Name: Zach King: The storyteller in all of us | TEDxPortland
Uploaded: 2019-09-12T11:29:49.000Z
Duration: 15 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Queenie Lee Reviewer: Peter van de Ven

Past continuous

It was six years ago that I was just leaving Portland.

and I was taking off to LA to go live there.

It was scary to be a young kid - just graduated from high school -

to be a film student in Los Angeles at that time.

"What are you going to do when you graduate film school?"

I'd have, of course, said, "Well, I'm going to be in Hollywood,

making feature films for the big screen, and my name up in lights,

and working alongside my favorite director, Spielberg, here.

and I'm actually making short videos out of my garage for this -

And this is one of the tools that has changed my life,

What actually happened was I didn't get into film school like I expected.

I ended up having a year at university while I was waiting to reapply,

"OK, man, I thought my calling was to be a filmmaker

So I fell in love with something during that time,

I fell in love with the internet and digital technology

I realized both of these were really converging in a really cool way.

especially, websites like YouTube were just coming out, Vimeo.

You could post your work online and start building a following.

And then on the other side, you had digital technology taking off.

Cameras were getting cheaper, they were getting better quality,

and again, they were only costing a couple of thousand dollars.

and I started filming my own videos while I wasn't in film school.

so I did that and I posted online, and began building this following.

and I eventually been talking to classmates, my teachers, like,

"How do you get into the film industry? How do you get into Hollywood?"

And they would tell me this, "OK. Well, here's how it works:

you go into Hollywood, work for ten years up the ladder

You're being assistant to somebody, and doing this dirty job here,

and then you finally get to a place where you can pitch your movie.

Because what all directors want is this chance to be in front of executives

and let's say the Hollywood system buys it,

the studio pays for you to go off for a couple years and make that movie,

then you come back, and you have a theatrical release,

One, it does awful and you skip town and never direct something again,

and that's the moment you get to start building your following.

But I'm stepping back as a student still in film school going,

"Well, that doesn't make sense to me because that system's got to be broken."

I'm already building my following online,

and I had friends that were doing this online,

building successful YouTube channels and other networks online.

So that didn't make sense, to wait 12 - 15 years

It didn't sound like I'd be doing something that I loved.

So it was this tool that started to change my life.

It was other tools like the cameras that started to change my life.

go ahead and get them out of your pockets, OK?

I'm giving you permission because half of you are already on them.

I see you tweeting over there, and taking a picture over here.

Most of you will check this twice during the course of my 15-minute talk.

Most of us check our phones ten times an hour

And for me, probably all of you in this room,

by answering this question, by raising your phone in the air.

Did you check your phone after being awake for 15 minutes this morning?

When you go to lunch after this, and you go to the bathroom,

seventy five percent of you will take your phone with you.

So, yeah, you're raising your hand, your phone there.

But what I'm saying is, we live in an age where technology is one of our tools.

The internet is one of my tools, and we only need just this.

You know, I was flying up to Portland from LA yesterday,

"If you were a writer, back in the day, in the 14th century,

before the printing press was invented by Gutenberg,

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Zach King: The storyteller in all of us | TEDxPortland

literally

incredible

awesome

insane