Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Noel.
Hi Jordan, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Sound & Vision. My artistic drive always comes back to the alchemical combination of these two elements. Visual art – drawing, painting, collage – was an early obsession but didn’t intersect with my deep love of music until I was in middle school. In 7th grade, I began creating album covers for an imaginary music group, cringily called Those Darn Pigeons. Between 8th and 9th grade I started my first band, FLOSS, intent on attaching actual music to my album art dreams. I instantly fell in love with performing; the essential third leg in my conception of sound and vision.
Participation in the Atlanta hardcore punk scene of the 1990s taught me about DIY ethics (and the magic of xerox machines in art-making) while a parallel fascination with 1970s glam rock steeped me in fashion and theatrics. However, my interests were hardly limited to those two genres. My dad’s fairly eccentric music taste led me to exploring all sorts of things from George Benson to Andreas Vollenweider to the Hampton Grease Band. High school provided an opportunity to learn film photography and introduced me to experimental animation. I wanted to experience and try everything!
Oddly, moviemaking wasn’t anything I even considered at the time. We didn’t have a television until late middle school; instead, we had a small computer monitor with a VCR attached along with a small collection of VHS tapes: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars: A New Hope, The Natural, and Pretty Woman (which was kept out of reach of my sister and me). We would occasionally rent a movie from Blockbuster. Unlike many families in the 80s/90s we never had a camcorder. I loved movies but the making of them felt far beyond my reach.
College opened up a whole new art world for me. I studied painting, graphic design, fashion design, and non-Western religion at Appalachian State University. However, most of my time consisted of running around in a small scene of painters, illustrators, writers, and musicians. This was an incredibly inspiring and educational time – both inside and outside of class. After two years in Boone and a tour playing a half-broken guitar in a spaghetti-throwing, fake-blood-spitting punk band called Candy Ass Pansy Bitches, I quit school and moved to Athens, GA to chase the art life in a slightly bigger college town, reuniting with many of my high school collaborators. It was there that I opened my first (and last?) solo art show of paintings, performed and roadied on as many tours as possible, designed albums/merch for bands I wasn’t in, fell in love with my wife, worked in a vintage clothing shop, paid the bills as a fine-dining maître d’, became obsessed with cinema, and bought a used camcorder. The camcorder’s initial purpose was to document tour adventures but quickly became a tool for moviemaking experimentation. These forays didn’t amount to much other than a few hours of strange (and pretty uncompelling) footage but a moviemaking aspiration was born.
Around this same time (2003?) I made what was, unofficially, my first short film. Created over the course of a few days on a friend’s computer using Microsoft Paint, it told the story of a branch snapped from its tree during a storm. Sadly, that little animated short has been lost to time and the digital graveyard, never to be seen again. I began editing tour footage into little documentaries, was on my first film set (a short film called Street Lamp Jaguar), and played a character in my brilliant friend Will Goss’ second cult feature film, Magenta’s Caress 2. Moviemaking started to feel nearly within reach.
By 2010, I was making a life as a graphic designer. I was creating art for Manchester Orchestra, The Whigs, Counting Crows, Kevin Devine, and many others. One of those was a Nashville band called MONA. As the band and their manager were talking about creating a music video for their first single, “Listen To Your Love,” an email intended for their guitarist (also named Jordan) mistakenly arrived in my inbox. I jumped at the opportunity to create a video. I pitched an idea and they went for it. Suddenly, I had become music video director. Whoops! Within the year I had directed and edited half a dozen music videos. I was having a blast.
The next summer I ran into an old friend from Atlanta at a concert. Lionsgate had optioned a script he wrote a few years prior but failed to actually produce it. He was frustrated. I was loving the music video adventure I was on but felt anxious to try something a little less constrained to a 3 minute song. He sent me an idea for a short film that involved an animated pink elephant in a live action world. I loved it. We got to work, assembled an astoundingly talented crew, found some funding, and released Rooney’s World onto the film festival circuit in 2012. I felt like I had found myself. I had also found the other crucial ingredient: a filmmaking partner, the Thelma to my Louise, Hudson Phillips. Our partnership is pretty unique as writer/producer (Hudson) and director/editor (me) and I believe it has been an essential component in our output.
