I interviewed Jessica and Justin Crum many, many months ago, in December of 2018. They were originally supposed to be featured in February, but some big hits came around that time, and the podcast was shelved for quite a bit as I figured out how to move forward and sort a few things through. Since I interviewed them, they’ve celebrated one year of the Studio Downtown, ten years together as of June 7, and continued to work on their prospective projects, including a speaking engagement for Jessica at the Women Influencers AR networking event on Friday, September 13 in Little Rock. As for this series, my goal now is to offer the episodes twice monthly, instead of trying to publish once a week. To help with costs, I’ve set up a Patreon. Become a patron and get podcast episodes before anyone else, behind-the-scenes peeks, and more. Now, here’s the next episode of Sustaining Craft the Podcast, a series that features those in a creative field. Listen below to learn more or keep scrolling to read about Jessica and Justin Crum and how they work together in their careers as a creative director and filmmaker.

Jessica and Justin Crum, two creatives pursuing careers in design and film, had their first date at a cemetery.

They’d met at church through mutual friends and would go to the farmer’s market as a group afterward. Jessica was a young mother at the time, bringing her daughter with her in a stroller. “That’s when I found out he was so funny,” Jessica shared. “And I think he was comfortable being funny because he’s so shy, so really, if it had just been he and I, I don’t think he would have been so open, but we were with his friends, who introduced us.”

She invented an issue with her car and asked a friend for his number under the guise of asking him for help. When she texted, she asked if he’d like to visit somewhere else besides the market. “He didn’t text me back for four hours,” she shared.

“I was taking a nap,” Justin added.

“He stands by that alibi, but I don’t believe it,” Jessica said. “Who waits four hours to text you back when you’re asking them out?”

When he finally did text back, he first suggested a show that was taking place at a bar.

And Jessica was only 19 at the time, with a two-year-old daughter. “I was so embarrassed,” she said. “I said, ‘I can’t, I‘m not old enough to go in there.’ I thought it was just going to be over. Conversation over. You know, maybe in our next life.”

But Justin had another idea. ”And he says ‘Okay, there’s an art show at the cemetery. Do you want to go to that?’” Jessica said. “So he comes to get me, we go to the cemetery looking for the art show. Cemeteries there have events all the time. It’s pretty cool.”

By the time they arrived, the show was over, but the gate was still open. They decided to walk around the cemetery anyway⁠—and got locked inside. That’s where they had their first kiss, over the grave of Helen Hood. “If anyone out there knows who she is, I still wonder, who is she?” Jessica said. “That’s our wifi password.”

“For a long time, that was our password,” Justin clarified.

Now, married for ten years and living in Conway, Jessica is the owner and creative director of Silverlake Design Studio while Justin is the writer and director behind Farewell Films, the production that produced his upcoming film, Papaw Land.

Before they met in LA, they were teenagers in rural areas of Arkansas and Virginia, before stumbling into film and ending up in Hollywood.

Justin grew up in Stafford, Virginia, unsure of what he wanted to do. “I always wanted to do something different, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was until my junior year of high school,” Justin shared. “For one of my sophomore projects, we had a chance to do a video or a paper, and I would normally be like, ‘I’m doing the paper,’ because there’s no way I can be in a video or make a little movie.”

But his friend pushed Justin to do the video. “He forced me to do it,” Justin said. “And when we were doing it, we were dressed as women and running around this campfire and just having the best time. It was just so much fun, and I really came alive in that space. And the cool thing about movies is, not a lot of people are watching you live. You can just kind of get it right and show it to them when it’s ideal, so that appealed to me, too.”

He then took his high school’s video production class, an offering that was unusual for such a small town, which had him editing raw video footage from VHS tapes on multiple VCRs. “It was very rudimentary and that was a lot of fun,” Justin said. “It kind of made sense me, I don’t know why.”

He attended community college for two years, saving money and living with his parents so he could make his way to California. In 2003, he headed to film school in Long Beach, California.

While Justin was writing scripts in southern California, Jessica was on her way via New York City, pursuing a desire to act. She’d grown up in Pine Bluff, visiting Little Rock for commercial acting classes and audition trips to New York City. “My parents were 100 percent on board with helping me pursue that dream, which was so cool,” Jessica said. “And then when it came down to it, I was ready to move to New York, and so I was looking for a college there. Because even though they were really supportive, I needed to have a backup plan and go to college.”

While taking the subway, she met a girl who explained she was attending the Fashion Institute of Technology. When Jessica got back home, she researched fashion schools and found the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, in downtown Los Angeles. Her acting teacher in LA, and by age 16, Jessica was in southern California. “I moved to Los Angeles when I was 16 because I begged my mom to let me drop out of school in ninth grade,” Jessica said. “And she was like, ‘If you homeschool yourself, you can.’ And so I did. I wrote my own transcript in Excel and printed it off and made her sign it.”

By age 17, she was pregnant.

But she stayed in school, a decision she credits to rebellion. “Honestly, even the success came from rebellion,” Jessica said. “I was rebellious so I wanted to leave Arkansas. I was rebellious so I was messing around when I shouldn’t be. And then I was rebellious that when people said, ‘You need to move back to Arkansas and give your child a better life and yourself a shot at finishing school,’ and all this stuff, I said, ‘I could do it. I could do this.’ So I stayed in school.”

