Who is...
Jason Wishnow?

When TED Talks premiered, in the summer of 2006, my role was to lay the foundation for what would become a Peabody Award winning collection of ideas and inspiration from TED’s roster of authors, architects, rockstars, astronauts, knights, and Nobel laureates.

TED had been around since 1984, as an exclusive, live event. TED toyed with bringing its talks to tv in the early 2000s – so everyone called it career suicide (for TED and for me) when I came on board and suggested putting them online, instead. I built and ran TED’s video department, overseeing everything we did with video for nearly seven years, and, by the time I stepped down, more than 1000 episodes were watched and shared almost a billion times... online, on planes, on tv, too... even in outer space.

I went from from nobody knowing where I worked (at first), to being accused of having the best job in the world (once I’d left). As I transitioned out, my last business cards simply read: “Film Director at Large.” I loved those cards.

My most memorable TED moments involved speakers: spending the night in a hotel room with a brain in a jar; riding in a helicopter to deliver laptops to kids liberated from terrorists; staging a rooftop sword fight between two actual knights – Sir Ken Robinson and Sir Richard Branson – since that’s what knights do; and chatting on the phone with actual, weightless astronauts (hurtling 200 miles above the Earth at 17,000 mph – because that's what THEY do) to remotely direct a shoot aboard the International Space Station.

If you reload this page, you can shuffle through some of my favorites (because people often ask): Bill Gates, Misha Glenny, Jane Goodall, Temple Grandin, among others...

Acclaimed dissident artist Ai Weiwei acted in this film while still under house arrest in China.

AI WEIWEI 艾未未   The Smuggler
HU JIANING 胡珈宁   The Woman
LI NING 李宁   The Man
BAI YAO 白瑶   The Wife

World Premiere: Telluride Film Festival.

One of the most successful short films in Kickstarter history (and its most contentious).

Starring Heather Burns, Ajay Naidu, Beth Grant, Michael Chieffo, and Miles Fisher.

“Creepy and hilarious” - The Atlantic
“Fun and slightly dark” - NotCot

35mm CinemaScope. Featuring a Potato, a Tomato, Broccoli, Garlic, and Billy Dee Williams as the Bartender.

TRIVIA: My direction to Billy Dee Williams: “You are the handsomest bell pepper in all of Ancient Greece.”

The film took two years, a volunteer crew of over 100 people, more potatoes than I’d ever expected, and post-production resources donated by Industrial Light + Magic and Skywalker Sound. One of the first stop-motion films shot on a digital still camera (the technology was so new, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride crew stopped by to study our setup). Official Selection: 80+ film festivals on nearly every continent, including Sundance (World Premiere), Seattle (the Audience Award), São Paulo, Rome, and Hong Kong, bringing back awards for animation, cinematography, and comedy.

“New Venue is about what’s happening now” – RES Magazine (1999)

“The New Venue advances the definition of what film on the Internet can be” – Apple.com (2000)

The New Venue looked like a cardboard Pandora’s Box. It launched while I held down two jobs, assistant directing off-Broadway at night, working in Woody Allen's production office by day (back when it was an industry rite of passage to work for a suspected predator, and besides, I got fired). I was fresh out of college, struggling to make ends meet, and the day my online art house went live, the New York Times tracked me down – mad they didn’t get to break the story. I asked, “What story??”

More reporters called – some came to my door – from ABC, BBC, CNN, NBC, ARTE, Variety, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Kyodo News, Fortune, Spin, Newsweek – all asking about “new movies for a new medium.”

By the time I was 26, my scrappy, solo side project beat Rolling Stone to win “Best Use of Video on the Internet” at SXSW, Apple asked me to partner, and I was invited all over the world to share my take on the future of film.

In 2000, I spun off the first film festival for the Palm Pilot, which had recently been hacked to play “mobile movies” – silent, black and white, lasting only a few seconds. So, on a lark, we billed it as The Aggressively Boring Film Festival.

But then, before I ever made a penny, the dot-com bubble burst, and, amid the collateral damage, I found out it’s rarely a matter of who gets there first. These days, Silicon Valley likes to say it’s cool to fail. Footnote: it’s not.

I went from being called a visionary (back then, EVERYONE was a “visionary”) to being called an artist (a starving artist, the very worst kind), so I hit pause on this life to make Oedipus with vegetables, because, if I needed to, I could always eat my cast.

 

 

BIO:

Jason Wishnow is the filmmaker who launched TED Talks, the Peabody Award winning video series watched over one billion times (even in outer space).

Wishnow works at the intersection of film and emerging technologies and has been called “no stranger to difficult shoots” (Wired UK, 2014), 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 award winning short films and videos have played on television (The Sundance Channel, MTV, Channel 4 UK), in museums (such as MoMA), and at over 100 film festivals worldwide (including Telluride, Sundance, Seattle, São Paulo, and Hong Kong).

ALSO:

I’ve slept out with Star Wars fans – dodged nuclear radioactivity with Japanese surfers – staged a zombie yoga flash mob – and helped develop political satire tv shows in Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, and Venezuela (as featured in The New Yorker).