Meet Jonathan Gabriel of Arrhythmia Films in Midtown

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathan Gabriel.

Jonathan, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in Syracuse New York and from a very early age, I loved movies. I would very often grab my family’s video camera and create skits with my brothers and present them to my parents. It would often become an event to gather around the television and have me present these videos. I especially loved very stylistic and experimental storytelling.

This passion has grown throughout my time in high school and college. Although I did graduate with a bachelor’s degree in film production, my career path in film wasn’t a smooth ride and infact was a very bumpy ride. As we all are aware, film industry opportunities are very particular to geographic regions. It was hard for me to break into the industry back home right after college. That year, my life started steering away from film. However, the idea of not making films bothered me. It was a life-changing moment because that simple thought gave me the courage to jump start my film career.

So when one of my friends from my hometown told me Atlanta was starting to gain some traction and that the film industry was moving down there, I packed my bags, quit my corporate job and moved to Atlanta pursuing film full time in 2013. Trust me, it was scary.

I moved into an indy film resident house called The Thunderdome; featuring a community of like-minded filmmakers sharing gear and life experiences. This was a great community to break ground and surround myself with people who were also passionate about film and pursuing their own dreams in the industry. I have become more comfortable and confident in searching for my own path. After working in the industry for the past few years, I have since found my creative voice in emotion-based storytelling and haven’t stopped since.

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?
The film industry isn’t an easy industry. It is all about connections, knowledge, skill sets, and continuous learning. It is NOT a 9-5 job with benefits and regular paychecks. It is glamorous in outsiders’ eyes but for sure not an easy role. There is also a lot of competition which can bring out the worst in people. Often many also get into this industry and try to walk over people, bringing in drama and making the entire film making experience very unpleasant for others.

This is one of the main reasons I decided to start my own film company, Arrhythmia Films; to apply what I learned from my “bad sets” and change the industry 1 set at a time. I don’t want to just make films; I want to make them well; treating the client, talent AND crew with respect. I know first hand the times I was treated with respect on set, I went above and beyond for my team and was happy to work with those teams over and over again, and still do to this day.

It was also very important for Arrhythmia Films to create projects that our crew feel a sense of ownership with and share responsibility with. Filmmaking isn’t just about profit, viewership and all the data behind it. To us, filmmaking is a team sport, you really can’t do it alone. When you take care of your team, they take care of you. I strongly believe that will help get a better film out.

The impact of film has the power to change lives. I think recently mainstream media has been mostly focused on box office viewership, opening weekend ratings and return on investment, but are slowly losing the essence of what makes a film great; inside and out. The power of the media means as a member of this industry, we share the responsibility to create genuine, thought-provoking, and life-changing content. That’s why Arrhythmia has a mission and is passionate to empower genuine storytelling that provoke emotions.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Arrhythmia Films – what should we know?
Every story is different and like an arrhythmia, we want you to experience heartbeats in different ways by guiding you on journeys. Good stories also don’t rely on simply one emotion, the human experience is comprised of a dynamic group of mixed emotions. Often it is difficult to share your personal stories with those who haven’t been wearing the same shoes as you. Here at Arrhythmia, we aim to help bridge this communication gap and create empathy with each other through emotion-based content.

At Arrhythmia, we strongly believe that film could be understood universally in some artistic format. For instance, people around the world regardless of the languages, cultures and backgrounds, understand old Charlie Chaplin films. The essence of filmmaking is to make people feel empathy. At Arrhythmia, we have been exposed to a lot of influence and techniques from foreign films, which shapes our storytelling methods. For example, many Asian films and animation rely on visually exaggerated inner emotions while other countries may rely on more realistic subtleties in human nature, that don’t reveal everything bluntly, but the absence says it all to our audience. Every story is unique and shouldn’t have a universal way of sharing. That is why we are all about experimenting and testing new ways of storytelling, depending on the goal of the story. We specialize in visually bridging the gap, making our human experiences relatable and memorable causing our audience to truly empathize and understand.

We at Arrhythmia also want people to come to Atlanta and view ATL as ATL, not the “Hollywood in the South”. We want people to come here and see the beauty of the indie film industry and see how we are putting efforts to understand their culture, appreciate their art format and hear their voice. WE want to become the pioneer to welcome more and more artists regardless of the cultures, languages, and backgrounds, to ATL and be genuine to their own hearts and make their own art.

Art is universal but heavily influenced by culture. Arts need to be inclusive, not exclusive. We don’t see a lot of international films in the U.S. however, these are beautifully made and very great filming techniques are used. Hence, we want to become the platform to welcome those arts and share these stories with our audience. Within our team, we are constantly asking ourselves: How could we make art genuine? How could we become pioneer to encourage more intercultural exchange in film? This is what Arrhythmia wants to do and passionate about.

In the past few years, we also found our niche in rejuvenating corporate training videos. Our clients enjoy partnering with us to brainstorm and create unique learning materials for their employees. We truly enjoy the challenges of creating unique and engaging content based on our clients’ custom needs.

What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?
One of our favorite projects is our “Living Nightmare” anthology where we recreated ACTUAL real-life nightmares as close as we could. Nightmares are super fascinating because they aren’t real, but while your dreaming, they are very realistic. You could experience lasting trauma that is burned into your brain for your entire life, and yet, it never even happened and many have difficulty describing them before the memory slips away.

When we took on this project, we didn’t want to simply retell these experiences with a narration, but we wanted to immerse you in the fears and feelings of what it’s like being in an actual nightmare. Since each person’s nightmare was so personal and very dynamic, we knew this would be a perfect fit. We were able to be very experimental since dreams are so open-ended with endless opportunities and no formal rules to follow. We had the pleasure of trying out new ways of making your feel those hard nightmare moments on the screen: not being able to wake up, sleep paralysis, teeth falling out, being chased, and the unknown to name a few. We were honored to work with different talented film crews for each nightmare in order to give each a unique style and take, playing off the filmmakers strengths. We also decided to go completely practical with this series which gave us the opportunity to really unlock our creative storytelling minds.

Another project worth mentioning was our music video we created for Fox Populi “She’s Fighting”. We figured out pretty early on in our pre-production meetings that a super important element was to make sure we describe what it feels like to be a woman fighting in this crazy world and also how we all need to support women now more than ever. Being a man in this conversation, I recognized the needs and was eager to bring more women into this project considering there is a large gender gap in the film industry, currently it is predominated by men. This was a perfect opportunity to not only make a good music video but make it right by being very intentional about who we partnered with. We sought out a production team not only who was qualified but cared about supporting women. In this production, we are super proud to have an 80% female crew and support to back it up. We had an incredible team that I still work with to this day. I hope to continue taking on more projects with Arrhythmia Films and utilize our resources to continue to empower females with our company.

Contact Info:

• Website: Arrhythmiafilms.com
• Email: ArrhythmiaFilms@gmail.com
• Instagram: Arrhythmia Films

Image Credit:
Heather Troutman did most of our photos.

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