Inspiration – J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Box

There are just some people who’s work goes beyond the norm and just captures my attention in ways I just can’t explain; J.J. Abrams is one of those for me. I guess I became aware of it when on a Saturday afternoon ABC ran an all day marathon of Alias season one on one to serve as a catch-up for the soon to premiere season two the following week. I sat all day long as the mysteries of SD6 and the lives of these characters unfolded before me. After that, I was hooked! I started following anything that J.J. did, well I guess that’s not exactly true. I wasn’t a fan of Lost, until this year – when my wife Amanda started watching it…

I didn’t really realize what it was the had me glued to Abrams’ work – until I saw this piece of web history from TED.com!

It’s amazing to me the profound expressions of mystery – and if you’ve seen Lost then you understand that it’s an ever unfolding universe of questions some without obvious answers leaving the viewer to ponder and engage more and more. But the more amazing thing that I take away from this is the power of democratizing moving making! At one time I had started to collect videos on YouTube that I called “Any Kid with a Camcorder!” that I hoped to showcase the works of normal individuals making great work with off the shelf hardware. (I’m now inspired to re-start that again… So stay tuned for more info!)

We live in the most incredible time of media creation, it’s kind of like what the printing press did for books and the desktop publishing revolution did for computers. The down side of this is that the market will soon be flooded with mediocre videos (the vast majority of YouTube – come on, how many times if getting hit in the crotch funny?) but in the end the cream raises to the top!  There’s a vast landscape of top notch work hosted on vimeo.com (which is quickly becoming my favorite video site) that shows the skills of this upcoming generation of storytellers and media masters!

So here’s my new mission – or a sub-mission for this site: I’m not an expert in movie making, I’m not going to pretend to be one! I’m not a post-production guru, or a visual effects genius (don’t get me wrong, I’m good at what I do – but I’m no guru), but what I do believe in and what drives me to post more here, is an urgency to “Democratize Movie Making” so as I can I’m going to show you how and why I do the things that I do.

On the re-cut of the “I Won’t Mind” project I’m going to host screen casts live on Ustream.tv so you can watch me work and interact with me while I work on the project – so If you want to know when I’m doing those sessions Follow Me On Twitter.

I also would love your feedback on what I’m doing here!  If you have an idea – or if you have found a great video that you want to show me, just leave it here in the comments.
Until then, go out and create something!