Milwaukee is filled with successful, low-key individuals like the Emmy-award winning filmmaker Jeremy Bessoff.

Bessoff, 33, is a multimedia producer and instructor who served as the producer for The Strive Media Institute's Gumbo Television, an urban teen magazine show made almost entirely by teens for teens. In 2006, Bessoff won an Emmy Award for his work on a Milwaukee County Transit System commercial called "Bleep Bus."

Today, he works as a freelancer on a variety of creative professional and personal projects. OnMilwaukee.com caught up with Bessoff and asked him more about his life and creative work.

OnMilwaukee.com: Tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up?

Jeremy Bessoff: I moved here from The Quad Cities. It is a sort of a midwestern way station between Des Moines and Chicago. My mother moved us there from Calgary, Alberta, because she fell in love. There wasn't much to do there, so we made our own fun. A lot of my early activities took the form of some kind of creative expression. It was there I realized what I wanted to be. The contours of the valley landscape channeled my interest to art.

OMC: What were your earliest artistic endeavors?

JB: Every kid makes art of some kind. They scribble something on typing paper or become expressive with their mashed potatoes. All parents prize mad gestures fueled by yet-uncontrolled motor skills. They hang it on the fridge in self-inflated pride. My folks did that, as well. It wasn't until late in high school that I first became aware of the fact that I could control those marks and gestures. I started getting excited about how I was able to coerce those marks into something that reflected my internal imagery and ideas.

Things started getting really interesting for me when I discovered an old Super-8 camera at a thrift shop. Wow! I could make hundreds of images in seconds. And when you dropped off the cartridge at Walgreen's, it came back a week later as an actual, real-life movie! That's when art -- though at the time I had no idea it was art -- became an external, social thing for me. I could entertain my family and friends. They could also be included in the creation of it as well. Everyone wanted to be a movie star! Then came a video camera …

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