Like most great ideas, Jtwo was born in a bar over two beers and a conversation between two disillusioned soon to be college grads  in 2009 during the worst recession in American history since the Great Depression. While most of their peers were interning for free at evil corporations or scouring the internet for PA jobs in NYC or LA at production companies that recycled them like yesterday’s news, our co-founders did the only logical thing they could think of…start their own company (if you can’t join Em, beat Em, right? Wait, is that how that goes?)

They set up shop in the heart of the grimiest hardest working city they could find, Philadelphia, and went to work building a production company that was so monumentally different and unique than any other production company out there that when other production company’s would look at them they would say, “wow, you are so monumentally different and unique, you’re incredible.”

There was only one issue…they were dead broke and their office was a third floor bedroom with one desk in the same house they rented and they didn’t own a single camera.

Fast forward (hard times, hard times, blah blah blah and yada yada yada yada walked 40 miles in the snow) nine years and Jtwo has become an award-winning content creation juggernaut that has shot documentaries on four continents, national commercials with some HUGE celebs (no seriously, Shaq is HUGE), worked with agencies and companies like Independence Blue Cross, Johnson & Johnson, and had our work seen by millions on ESPN, Showtime, CBS and more.

Oh, and we moved into a new bi-level studio located in a delightfully crappy alley just blocks away from the Liberty Bell in Old City, Philadelphia. Thanks to a bunch of how to decorate “Creative Workspaces for Dummies” books our Creative Director read we have an open floor plan, no assigned desks and the always present opportunity to swivel a chair and yell at the person next to you for listening to their podcasts too loud. With our ever growing crew handling projects on projects, this enables us to collaborate on a whim and make adjustments on the fly at any point during the production process.

Following the release of our award-winning feature film, For Aaron: The Documentary and the digital campaign that accompanied it in 2009, we saw how important digital storytelling was as a tool to engage and inspire change in the world around us.

We saw first hand how rapidly the marketing of a social cause or an impact organization was changing with the advancements in technology and with our access to filmmakers, web designers, photographers, digital artists, and branding specialists we knew we could be a large part of that change. We understood that if we committed our time and talent to the world, we could create a legacy of impact. So we launched what we called The Projects That Matter Initiative that would provide reduced costs for media and marketing services and flexible & affordable payment plans for non-profit organizations around the world so that we could help them share their stories more effectively. The Projects That Matter Initiative has become one of our most successful launches to date reaching millions of people all over the world.

For our two co-founders, Justin Jarrett and Travis Capacete, it’s been one wild decade. From the “old days” of running around the country with a DSLR Camera and boom mic to setting up shop on the third floor of a crappy row home in North Philadelphia during the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression – one thing has always been true. These two knuckleheads are the closest thing to brothers as they come and they keep this place running day in and day out.

They are usually too busy to chat, so we forced them to sit down and rap about the early days of JTWO.