From Here to Awesome, the “discovery and distribution” online film festival initiative spearheaded by Arin Crumley, M Dot Strange and Lance Weiler, has released a video explaining their basic raison d’être. Subtitled “Festivals Don’t Work”, the video gives a brief refresher course on Crumley, Weiler and Strange’s efforts to deliver Four Eyed Monsters, Head Trauma and We Are the Strange directly to their audiences. And yes, Spout (who sponsored Four Eyed Monsters’ YouTube premiere and ended up paying the filmmakers almost $50,000) gets a little shout-out.
Add to My Profile | More VideosLance Weiler of Head Trauma fame has launched a new web series on MySpace called Hope is Missing. Loosely intended as a companion to Head Trauma, which is being released on VOD on October 23, the series is a true cross-platform event unfolding over MySpace, Twitter, and even real life. Two episodes are live so far; I’ve been having fun sorting through the comments, watching the users go from taking it at face value that these are “real” clips about a real missing girl, to questioning that assumption, to making the connection to Head Trauma. The first episode is above, and the whole series can be found here.
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.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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