About

Like all pages like these. This is where I tell you about myself.

My Name: Johan Malmsten
email:
contact@jmalmsten.com
Telephone-number:
(+46) 070 – 359 67 41
Linked-in:

View Johan Malmsten's LinkedIn profile
View Johan Malmsten’s profile

Bëhance:
behance.net/jmalmsten
Twitter:
@jmalmsten
YouTube:
jmalmsten

 

I grew up in the rural parts of Middle-north-Sweden. My parents took over the farm of my uncle and I learned the crafts of farming and keeping of animals.

I’ve always been fascinated by movies but never really imagined that I would do part in the business myself. So instead, for “gymnasiet” (Swedish High School if I remember correctly) I opted for an education in programming and there I tried to study the art of game-design and creation. I got decent enough grades but there was this nagging feeling. And during a day of reading about the coding-principles of Direct X, being alone in an empty class-room. It clicked. “Who was I kidding?” Yes, programming games was interesting and all. But all I really gravitated towards were the texts about storytelling. “That’s it!”, I said out loud to myself. I’ll drop the pretense. I will pursue filmmaking. And that is what I ended up doing.

After the short mandatory draftee-period I went to university and started doing shorts and working at the local student-Television-networks. I found that the summer before I had practiced overnight-filmmaking with some friends and that experience was extremely useful. I managed to get to a point where I could take the raw video-tapes and produce decent things that would go out on the cable-network. Some were appreciated and some were just crap. But at least I knew I could do it. I learned to take ideas from first thoughts to finished films.

Then came the day when a friend of mine who ended up writing a few episodes of the zombie-reality-spoof “Sista Dokusåpan” contacted me about this one guy who were making his first feature. One thing led to the other. I called the pilot something like “typical amateurish videography” and the guy made contact. Got me in on the production mainly as a camera-assistant. And in the end circumstances made it so that I became the DP while I actually weren’t exactly qualified for it. I didn’t talk to him about my snide remarks on the internet. I’m sure he read them. I just took it as a challenge to “put up or shut up”. Challange accepted.

Outside of the film that was Marianne mentioned above, where I got to work with folk like Thomas Hedengran, Tintin Anderzon, and Peter (friggin’!) Stormare. I also cut my teeth in the world of commercial-productions as an apprentace at Kongro Produktion. A field I did enjoy somewhat but felt very artificially limited. Especially since I saw what we were doing contra the stuff that the americans and japanese were doing. You can only do so many 20 sec slide-shows until you become so bored that you just want to make a series like the SoftBank-Dog just to show people what they could be doing.

Work then dried up a bit as I took a day-job as a support-technician for swedish satellite TV-company ViaSat. That occupied my daytime for 1.5 years and that brings me to about now. I had a stint at shooting stills for a local podcast-show, reworking their website and then it was off to Kramfors for a day-job there at the Swedish Migration-office.

Ever since that day in high-school I haven’t thought that movies isn’t what I want to do. So I do them, I read about them. I blog about them. And I show them in the local arthouse-cinema. I want to make stories in moving pictures. And if you want this too. And you can pay for it. Then don’t hesitate to call  or mail me!

 

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