Kicking Ass TOGETHER for 5 Years 🤜🎂🎥☯️

This summer marks 5 years since we opened up Justice For Hire as a SHARED cinematic universe that anyone could be a part of. The video below is a thank you to ALL OF YOU that have helped make this “crazy” idea a reality:

But WHY make JFH as a community (I mean, personally)? Because I needed people to LOVE creating action scenes like I love it - because if you love it and I love it, we can do it together and I could stop feeling so ALONE in my creative journey. And since I KNOW I can make action, I needed people to know they could too.

AND WE DID IT, and it feels amazing to have a global community telling a story together! But HOW did we empower each other to create something like a movie or show together when no one - no studio or network or filmmaker - does that? I’ll tell you how it started…

Besides a phone, we didn’t have any tech back in 2018. All I had were ideas on what it would look and feel like if people stepped into their own characters within our story world, and a process for making that a reality (which is now patent pending). Given that JFH had a record-setting comic book series and previous films and videos that began when I was in high school (so it’s actually our 24th anniversary of JFH ), I felt like finding a jumping on point in the universe timeline was difficult, so I decided on a soft reboot that would allow me to figure out later how to integrate all of the previous content. I thought if we had a single short video that shows a world with an app that’s like Uber for heroes - hire a hero or become one and get paid - people would be inspired by the idea. I remember being in NY holding my 3-year-old son as he slept the night before I had to fly him back to LA to his mom thinking that if I didn’t get up and write that script, my life wouldn’t change the way I wanted. It took me all my might to pull away from him at 1am and I wrote a 4-page script in 2 hours, sent it off to my cinematographer Somnang Vann, and by the time the flight landed, we were talking shooting locations and scheduling. 2 weeks later we shot our very first JFHSCU scene (Justice For Hire Shared Cinematic Universe) with a mix of people that were interested in the idea, including actors and non-actors.

The short was made, I cut a trailer within a few days, and we were almost instantly selected for the Urban Action Showcase (where we won Best Trailer later that year and have since become a partner of the event).

Next, we needed to invite people - anyone who so desired - to create with us. Since the premise of crowdsourcing heroes needed to have some humble beginnings in the JFH story world, I decided that we could have a meetup for heroes, film it as a backstory scene to the first short we made, and create new characters and stories on our phones with anyone who showed up. I promoted the event on Instagram and Meetup.com for the first Saturday in October 2018 and had a mix of friends and newcomers attend. That kicked off our monthly meetups that continue to this day.

Fast forward to us having our own app made by fellow cast members Andra Roxana Stanciu (our developer), Autumn Noel Kelly (our graphics), and Tommy Redis (our tech advisor) with support from our JFH App Test Team. We launched the app early due our first episode going viral on TikTok, which led to an overwhelming amount of content coming in.

Now, with hundreds of hours of footage from people all around the world, we are weeks away from the launch of the new season of JFH. I promise you’ll see how all of our work ties together cinematically in a way that I hope you’ll love as much we do.

Special thanks to our martial arts filmmaking homes, NY Best Kickboxing led by Sifu David Ross in NY and Shaolin American Self Defense Academy led by Sensei Donnie Jeffcoat in LA, both of whom have been instrumental in giving us a safe space to create and flourish. And to Ric Meyers, Demetrius Angelo, Telly Wong, and Jeff Gomez for their support of the development of our creative, community, and industry efforts over the years to help us get here. And of course, thank Y O U! Here’s to many more years of JFH and more shows and shared cinematic universes on ReelwUrld.

With Love,

Jan

Justice For Hire Founder aka Hero #0

DISCLAIMER: JFH Is NOT a vigilante app. It is for collaborative cinematic storytelling purposes.

#HeroesUnitingWorldwide

Our 1st Action Filmmaking Event in LA (and we're on Fox News!) 🎥🤜☯️

We have our first ticketed event this weekend in partnership with ActNOW, LA’s LGBTQIA+ acting collective. I could tell you all about it, but so could Fox News! The event is all about people creating characters, learning safe action choreography, and making an epic scene within the Justice For Hire Cinematic Universe. You can get tickets here:

https://rainbowrated.com/shop/cmlp3bnzae9k4fh-m2rwz-nwsmn-hzl7w-2xhfd-gm4py

Be there in whatever gear your character wears, whether full-on superhero outfit or a plain clothes hero like me.

