Gadgetory

you know we launched TED Talks for the world around seven years ago it seemed like the stupidest idea that anyone had ever had essentially that I was putting on tape lectures why they would sort of look at me with this sort of pity we felt that the ideas deserved a wider audience than they were getting and so when we launched TED Talks our true mission was to figure out how how to better spread ideas through the world what is Ted Ted is a conference sure it's more than that it's an idea actually a collection of ideas and people people and ideas people with ideas people who are here for a number of days to talk to other people about ideas those people also have ideas and there's people here who help the people with ideas tell their ideas to other people and we're going to find out what happens when all of those people and all of those ideas get together in one place and start doing things with one another one of the things we really pride ourselves on is how much effort we put into preparing speakers so we don't just choose to speak and put them on stage we have a very deep editorial process very similar to the way an editor and a writer would work together when you give a talk at Ted there's a very specific format they want you to tell a story they want you to engage the audience which in science is something we don't normally have to do and so they help us to realize the story and to come up with new imaginative ways that we can tell it as an engineer and a computer scientist we don't typically get a lot of training in how do you present yourself and present your work and tell a compelling story and that's one of the most awesome things that I've been able to take away from this experience it's actually extremely difficult to try and condense a decade's worth of work is actually extremely hard so we were really trying to make the speaker's rockstars to shoot them with tight shots with moving cameras multiple camera so that we could get you know a great edit that's the kind of thing any filmmaker would do but at the same time we didn't want it to feel very false we wanted to feel authentic and real and intimate and so there's a balance we're always striking in the in the filming process we don't cut out a lot because they sort of bring their own genius but we do sort of try to make them who they wanted to be when I stepped on stage you know so we don't really change them we try to make them the best them things need to have a filmic layer but less sweeping to me it's more personal a little more rough around the edges it's okay if you get a close-up of someone who's not beautiful because keeping it sort of as real intimate is great because you just want to get out of the way the idea and let people access that idea with this little barrier a little film between them and the idea is possible so what's the biggest challenge it's at a you know at a conference of this size a lot of it is like the numbers game you know we have so many machines down there so many moving parts that it's kind of a mathematical probability that something's going to fail and so a lot of it is just making sure that we have backup machines we have backups of backups of backups because this time at the ted conference is so crucial for us it's when we're getting all of our material that we're going to use to put ted talks out you know I'm an Internet the rest of the year see you guys are running windows that X pisses all of that XP shop okay the media cave is the official name for this them it is called the media caves there any thought to actually doing a cave like structure at any point or we thought about it but we found that it was probably gonna be too expensive too time-consuming yes so okay so how many people do you have down here how many workstations how many people you can give me rough ass I mean we'd see we have I think somewhere between 16 to 20 people after each speaker gives a talk we actually try to turn around their talk by putting them on a thumb drive so that they can actually copy of it to review and to make sure they like what they're saying okay so if I'm a speaker and I and I saw completely I can be like don't put that on line because i hate though in the history of Ted I don't think we've ever had a speaker say like please don't go I didn't know I didn't know that they actually got an option big production a lot of pieces a lot of moving pieces it's a bit like a puzzle a puzzle you've got to put together very carefully active with a puzzle could explode and get glass in your eye because their puzzles made a blast did I mention that the fact that there are limitations here in terms of Uranus space you know it's an auditorium you've only you've got nine cameras but is it are you battling the limitations or is it you know do you like working within them I think the limitations are exactly where the creativity starts happening a lot of the speakers talk about what constrained then actually liberated them I'm more excited about the said than I've been in a while and I think it has to do with the worldwide Talent Search that we did in 14 cities around the world a kind of open call for speakers which was very risky so we have 33 speakers here who were chosen from those auditions and they're bringing they're just people we wouldn't have found any other way at the heart of every TED talk is a really passionate speaker and I think what the great TED Talks tap into is this very primal way of connecting a single person standing on stage locking eyes with you telling you what they believe in can impact you in a way that almost nothing else can