Well, looking at the path I came to creating a series of videos, just this past six months. I’ve been making films for about ten years. But only in the last six months have I created a series which is called, “Real People, Real Stories”, focusing just on great teachers, leaders, whoever are terrific storytellers.

      Getting into storytelling was a natural progression. I don’t think it was actually by design, it just came out as a series of discoveries. I’ve been making films for about ten years. I started out making independent feature films, and before that I traded bonds and currencies at the Chicago Board of Trade. So I didn’t study film-making. I didn’t study how to tell a good story. 

     And in our family, we say that the stories get better every time. (laughter) But they are retold. And that’s the basis of how I spent most of my childhood, just living, and learning, and learning about our history, and our past, where I was from, and so on. But when I went to school, I studied finance and economics, and I decided to be a trader at the Board of Trade. But I did that so that I could travel, two or three months out of the year. I had a lot of freedom. So I could paint and take photographs and that was a different form of storytelling, actually, because every painting I make is a story. So it was still kind of living my life, but going to work, and doing my work, but my life was still really about creating stories. 

     And as sort of an accident, I was asked through some friends of mine to work on an independent feature film, which came to Chicago,. I accepted, and I was thinking out of curiosity that this would be interesting, and I’d learn something new, and I’m a very curious person, and so I accepted. 

     But the first day I was there, I knew that something had happened. I was just intrigued with the collaborative process of making a film, which is initially, how I got into making films. But over the next six months, the process of a hundred and fifty people working together to create a story. But the only bad part of that, which I was explaining a little earlier, is that the film that we were making was a low-budget action independent feature film, actually with gangs, I mean, real gangs in the streets of Chicago. So the only thing that we were really teaching was children how to kill each other. (Laughter) We sold the movie. In fact, we sold it even before we finished making it. Which is an unfortunate and sad kind of statement.

     But after that first film, I began making documentaries. I was very lucky, about six years ago, to be hired by the CEO of New World Entertainment, who was looking to create a new division, an educational division, which was called World Knowledge. And he was willing to try anything. He was just willing to try anything different, and in fact, when they hired me, when they offered me the job, I told them, “I don’t make educational films”. 

    And he said, “No, but you tell stories. You tell very good stories.” 

     And so he actually went completely outside of the market to find somebody who just liked to tell stories, and that’s how we launched that series. And one of the things that I’ll be speaking about tomorrow, which is an ongoing process for my company that we have a lot of fun, learning. It is a kind of an accident. It was one of the first things we discovered in creating educational films that are reality based in that people seem to remember what we were hoping they might learn or experience when the information was told within a story, when it wasn’t just told, but when it was told by a great storyteller. People remember the story, which is how they remember anything that is new. This was very exciting. And the most exciting part of it is that, the more we work on this journey, specifically now on storytelling, the more we realize that it’s really about creating experiences, which is what we are trying to do. And we have a lot of fun doing that.