Fun fact, this event kicks off monthly action scene events for JFH in Los Angeles and New York, and we’ll announce the rest soon. This is a major step for us making real movies and shows with our community around the world in-person and on our app simultaneously. The events also give us a new way to expand our community and grow our investor base on Wefunder (if you’re over 18, you can own part of our company).

I’ll let you know how it goes in next week’s very special update. ;)

Thanks for being part of the Heroes Culture.

With Love,

Jan aka Hero #0

DISCLAIMER: JFH Is NOT a vigilante app. It is for collaborative cinematic storytelling purposes.

#HeroesUnitingWorldwide

I Learned Real Action Requires Empathy 🥋☯️

JFH got REAL when I stopped an attacker at church on 4th of July weekend. This post is NOT about our JFH show or our shared cinematic universe. It's about a very real incident that happened to me and how it relates to my life, JFH, and my view of humanity. I made my first citizen’s arrest at church when a homeless man attacked our prayer group in Hollywood. Here’s a short video of the incident:

My gratitude for Tai Chi, Professor John Machado’s Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and Rener Gracie’s videos on how to deal with real world conflict safely has never been higher. This trifecta of training (Tai Chi’s sensitivity, BJJ’s positions & transitions, and Rener’s practical strategies) helped me make choices to take the least destructive route to restrain a violent person until the police arrived. Until this day, with all my pro fighting training aside, I had never been in a “real fight”. Here, amongst my spiritual community, I felt truly aligned to use my training to protect them, including my mother and my son who were present. My son and I locked eyes many times when I was on the floor, and I knew he knew everything would be okay. This moment has many learnings for me as a human, a martial artist, a spiritual seeker, and as a filmmaker. I’ll share a few now:

1. Flow vs. Thinking — I grew up around martial arts masters that described real fights as a flow that “just happens”. And that you should train so much that you “don’t need to think”. That’s untrue from my experience. It was my ability to think under pressure that allowed me to keep myself, the homeless man, the people around us, AND the property of the church safe. Strategic thinking should be trained just as much as physical techniques, and both have spiritual implications to explore.

2. Empathy Over Everything — Movies, shows and comics glorify punching people to solve problems. I didn’t throw a single punch, although the homeless man caught me with an uppercut. After I checked in on my bleeding lip, I decided that there was no purpose in making him feel the same pain. He was already in pain from his past. The only objective was to stop him from fighting. That’s why I chose the rear naked hold. I didn’t even put the “choke” part in the hold because I didn’t want the homeless man to lose consciousness. We just wanted him to be still.

3. EVERY HUMAN needs some form of self defense training — I’ve always felt like this, but this weekend made my conviction stronger. Real strength is knowing that you are able to step up to the situation in front of you and positively impact it. No one in the room besides my elderly mother and my 8-year-old son were aware of what to do in a moment like this. I had to instruct other members of the prayer group to keep their distance, keep video going, to call the police and more. We as a culture need to have a basic understanding of protocols in violent situations to ensure that we can all work together for the optimal outcome.

The police finally came after 45 minutes of me holding the homeless man in the same position. They were complete gentlemen, and the main officer I spoke with was a fellow BJJ practitioner from the Gracie Baja family. For the most part, I’ve only had excellent interactions with police my entire life. I’ve found them always there to help me. That does not mean that they are not part of a broken system, which they are. The homeless man will be back on the streets by mid-week. I needed to physically go to the police station the day after the incident to file a trespassing order on behalf of my prayer group so the police could arrest the homeless man again on sight in case he returns, but that doesn’t solve or prevent a problem. The world needs fixing and it’s up to us.

This situation reminded me of why I started our show Justice For Hire to envision a new Justice system starting by making every person a hero. In the spirit of Star Trek, I’ll be exploring these ideas and more in JFH as part of ReelwUrld’s first community made show to inspire more conversations and progress. In the meantime, for the sake of yourself, your loved ones, and your community, please train yourself in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Tai Chi (both). Thank you to my family and all of my teachers that have kept me deepening my education.

If you want to train with me, check the JFH App's Tai Chi to the People section of the Watch page (the play button icon) or my Tai Chi YouTube channel where I release videos daily.

With Love,

Jan

Justice For Hire Founder aka Hero #0

Ally or Rival me on the JFH App.

DISCLAIMER: JFH Is NOT a vigilante app. It is for collaborative cinematic storytelling purposes.

#HeroesUnitingWorldwide