DIY Guru and Pioneer Lance Weiler - Head Trauma Case Study

I called Lance Weiler a one man power house in our talk explaining to the audience that there is a lot you can do as one guy. Now Lance does have his wife who helps him as well as a programming buddy and other team members but for the most part, it's all him and he gets an amazing amount done and pulls off some incredible things that have brought him a lot of financial reward and opportunity. He's about to start on a 5 million dollar film he's going to shoot in 3D and all of this is happening as he's just found out the great news that he's going to be a father and it's a boy. So as if life isn't about to get way crazier, the past 9 years have been pretty intense for him. One of Lances accomplishments is he got a movie to re-tract it's statement about being the first digitally distributed film to theaters pointing out that it actually was a movie he co-created called the Last Broadcast.

Lance and I recently spoke together in Vancouver and he explained the innovative back story of The Last Broadcast but in this talk he focuses on his recent film Head Trauma and his online reality game Hope is Missing.

The highlight of Head Trauma for me is the Alternative Reality Game that he built around the film which includes live music while the film plays in theaters, text messaging from the characters that follow you out of the theater and websites that record your voice over the phone. He does crazy things like call the cops to break up gurilla screenings that he set up and then will text message the crowd as the police helicopter flies over head with their search lights. And then he'll direct people to websites at the same time he has his software call them and then loops their voice into the website causing an eerie echo and then has when they try to click the exit box the phone tells them, "where do you think you're going, I'm not done yet!"

It's Horror 2.0 and Lance is the master of it all and I'm sure him and his cohorts are giggling in the corner as it all goes down. But fun and games asside, there is so much to learn from lance and his ultra confident rock solid approach to getting things done. Susan and I often refer to lance in conversations saying we have to do what lance would do.

In his talk he also explains what the Workbook Project which susan and I are occasional contributors to and which is an amazing resource for filmmakers needing to wade through the hundreds of tools that exist. It's also a great place to learn through osmosis by listening to other creatives talk about their work through podcast interviews.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: lance, weiler, power, to, the, pixel, head, trauma, case, study, future, of, media, revolution, film, arg, hope, is, missing