I finally met Lance Weiler at SXSW this year after a couple of years of reading his blog and Festmobs. Lance’s first film, The Last Broadcast, was the first feature to be distributed via digital satellite (it was also thought by some to have been plagiarized by The Blair Witch Project). His second film, Head Trauma, premiered at LAFF last year and is now available on DVD.

Weiler has basically spent the past year using Head Trauma as a starting point for a number of experiments in film exhibition, marketing and distribution. I’m super-excited about a Head Trauma event coming up next weekend at The Museum of the Moving Image (which, weirdly, is the closest thing I have to a neighborhood movie theater here in southwestern Queens). Weiler calls it his “cinema ARG”, or, alternate reality game:

It consists of three core parts. There is a pre-screening event which plays out across a number of city blocks surrounding the museum, the screening mashup which is NEW and improved, and a post screening leg that follows audience members home. The home version of the cinema ARG will involve user-generated materials, remixing, emails, SMS and phone calls.

While you await my full report on that, check out the above clip, in which Weiler explains another Head Trauma spinoff, in which he invited a number of bands to compose an alternate score for the film.