it,” and that was really all it took to get things moving.
From there, Foolish of Me came together through that same group. I directed and created the project, but it was built with the people I had just stepped into community with. What started as me showing up as a PA on a commissioned shoot turned into an opportunity to lead something of my own.
We shot the film over the course of a weekend, two days total. A lot of it was at Jay and Frank’s house, and some of it was in Midtown. During one of those Midtown moments, we stepped away from the gear briefly and came back to find that Jeremy’s equipment had been stolen. That easily could have been the point where everything stalled out or fell apart, but it had the opposite effect. If anything, it made us more committed to finishing the project. We had already lost something in the process, so there was no version of this where we didn’t see it through.
A few months later, on April 25th, we premiered the film at the Glassell School of Art. That moment doesn’t happen without community and the relationships that had already been built. It was a reflection of what happens when the work and the people align.
I remember being nervous that night, not because I didn’t believe in the film, but because it was the first time we were putting something out together in front of people who genuinely support us. Friends, collaborators, and people who showed up to be part of it. That part mattered just as much as the film itself.
A year later, I don’t really look at Foolish of Me as just a project. It feels more like a turning point. From that moment, things didn’t stay the same. Jay Clark and Frank went on to formally build out Slate 50 Studios into a production company that continues to support and tell stories for organizations in the arts and beyond. On my end, Creative Bay has grown into something more focused and intentional, a publication centered around music and the stories behind the artists shaping it.
More than anything, we’re all a bit more grounded in Houston now. What started as a group of people coming together for a shoot has turned into something that continues to build, project after project, story after story.
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