This is the first post from our resident video guru Mike Jones. To start out I asked him to tell us a little about himself and also give a brief view into how he is inspired. Check back each Wednesday for his views on creativity and some helpful tips on making the most of his visual language of choice, video.

My name’s Mike Jones and here’s my story. I’m an advocate of awesome. Lover of OKC. I make moving images and tell stories.

I was born and raised in Oklahoma City (and proud of it)! I think OKC is one of the coolest cities in the nation and I’m super excited to be here in this city, at this time, with you amazing people.

I’m a storyteller and my preferred medium is moving images, aka film. I’ve been blessed to be part of amazing things in OKC like The Helium Project and adventusokc! I’m currently planning a new creative event in OKC called elevateOKC (twitter: @elevateokc).

Since I’ve brought up Twitter, I’m addicted to it. Hit me up @VoteMikeJones

Enough about me, lets talk video.

Filmmaker or Storyteller?

About six months ago I hit a creative wall, a big one. Essentially what had happened was I had pulled every filmmaker trick I had out of the bag and had nothing else. I was bored with my work and it showed. I started looking hard at those who inspire me (who across the board have been doing this a lot longer) to try to determine how they kept bringing the awesome year after year. Something hit me over the head.

They were storytellers first, filmmakers second.

I’ve changed my perspective from being a filmmaker to a storyteller who uses movies as my preferred medium of story telling. While that’s all fine and dandy the actual leap from that revelation to being better is a little more involved. The best way I’ve found to really make myself better at telling stories was two fold. First, make everything/everyone/anything a story. If you meet someone, they have a story, find it. Just talk to them and learn to be inquisitive. Second, get into different mediums. Try writing a narrative, doing NPR style stories, anything that’s way outside your box. Getting outside that box helps you to focus on the story first and the medium second.

On my journey to rediscover the awesome I came across this video. On one hand there was anything in this (technically) I hadn’t done and could do. What made it awesome was the story, and the story teller – http://vimeo.com/3696997