I really like TED. I enjoy watching the videos, to be awed, to be inspired. I also really like the videos that discuss the movie industry or movies themselves. So here’s the movie TED Talk top 5.

5. Don Levy: A cinematic journey through visual effects

Don Levy has been at the head of the Sony Pictures Imageworks for the past 17 years and in this talk, takes you through the developments of visual effects. For more Talks on visual effects, here’s a Talk by Rob Legato, who too discusses effects (and how to make them so good they trump real life).

4. Franco Sacchi: A tour of Nollywood, Nigeria’s booming film industry

I’m including this talk by Zambian director Sacchi instead of, for instance, James Cameron’s talk (which in my opinion is more than a shameless plug than anything else), because I think it’s much more interesting to learn about parts of the world that aren’t so on the foreground. Nollywood is the third largest film industry of the world, and before this Talk, I honestly did not know much about it.

3. Colin Stokes: How movies teach manhood

Discussions like these are ever close to my heart. Here, Colin Stokes discusses how movies can influence the way people and particularly men think about manhood. Underlying messages of films are what I’m particularly interested in and I thought this was a very interesting talk.

2. Beeban Kidron: The shared wonder of film

Beeban Kidron is a British director of many TV series and documentaries. In her Talk, she discusses how storytelling developed over the ages and the messages we send our children nowadays, through cinema, the most popular art form there is. She says that today, no longer is story king, but sensation.

1. Jeff Skoll: My journey into movies that matter

Jeff Skoll, first and former president of eBay, discusses how he came into the movie industry, and how he approaches it. He has been part of the productions of big movies like Syriana and An Inconvenient Truth, and his aim, through making movies, is to do good. An interesting talk about how movies can inspire people to do good, the opposite of what we usually hear: about how movies inspire people to do bad things.

Bonus Talks

Two more talks because once you start watching these talks, you usually can’t get enough…

J.J. Abrams: The Mystery Box

Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story

Do you agree or disagree with the speakers? Are there TED Talks you’d add to this list?