Since Jared Thomas opted out of college after high school graduation, he has followed enough dreams to write a travel guide for the gap year.
With the gap stretching into four years now, Thomas is well on his way to a career in film – or photography, or music, or writing.
Next week, he puts his passion of the moment on view in Vero with an evening of short films screened at Project Space 1785, the avant-garde gallery he and two friends opened earlier this year. Curated from contacts he made working on film sets in New York, plus his research on line, Thomas’ event promises to draw another crush of creative types seeking out alternatives to mainstream cultural offerings.
That Thomas at 22 is even part of the co-op gallery, certainly the most innovative in the downtown gallery cluster, speaks to his industriousness in a field many here consider a pastime.
His partners in the gallery venture, James Ruby Barsalou and Aric Attas, have degrees, careers and families; they carve out time for their fine art photography.
Thomas, who graduated from Indian River Charter High School in 2011, is still scraping by freelancing in film. He was heavily involved in theater at Charter’s arts academy; two years ago, he was back at the school helping out with a play when he met Barsalou, recently arrived from California to work as the school’s public relations coordinator.
The two got to talking, and Barsalou saw his spark.
“James let me borrow his spare camera,” says Thomas. “I knew nothing about photography. I didn’t know how to take pictures. I spent the month of September 2013 riding my bike around Vero trying to figure out how not to take bad pictures.”
At the end of that month, five of his photos were worthy of Project Space 1785’s first show in February, along with ten more he took in New York City last summer and fall.
That four-month stint in the city was spent working full-time on various film sets. Like photography, his introduction to film-making came through his own perseverance, acting on what seems an unstoppable curiosity.
“I wanted to decode it and figure it out,” he says. “Growing up in Vero, I never had the opportunity to observe a film set. I had no conception of the process, how the film came to be what it is. So I did a lot of research online watching videos, interviews with filmmakers, researching equipment, trying to get a handle on how the pieces come together.”
Through a friend of his father’s, a former neighbor when the family lived on the north barrier island, he heard mention of Reed Morano, whom the Guardian online referred to in a recent review as “the go-to cinematographer in the upper tier of American indies.”
Online, Thomas started researching her work, watching the films she’d worked on. Envisioning a detour to New York on a planned trip to Philadelphia, he asked his neighbor for Morano’s email address, and wrote her, introducing himself and inviting her for coffee.
“I just wanted to pick her brain,” he says. “She got back to me in, like, an hour. ‘I’d love to meet in person, however, I’m busy directing my first feature film.’ So I thought, why don’t I ask if I can somehow be involved in that project?”
That project turned out to be “Meadowland,” Morano’s first feature-length film in which she was both director and director of photography. Starring Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson, the film debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in April and is scheduled to be in theaters in October.
Thomas sent her a list of experiences he thought might be applicable, and a letter of recommendation from Michael Nafziger, his old theater teacher at Charter.
“I was anxious to learn and eager to understand,” he says. “I just wrote her and said, if there’s any way I could be helpful on this project I’d love to do it. I can relocate. Like, I’m down.”
A few emails later, Jared Thomas was an intern in “Meadowland”‘s art department.
“I didn’t even know what the art department does. I thought I’d be at a computer doing graphic design for marketing. Turns out, the art department basically deals with everything you see visually except the wardrobe, makeup and props.”
Thomas took the bus up from Philadelphia on a Sunday, settled into a sub-let studio, and reported to work that Monday.
Thomas dug in to learn all he could, staying on the set well past what was expected. “They were really urging me not to overwork myself, but I wanted to be in there and do it,” he says. “I was always around just in case they would let me do stuff.”
Soon, the internship snowballed into steady paid work.
When filming ended, friends on the set steered him to new jobs. One short film was set in a monastery in upstate New York. Then came a string of commercials, then a two-day gig with the National Geographic Channel show “Brain Games.”
At one point he was driving around New York in a “cube” truck picking up furniture for a set. “They’d give me a list and just say, ‘Go! Just figure it out!’“ he recalls. “I look back and say, Was that real?”
After four months away, he came home to Vero in December, and immediately took off for a two-week tour with his indie-rock band, Prayer Chain – he plays drums.
When he came back, he and his friends Barsalou and Attas went to Art Basel in Miami. On the way, they dreamed up Project Space 1785.
Back in Vero, they met with Attas’ friend, Neli Santamarina, who had just bought the L-shaped Len-Mar Plaza off Old Dixie Highway. Santamarina was sympathetic to the trio’s frustration with Vero’s mostly traditional art scene.
“I told them, push some buttons,” she says. “Take that little space and do whatever you want with it.”
Since it opened in February, Project Space 1785 has drawn full houses to its shows, though Thomas had to miss the most recent: he had another feature film to work on, starting in Muscogee, Oklahoma (he drove a loaded rental van there from New York), and wrapping in South Dakota.
It was a wild ride, at one point involving gutting the kitchen of a house in utter disrepair and installing even worse-looking cabinets culled from abandoned houses.
“The demo guy drove us around. We were all like, this is crazy. But this is what you do when you work in film. You grow accustomed to doing things but you’re never desensitized to how crazy it is.”
And the director-screenwriter was rewriting much of the script along the way; the crew was often in limbo until the day of the shoot.
“It was really stressful and kind of horrible at times but it was really cool. It was totally worth it. It was awesome,” he says. “It’s not lost on me how totally lucky I am.”
As for the film shorts series, two are shorts directed by friends he met in New York. The three others he came across in his research. Doors to the gallery open at 7 p.m. The first film starts at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 4. There is no charge but donations are accepted.
