Jesse Vogelaar Is A Director Who Never Stopped Playing

At eight-years-old, Jesse Vogelaar cold-called a random video production company from his Hamilton phone book and pitched a 35-chapter ‘Digimon’-meets-’Star Wars’ epic that lived on a failing floppy disk.

“There’s magic in not overthinking it -- in trusting that childhood instinct to just create,” the Supernormal director says.

It’s a philosophy rooted in his New Zealand upbringing. At Orewa Primary School, he transformed playgrounds into sci-fi universes, orchestrating daily spaceship adventures with classmates.

“We’d pick up exactly where we left off each recess,” he recalls. “Other kids would join until we had this whole crew running around pretending to navigate asteroid fields.”

Jesse sees these games as accidental training for directing. “It was this weird glimpse of what filmmaking would be like -- convincing people to invest in something that only exists in your imagination.”

The New Zealand-born filmmaker’s signature blend of absurdist humor and intuitive storytelling has since earned his recent short, 'Room for One More', a best comedy nomination at Palm Springs ShortFest. But his breakthrough came with the viral short ‘You Lose’, made on pure impulse. “I had no plan, no expectations -- just this gut feeling it could work,” he says.

When he later tried to replicate that success through careful planning, the work lost its spark. “The best ideas often come from that place of playful intuition,” he says.

That instinct shapes his diverse projects, from the Screen Australia and ABC-funded comedy series ‘Ruby Rai, P.I.’ to the SBS-acquired short ‘Mark Targets’.

Now signed to production company Supernormal, Jesse brings his offbeat voice to major brands. His Specsavers spots thrive on surreal gags, while his Melbourne Museum work turns education into playful storytelling.

“Commercials demand that you connect immediately,” he says. “The best ones make the viewer think, ‘Wait, what?’ and lean in closer. That’s not so different from getting kids to believe they’re flying a spaceship at recess.”

Festival success has followed, with ‘Room for One More’ screening at PÖFF and Flickerfest after its Palm Springs nomination. “At festivals, you’re surrounded by filmmakers who approach storytelling completely differently,” he says. “It pushes you to trust your own voice.”

As he develops his debut feature, Jesse sees it as a return to that 35-chapter childhood story. “Short films teach you economy. Features are about sustaining that connection – like revisiting an old playground universe, but with the tools to actually build it.”

He still mines his archive of childhood ideas and half-formed concepts. “Recently, I found an old note that solved a problem in a commercial script,” he says. “Those notebooks are like a conversation with my past creative self.”

His advice to emerging filmmakers is characteristically blunt: “Stop waiting for permission. The industry will try to box you in, but the work that stands out comes from pursuing exactly what excites you, no matter how odd it seems.”

Decades after that cold call, Jesse’s career proves a point he unknowingly made at eight: the ideas that feel too strange often work best.

“The world has enough safe, predictable stories,” he says. “What we need are more spaceships on the playground.”