| Biography
| Jamie Kravitz
Jamie Kravitz,
producer, writer, and editor of Into The Streets, was born
to be an independent media artist. By age four, with his father’s
help he was making short animated films with a Super-8 film camera.
Inspired by 1950s monster movies and 1970s television, he soon graduated
from making bananas peel themselves and paper cut-outs telling stories
to directing his friends in comedic monster or superhero movies.
Kravitz majored
in film and video studies at the University of Michigan and learned
how to produce, direct multi-camera shoots, and how to run a community
television facility at the Ann Arbor Community Media Station. Also
an avid inventor of games, he progressed from making cardboard pinball
machines and board games to designing entire worlds for his friends
to explore in role-playing games. Enthralled by the first computer
games in the late 1970s, he wrote his own “text adventures”
on huge, clunky mainframe computers, the standard when the notion
of a personal computer was but a gleam in some geek’s eye.
But Kravitz
did not live by brain-games alone. “While sports never appealed
to me much, a wonderful high school teacher taught me to love ballet,
jazz and modern dance. With that training, I was able to perform
in and serve as co-Artistic Director of a modern/jazz dance troupe
at the University of Michigan. Later I moved to California and had
the opportunity to dance professionally with Naomi Goldberg's L.A.
Modern Dance and Ballet troupe and the Rudy Perez Dance Theatre,
culminating in performances in the 1993 Dance Kaleidoscope and L.A.
Festival.”
At age 24,
Kravitz was hired by the City of West Hollywood to build a community
cable facility from the ground up. The outcome of his efforts was
West Hollywood Public Access, where he served as director for 10
years. During that time he produced the documentaries A Reason
to Vote (1999), What Price Profit? (1995), and narrative
works Employee of the Month (1996), and Low Rent!
(1992), which was shown in Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian
Film Festival.
But tugged
by the creative need to explore the explosion in technology, he
attended the Academy of Entertainment and Technology at Santa Monica
College where he became “digitally literate” and experienced
the world of Photoshop, nonlinear editing, motion graphics, and
interactive design. In 2000 he left the public access station to
take a job as a Multimedia Producer with the gay and lesbian dot-com
company, GSociety. While there he produced streaming video and other
rich-media content for the companies' numerous websites, including
Gaywired.com, Lesbianation.com, and QTMagazine.com, and produced
video projects for various corporate endeavors.
“The convergence
of mediums through technology has made it possible for me to bring
together many of my creative inspirations, allowing me to create
new works that can be a movie, a game, a carefully choreographed
sequence of movements which together form a new whole,” says
Kravitz. With support from his partner Sebastian Uijtdehaage and
passing acknowledgment to their cat Louie, he formed Jamie Kravitz
Digital Design and Production (Digivitz.com) after leaving GSociety
in 2001.
When the City
of West Hollywood decided to commission a documentary commemorating
the 10 year anniversary of the historic AB101 demonstrations, they
looked no further than their favorite son. “Producing and sharing
‘Into The Streets,’” says Kravitz, “has been
an incredible opportunity for me to give something back to both
the city and community I love.”
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