Meet Jodi Norton

We recently connected with Jodi Norton and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jodi, thank you for joining us today and sharing your experiences and acquired wisdom with us. Burnout is a huge topic these days and so we’d love to kick things off by discussing your thoughts on overcoming or avoiding burnout

Living in LA and working in entertainment, it’s very easy to feel as though the industry is the entire world. In order to be successful and stay on the pulse of the industry it requires being constantly immersed in what movies and TV shows are coming out, the state of unions and their relationships to big media companies, who’s getting signed where, what are festivals raving about, etc, etc. It can become very easy to drown in all the information you’re supposed to acquire to stay in the loop.

For myself, I’ve learned that the best way to overcome or avoid burnout, especially when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the industry, is to take a small getaway from Los Angeles.

Being able to leave the city for a few days allows me to reconnect with my passion for it. Being able to remove myself from the traffic and stressors allows me to be reminded that at its core LA is a city of of creatives willing to leave their families and chase their dreams, and we all end up coming together to make art. It’s a quick rejuvenation period that allows me to come back in refocused and invigorated to achieve my goals.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I was 17 when I was introduced to what a producer was, and six years later I haven’t looked back once. From my elementary school days all the way through high school I spent my time writing. It started as short stories and poems and very quickly turned into screenplays by sophomore year. I got very lucky that I learned how to combine my love for writing into a producer role on film and TV sets and have had tunnel vision ever since.

In college, I worked as a producer at CommAgency, Penn State’s student run media agency, I interned with talent agency’s out in LA, I made a 30 minute short film as my senior thesis, and then I moved to LA, where so did everyone else. How do you stand out and break into an industry where everyone shares your qualities of passion, experience, and talent?

Good Bones Productions was the answer to that question. Dating back to my elementary school days, the part of film and TV that I loved (and still do) is the storytelling. I started Good Bones to carve out a job for myself to allow the opportunity to craft stories and projects that are invested in the storytelling behind them.

Since launching in January of 2025, Good Bones is releasing its first project this summer- a docuseries on female Olympians and the intersection of feminism and sportsmanship. The series is designed to highlight the motivation and drive of these athletes and their discipline to be at the top of their craft while also helping advance women’s sports and maintaining that support through the ups and downs of wins and losses as an athlete. As a subject I am connected to and a team of athletes willing and ready to share their stories with the world- this docuseries is designed to set a precedent of Good Bones’s mission of being dedicated to pushing projects with human driven stories and examining the human condition.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I feel like it’s an LA cliche, but being your genuine self while networking or just looking to make connections will get you further than presenting as who you think people need you to be. There’s so many creatives and so many people looking to collaborate that you as you are will find a pocket of creatives that will accept you for that and love working with you. Sometimes it’s unavoidable to run into the Hollywood name game of who knows who and if that makes you relevant or not, but that’s a small part of the industry, the majority want to work with people who are willing to show up as themselves with cool ideas regardless of if you know Tom Hank’s second cousin’s dog sitter or not.

A skill that I started to build when I first moved out here, and am still working on, is learning to play the long game with my goals. I’m very much a person who loves to run before I know how to walk, and it’s important to have a big, grandiose goal to work towards, but what is equally if not more important, is learning how to break that large goal up into small goals and see them through overtime. One of the very first jobs I had out here was working as an assistant to an Emmy Award winning director and producer, and watching how he and his colleagues got to where they were I realized part of it is talent, part of it is luck, but most of what it takes to be successful is the amount of hard work you’re willing to do and how long you’re willing to do it for, so you need to learn how to sustain yourself to be in a position to do that hard work for a long amount of time.

But perhaps the biggest lesson or skill I’ve learned in my recent professional endeavors is the understanding of you either do it or you don’t. So much of accomplishing little goals to get to bigger goals is recognizing that you’re either going to pull the trigger or you’re not and it’s entirely a mental game.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

Good Bones is always looking for collaborations! I think that’s one of the most special parts about being an artist. A direction I have really been wanting to push Good Bones towards is producing music videos, so if any musicians are looking to make some music videos for their songs please feel free to hit us up!

Beyond that, so much of filmmaking is collaboration- there’s minimum 5 different roles on any given film set, so I’m always happy to connect with other filmmakers and just make really cool s****.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @goodbonesproductions
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodi-norton-a3ba05141/

Image Credits

Ellie Franklin

Michael Kuznar

Abby Tarpey