×

On pointless creativity

Filmmaker Jason Wishnow compels us to push our boundaries as storytellers and creators, with the acceptance that sometimes being creative is to do something that simply has no point. Wishnow shares with us his own experiments of the imagination — from his film interpretation of Oedipus using vegetables as actors, to a flashmob of zombies doing yoga, to being the visionary behind how the TEDtalks are recorded and presented to an online audience.

Recorded at INK2012, Pune, India

About the Speaker

Jason Wishnow
Filmmaker

Jason Wishnow is the filmmaker behind TEDTalks, the Peabody Award winning video series watched nearly a billion times (even in outer space). Wishnow works at the intersection of film and emerging technologies and has been called an “online-video virtuoso” (New York Times, 2009), the “enfant terrible of digital film” (The Guardian, 2000), and one of the ten most influential digital filmmakers of 1999 (RES Magazine). Prior to joining TED, Wishnow founded one of the first film websites, The New Venue, in the mid-’90s, an entire decade before YouTube. In 2000, Wishnow organized the first handheld/mobile film festival, The Aggressively Boring Film Festival, named after the technical limitations of its time. As a director, Wishnow’s short films and music videos have played on television, in museums, and at over 100 film festivals worldwide including Sundance, Seattle, São Paulo, Hong Kong, and RESFEST. Wishnow’s most recent project is We Are All Radioactive, a crowd-funded, bilingual, episodic documentary series about surfers and fishermen rebuilding coastal Japan after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Wishnow currently develops and directs narrative feature films and privately consults about digital video strategy. @thewishnow http://www.wishnow.com

View Profile

Explore More Talks