And she found that her classmates and teachers were helpful. “My pattern making teacher would bring little beanies to school that she had knitted for my daughter,” Jessica shared. “They were all really supportive.”

A few years later, while working in the fashion industry, Jessica stormed into her coworker’s office.

The coworker was married to one of Justin’s film school friends, and she invited Jessica to their church. “I stomped into her office and said, ‘I need to go back to church,’ because my life was a mess,” Jessica said. “I was a single mom and just needed a community. So she brought me to her church on Hollywood Boulevard and there Justin was, with his long hair and tall stature.”

Spending time together at the farmer’s market after church helped Jessica see past Justin’s reserved exterior and prompted her to ask him out. Despite their shared interest in creative fields, they discovered that their personalities were on opposite extremes.

“He is so practical,” Jessica shared. “He’s the one who was laughing at me when I said I was going to buy a house in Los Angeles with $300,000.”

“It was 200,” Justin interjected.

“Was it 200?” Jessica said. “In my head, it was 300.”

That practicality permeated Justin’s work in film. “He’s always been the realist,” Jessica added. “To me, it is interesting that he is in the creative industry because he’s got a very logical brain, so I’m definitely the one who is spontaneous.”

“Yeah, she’s the free bird,” Justin shared. “I like to have things planned out.”

“Which is so necessary when you’re making a movie,” Jessica continued. “It takes two or three years.”

They decided to move to Conway in 2014, where Justin began working for PBS creating documentaries. He created educational documentaries, included one that aired nationally. But with little room to grow, he decided to take a step back into the scripts he’d written previously. “My roots are very much in narrative film making,” Justin shared. “And I did grow to love documentaries there, I didn’t want to only do documentaries, and there’s no way to branch out from that there with PBS, really, unless you’re Downton Abbey. I just felt it was the right time to move into other scripts I had written before and start producing those. PBS was a bit of a training ground for me in a lot of ways and built my confidence up. I left there with the intention of making the film I’m making now, which is Papaw Land. I’ve been working on that for a year and a half. And it’ll probably be another year or so. It’s a long process.”

And Jessica tried to continue her career as a fashion designer. She was freelancing for her contacts in LA and started saying yes to other projects. “When people locally would say, ‘What do you do?’ I would say I’m a designer,” Jessica explained. “I would tell them textile design, fabric design, graphic t-shirts, and they’d go, ‘Oh! Could you make my logo?’ I was like, ‘Probably.’ I’m a yes person, so I was like, ‘Yes, of course I can,’ and then secretly I was like, ‘I’ll figure it out.’”

She volunteered for nonprofits as well, building up their portfolio and assisting with exposure and marketing. Jessica started Silverlake, creating graphics, logos, and websites in 2014, while Justin has been working with Farewell Films since 2017.

Jessica also discovered she was able to grow her business in small steps, building her team a few hours a week at a time. “I hired my first project manager at five hours a week,” said Jessica. “Which I feel like is very encouraging for anybody out there that wants to start a business. You don’t have to have a full-time job offer for someone to get on board with a mission. And I kept it intentional about only designing for local businesses. I’m not going after corporate or big ticket clients because local businesses need good design work.”

Justin produced Papaw Land in 2018, raising just enough through a Kickstarter, investors, and the contributions he and Jessica provided to finish filming. He hopes to make more. “I want to keep making films,” Justin said. “That’s my main thing for me. I’m hoping to progressively step up in terms of budget with the films. Hopefully, we can make a few and reevaluate at that point. I want to keep making movies. I want to do locally. I’d love to eventually get to the point where we can foster a more creative environment in Conway, specifically.”

And Jessica wants to prove that design businesses have a place in Conway. She also wants to encourage younger generations, including their own two children, to consider the creative industry as a legitimate career. “We’re raising our kids here,” Jessica said. “We want them to be exposed to culture that’s not like our culture and creative career options. I mean, they have no choice. I’m a designer, Justin’s a filmmaker and my daughter’s dad is a photographer, so good luck being an accountant or something normal. She already tells people that she’s an abstract artist. But that’s awesome. I want every kid to feel like that’s a tangible thing, making a living as a creative person or in your creative passion is attainable but it’s so hard. There’s no sugar coating it. It is hard. But I’ve been trying to get a seat at the table with the chamber of commerce here and other business leaders here to affirm the legitimacy of a design business, honestly. It’s not normal. There are just a few of us here in Conway. The whole point of that is when a kid says ‘I want to be a designer or fashion design or graphic designer when I grow up’, their parents are like, ‘You don’t need a backup plan. That is the plan. Let’s do it.’”

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As always, there’s a lot more in the episode. We also discussed how Jessica’s involvement in Justin’s film Papaw Land grew due to her love of chaos, the coworking space of the Studio Downtown that Silverlake Design Studio helped bring to life in downtown Conway, and more of how their personalities balance each other as they ask for and provide feedback on their projects.

Follow Justin’s adventures in film making on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (there are now some followers on Twitter!). Also, check out the Kickstarter to see more about the cast and crew behind the movie.

Find Jessica’s work on Instagram and Facebook. The Studio Downtown is also on Instagram and Facebook.

Be sure to follow Sustaining Craft on Instagram for free and Patreon for a little bit of money. Even the lowest tier level gets early access to podcast episodes–and helps produce Sustaining Craft more often.