The Art of the Ordinary
Jon Speyers ’08 says his favorite project is always the one he is currently working on. A filmmaker and photographer, Speyers credits his grandmother with nurturing his curiosity for the world.
“Growing up, Oma gifted her four children’s families annual subscriptions to National Geographic—the golden bindings lined our home shelves. I think Oma wanted us to know God, and also, have a sense of the world around us.”
Speyers’ grandmother, who survived two world wars in the Netherlands and successfully hid five Jewish families in her home during the second world war, emigrated to Ontario in the 1950s. She dreamed of seeing all four of her children attend Calvin. And they did—as did her 10 grandchildren. Speyers’ parents, Bonnie Duthler Speyers ’70 and Franklin Speyers ’71, went on to build their careers at Calvin, too.
From the age of three, Speyers regularly tagged along to campus with his dad, a visual communications and graphic design professor. He remembers popping into various studio spaces to watch students at work on their craft. As a kid, Speyers borrowed his dad’s video camera at every opportunity. And snuck it out on occasion as well. “That’s how I learned to keep the camera clean,” Speyers laughs, though he often gave himself away by forgetting to put the lens cap back on.
That sense of wonder nourished in studios and from behind a lens only grew during Speyers’ Calvin years. “I captured Outdoor Rec experiences with a lot of fervor—Huron’s North Channel, the Tetons, Wyoming’s Wind River Range, the Grand Canyon under fresh January powder. The material became the core of my first documentary reel.”
Speyers says his years at Calvin felt rich and robust. “I think in aggregate, what the Calvin education says is, ‘Look at the infinite levels of complexity with which God wired the universe. The ways he wove it high and low. Be awake. Wonder. Marvel. And engage with it.’ ”
After graduation, Speyers moved to California, “without a plan and less than a thousand bucks.” What at first felt like a risky adventure gradually evolved into a flourishing career. The reel he created of his Outdoor Recreation adventures—with original music composed by his wife, Jenna Karas Speyers ’07—helped land him work with the international travel series Joseph Rosendo’s Travelscope, broadcast nationally on PBS. Within a few years, Speyers had traveled to 15 countries and garnered four Emmy nominations for outstanding achievement in cinematography. When his first nomination came in, he was in graduate film school at the University of Southern California.
“I hardly knew what an Emmy was or what it meant, but there I was, soon glowed up, strolling the red carpet with Jenna,” Speyers says.
Today, Speyers works as a content producer at McCann Detroit, a global marketing group with offices on six continents. He helps conceptualize and execute content creation as a director, cinematographer, and editor. Speyers works with clients to develop, execute, and deliver content that helps them tell their stories well, a process he compares to the challenge and satisfaction of “solving a puzzle.”
When career and family life with two young children allow, Speyers still relishes producing personal projects and says it fuels his creativity at his job as well.
Last winter found him in South Dakota, for example, photographing a rancher, something he had wanted to do for years. “The guy is in his late 60s and just working like a tank, maintaining his ranch. It just blew my mind the way I was constantly trying to keep up with this individual. It was so inspiring to see.”
Speyers’ love of nature, travel, people, and the Lord continue to influence his vision for his art. “In my personal work, I think there are themes that I can see throughout the years,” Speyers says. “Over time, I’ve grown more and more interested in other people. ‘Le quotidien’ as it would be referred to in French cinema. The everyday. In broad strokes, I hope to encourage empathy.”