Patrick Jackson + Daneeta Loretta Jackson

Brief and present history of the ElekTrik Zoo

From 2008: Our narrative film "Destiny lives Down the Road" won Best Short at the New Orleans Film Festival and screened internationally at such festivals as the 55th BFI London Film Festival and "Oscar qualifiers" like Bristol Brief Encounters and Flickerfest among others. It was independently filmed in St. Bernard Parish and cast with non-actors. We continued to make films set in the "Down the Road" landscape and are presently editing our latest film "Nicabob" about a lonely teenage boy who starts a Youtube channel to connect with the outside world. But, something surprising also came out of the world we created in films.

Our "Down the Road" films attracted the curators at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans who commissioned us to produce a major exhibit: "Chalmatia: a fictional place Down the Road," which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. The installation included over 400 photographs, 86 text pieces, a 48-minute film and an installation component. We physically molded a story onto an oval space that twisted up and through three floors.

"Alien Planet," short story from "Chalmatia: a fictional place Down the Road."

This work brought our gritty and magical storyscape of "Down the Road" (a fictional place, which, heretofore, existed only at festivals, online and in our heads) into the realm of the physically real. Our fictional stories were made manifest.

Our work has been exhibited and screened all over the online and offline world and in the strangest of places. One consistent impulse we have in our partnership is to blur the line between fiction and reality. Both hold the same weight for us. We understand the value of a good story. We start with something that really happened, or a person that really was, or a place that really existed. Then we go to work telling beautiful lies. What comes out of the other end is a new story: a fiction that may hold greater truths than the thing that really was.

Daneeta was born in Big Branch, Louisiana. She made her way to California then to Japan where she worked as a writer and content creator for 10 years. Then, she moved to London and attended the London Film School where she met Patrick and together formed the ElekTrik Zoo. They were both in class 142 a.k.a. The Last of the Independents. Daneeta: "At the beginning of my career, I worked as a writer in Tokyo. I wrote about every kind of thing. I still write about every kind of thing. I write daily. I went from Big Branch to Tokyo to London and now I'm in New Orleans. All off the back of my writing. My current projects are all set in the Deep South. My stories have blossomed into an ongoing transmedia project: "a fictional place called Down the Road". After 15 years, I still write all of our ElekTrik content."

Patrick:  "I'm nomadic from Sweden via London. I attended Brunsvick Documentary Film School before entering the Stockholm Film School and later graduated from the London Film School. I became interested in stills photography and cinematography as an offshoot of the directing." Growing up in his native Sweden, Patrick traveled extensively as a child and teen. Mostly to the Middle East, Africa and India. His world view was shaped both by the glory days of social democracy in Sweden and the struggle he witnessed in the rest of the world. This made him nomadic. Before moving to New Orleans in 2008, Patrick worked as a cinematographer in London. He's shot four feature films and a variety of commercial, web, and award-winning passion projects.