Rooney’s World was followed by several more short films (and more music videos) until 2017 when we shot our first feature film, This World Alone. Our second, Guacamole Yesterdays, premiered in 2023, and our brand-spankin’-new one, Gargantuan, premieres on the festival circuit in September 2026.
I’m still just a self-taught, scrapy, diy director/editor evermore grateful for the opportunity to make these movies. It’s a never-ending quest to figure out the best way to tell a story in this medium. That’s much of the joy of this work. Every project is wildly different and uniquely challenging. As much as I love the final product of moviemaking – it’s all about the journey, the exploration, the alchemical magic of sound + vision.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Hahahaha! Are any roads smooth? We live in the American South, land of potholes!
Honestly, it’s tough out there. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to make movies at all, let alone three features in nine years. Movies are expensive endeavors and funding is difficult, even for the micro-budget films that we make. While it is a priority for us that everyone involved in our productions gets paid, Hudson and I (among others) have chosen to defer our pay in order to put more money into each project. Between directing and editing, each of these movies requires many thousands of hours. I have two school-age daughters and manage/clean our AirBnB – it’s a tremendous task to bob and weave through all those schedules to find time for the filmmaking. This pursuit is often taxing and difficult on my family. Lucky for me, my wife and daughters are generous beyond compare with their patience and support.
When I was creating visual art in the music industry, my goals were constantly bifurcated between creative aspirations and financial fulfillment. It undermined my deep love for design. The business side was soul-crushing and the art side was compromised. I vowed early in my filmmaking journey not to let that happen again. Thus, while filmmaking has not yet been financially lucrative, the ROI artistically is through the roof. And yet, filmmaking retains its business side whether I like it or not. I’m just very careful about not letting the business corrupt the art.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My true love is directing and editing narrative feature films. The collaborative nature of the work with both cast and crew is art in action. It scratches my deep itch to create within the overlapping Venn Diagram of sound, vision, and performance. Directing is essentially creating an environment for these elements to interact, enhance each other, to become bigger than the sum of their parts. Editing is really just scissors and glue applied to moving pictures and sound. It’s also another stage of discovery and experimentation. I’ve never found anything else that can excite me on so many artistic levels while also being collaborative and existing as a tangible, lasting experience into the future.
While I adore all the collaborative aspects of directing, my favorite part is working with actors. I deeply admire the vulnerability and trust required to deliver authentic performances. What a privilege it is to create a safe space for that kind of play.
In the right circumstances I love making music videos. In 2025, my dear friend Langhorne Slim and I created four music videos for his album, The Dreamin’ Kind. These were the first music videos I’d directed in several years and it was great fun. These videos also presented an opportunity to finally work with my extremely talented wife, Lily Noel, a set designer / prop stylist / food stylist / production designer.
I embrace an openness to new experiences, to ambitious artistic adventures, to trying to do too much with too little money in too little time. I believe that magic fills the gaps, that intention guides chance, and that the faith of a gathered few makes the impossible possible. Nowhere else have I ever found all of these magical elements at work en masse than in the process of moviemaking. I believe this collective act has the power to change lives in every stage of the process, for both filmmakers and audiences.
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
I usually sit in the front row in the movie theatre. I want the full experience. The longest continuous walk I’ve ever taken was 28 miles. It was worth it. As a child I was given the opportunity to taste test both the green and the orange slimes at Nickelodeon Studios. Green tasted better. I have a substantial and ever-growing collection of vintage Kenny G t-shirts. Now you know the way to my heart. I believe that friendship is the meaning of life. Hi, I’m Jordan.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jordan-noel.com
- Instagram: @noelcommajordan
- Other: https://mirrorboxfilms.com
Image Credits
Calvin Bowers
Erika Doss
