Currently an Executive Assistant at HBO, Helena is by far our busiest volunteer. She is responsible for combing through the thousands of speaker applications we receive each year and digging out the stories that will inspire our community. Here we talk about the parallels between TEDx events and film sets, the power of language, and working with sled dogs.
You studied film production at Boston University. Is that what brought you to Los Angeles?
Yeah, I majored in Film Production and Hispanic Language & Literature, though I always knew that Spanish was more for my own enjoyment during college. I was semi-disheartened to discover that if you want to be in film production—at least at the time that I was in college—you pretty much had two options: LA or New York. People told me that it would be much harder to break into the film industry in New York because it’s a smaller community, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll try this whole LA thing.”What brought you to film production to begin with?
I always loved well-told stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer or a journalist of some sort. I used to write tons of short stories, both fiction and nonfiction. In middle school, we were assigned to shoot a scene from a book that we were reading about Alaska. This was in Fort Collins, and it just so happened that my dad’s colleague had sled dogs. With her help, we shot a little film of me on a sled being pulled by the dogs, and it was so much fun that I kept making films throughout middle school and high school. I realized, “Oh, maybe instead of storytelling in the written word, I’m more interested in this as a visual medium.”One thing I find interesting about film production is that the more you learn about the way films are made, you begin to see that it’s not just the work of a director. It’s a whole orchestra of people working together behind-the-scenes to make this very difficult thing happen.
Yeah, it’s actually insane and amazing in that way. That’s one of the best things about film production. Any single film or TV show creates hundreds of jobs for people doing wildly different things. It creates a wonderful intersection between blue collar and white collar jobs—you have the creative, artist types, the business types, and people doing hardcore physical or technical labor all working side by side with the exact same goal. I can’t think of another job quite like it.You grew up here in Colorado, but you live in Los Angeles. What led you back to TEDxMileHigh?
I was working on set as an assistant director, and as much as I really loved it, I was starting to miss my adventures in Boston. About 30% of the population in Boston is college students and people working in academia. No matter where you are, whether you’re in class or out of class, in a bar or in a restaurant, there is this all-pervasive nerdiness around you. Distinct from Boston, LA revolves around the entertainment industry, so one way that I was satisfying this need for academia was by watching TED talks. I excitedly went to a TEDx event in Los Angeles and came away thinking, “I’d love to develop and grow a TEDx event.” I went home, looked up the next opportunity to be trained by TED, and signed up with the intent of creating my own event in LA. At the training session in Vancouver, a friend introduced me to Jeremy Duhon, founder of TEDxMileHigh, and we instantly bonded over our shared Colorado-ness! He asked me to come shoot a behind-the-scenes video for [email protected] and it just snowballed from there. I absolutely love being able to stay so engaged with my home state. I have a better idea of what’s going on in Colorado than most of my friends who still live there, and it’s a great way to give back.
Helena Bowen and Jeremy Duhon