Today we\u2019d like to introduce you to Jack Kelley.<\/p>\n
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?<\/strong> Would you say it\u2019s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you\u2019ve faced along the way?<\/strong> Alright, so let\u2019s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?<\/strong> We\u2019d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?<\/strong> Today we\u2019d like to introduce you to Jack Kelley. Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started? The latest chapter our story is a new book that builds on and more deeply explores […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-front-page"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platoproject.gr\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe latest chapter our story is a new book that builds on and more deeply explores the concepts, science, and history in our hit international documentary The Atlantis Puzzle. This all started on the island of Santorini in 2019 when my wife and I were visiting the ancient ruins at Akrotiri. We\u2019re standing in the hotel lobby waiting for a taxi and there\u2019s a bookshelf full of history books and tourist info. My wife pulled out a book called \u201cThe Atlantis Conference 2008\u201d and handed it to me saying \u201cthis might be up your alley.\u201d I read through it by the pool on vacation and stumbled onto the work of Greek researcher George Sarantitis. As I read his papers, the hair on my neck stood up \u2013 this guy might have finally cracked the greatest mystery of the ancient world! We connected over the pandemic, and I wound up filming with him in Greece in 2021. Even after the documentary came out and got strong reviews in 2024, I still felt like I had a lot more questions I wanted to answer about the Atlantis story. Since I\u2019d studied classical philosophy, language, history, and literature at Yale as an undergraduate, the puzzle had real allure, and it felt natural to revisit Plato\u2019s ideas and re-examine what I thought I knew. A year later, the book is out in about a dozen countries on Amazon!<\/p>\n
\nMaking a film is never easy, and neither is writing a book. But at least with the latter, you have only yourself to blame. All the personal challenges of the past few years aside, of which there have been many, while researching and writing The Atlantis Puzzle book I had to contend with my poor abilities in Ancient Greek, getting a concussion, and more generally a confrontation with my own ignorance. There is so much history, philosophy, literature, geography, climate science, archaeology, and mythology to absorb when trying to understand a story like this, that at times one feels one will never \u201cfigure it out.\u201d But you have to build it brick by brick like anything worth doing.<\/p>\n
\nI moved to LA to be a screenwriter, but got fed up with trying to peddle scripts to producers of dubious qualities. Instead, the actor John Ruby and I formed our own production company and made our first feature \u201cSOLVER\u201d together in 2016, which was released in Jan 2018. It delved into the world of puzzles, and this idea of the puzzle has stayed with me in many different forms over the years. The Atlantis Puzzle was a shift to the documentary world, to the idea of applying ingenuity to an incredibly complicated story. It was also an attempt to translate the work of Sarantitis to a global audience in a way that wouldn\u2019t dumb it down, but would still be approachable. Now with the book, I hope legitimate scholars will take the work I\u2019ve done to build on George\u2019s insights seriously, as I find it to be just as grounded in textual and scientific evidence as anyone else\u2019s academic work. Going forward, I plan on sticking to documentaries in the film world because of the joy of discovery and the depth of research, but continue to work on historical fiction on the side. I hope people will find that the level of work that goes into my projects is something that sets them apart.<\/p>\n
\nLeaving a promising career in New York City in 2014 to roll out to Hollywood was a huge risk, and one that definitely set me back financially. Risk is a tricky thing \u2013 too little and you don\u2019t feel alive, too much and you feel like you\u2019re standing on quicksand about to get swallowed up. I tend to alternate between periods of risk and challenge and slower periods of resetting. Not being very good at taking downtime by nature, it\u2019s something I have to force myself to do in order to refresh the creativity that one must draw on to make new work. This becomes especially relevant when other areas in life are uncertain or in transition \u2013 there\u2019s a reason why the saying exists that you shouldn\u2019t change your work, your relationship, or your geographic location all at the same time!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"