by David Tomaszewski , published on 8.02.2010

Jeffrey Jacob Abrams, 43 years old, is a real communication genius and an internationally renowned multitasking creator, scriptwriter, director and producer of cinema and television. The son of television producers, he spent his days in television studios, starting very early on his brilliant career as a scriptwriter (among others, he’s responsible for the scripts of Forever Young, Regarding Henry or Armagedon), JJ Abrams has become what we could consider one of transmedia’s pioneers and probably even one of its leaders, since he is today, one of the creators whose creation on multiple media is visible to the greatest number.

After the successful series Felicity and Alias, which he created, Abrams launched an ambitious new project: LOST, which offered a vast universe with multiple viral content. First on the Internet, with an official forum, where audience members could share their thoughts and which became a real goldmine for scriptwriters. Several paper chase games were set up on the fictional site of OCEANIC AIRLINES, the airline company of the Sydney-Los Angeles flight, the starting point of the television series.

Following that, for the fourth season, the LOST universe also offered a series of mobisodes entitled Missing Pieces, only for mobile phones in the US, with one episode per week for thirteen weeks before the beginning of the season.

Abrams advocates a certain type of instinctive writing, sometimes favoring the pleasure of surprising over the global coherence of the story.

It’s not the end that matters but the experience that we are living. “When fans of LOST ask me how it’s going to end I tell them: Do you really want to know? Ok, I’ll tell you. And right then, they start begging me not to spoil their fun.”

LOST takes full responsibility for being a work in progress and constant mutation, where the interpretation of the audience is an important element of the writing.

Between two projects, JJ Abrams tries his hand at directing feature films, he is responsible for the third installment of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE saga, the highest budget in history for a first time film director. With MI:3, Abrams proves that he is as comfortable on the big screen as he is on the small.

According to Abrams, there are a thousand ways of telling stories in fiction today. A film or series, according to him, is the “summit of an experience that begins before the projection and can end long after.”

Abrams proves this by producing Cloverfield: a Godzilla type film with a Blair Witch amateur touch.

“By throwing images of the film on the net with no explanation, we created something close to a YouTube amateur documentary. The audience was not fooled, but we were starting to tell the story with these images, and the audience was already into the film.”

And even well before these few images of the film, the official site, which only had the launch date as a title, was a real labyrinth with multiple enigmas, Easter Eggs, and complex paper trail games.

Around the same time, JJ Abrams is hired to reboot the Star Trek saga by directing a new episode, the one where everything begins. Already, the preview of the film is not insignificant: it doesn’t show any image of the film, but the construction of the Starship Enterprise, which will carry the heroes of the story. It’s as if JJ Abrams was showing us a work in progress, the creative process and construction of a story, what we never see on screen.

Finally, Abrams is also testing his creativity on different media with the TV series Fringe. One of the characters, scary and mysterious, appears furtively in each episode, each time an event linked to the Fringe division takes place. He is called “the observer”, always wears the same black suit, and has the distinctive sign of being bald. In a “Where’s Charlie” manner, Abrams has inserted his character in different TV programs. We can therefore see him during important events like the Superbowl, in the front rows of the game, in the stands of a racing team during an Formula 1 race or in the audience of the famous American series American Idol.

Scriptwriter, producer, director, Abrams is a real one-man band: he’s also a composer and has written all the musical scores of his television series, he sometimes even delves his hands in the grease of digital special effects. And he’s also a talented keyboard player:

It would be interesting to invite JJ Abrams to give a course on transmedia to all our cautious French producers. As of today, he is still the best example of someone who puts his ideas down on multiple media as a practitioner and not a theoretician.

Could that be the best solution to get the machine started and moving forward?

JJ Abrams has been fascinated with magic and its mysteries since childhood, a passion that he inherited from his grandfather for whom he had a lot of respect. Abrams symbolizes his creative work and imagination with a magic box that he bought as a kid, which reminds him of his grandfather, and that he never dared to open. He conceives all his projects like this box, which always remained in its wrapper, and that he calls the “Mystery Box”:

http://www.ted.com/speakers/j_j_abrams.html