Finished watching the video? Good. Now, for a little context. Three years ago, journalism major Hope Wilcott went missing and her boyfriend Richard Chambers turned to the internet to help find her. Prior to her disappearance, Hope was investigating her mother’s mysterious illness. It started out rather innocuously, with Hope’s mother placing calls at 3:07 a.m. every morning that she couldn’t remember making the next day. Hope’s mother’s nocturnal behavior quickly took a violent and familiar turn for the worse, and began spreading to others. Hope, it seems, was a carrier for a malicious virus transmitted by soundwaves, and she was taken away to remove the threat of infection and begin the search for a cure. Though she is still missing, her virus has returned in full force.

The previous narrative played out in the original Hope is Missing game, which took place during the summer of 2007 as a narrative extension and promotion for Weiler’s film Head Trauma. Weiler appears to be returning to that universe with Pandemic 1.0, as story elements like HopeisMissing.com and the HopeisMissing twitter accounts have been repurposed to drive to Pandemic 1.0 content. He has assembled an impressive team of collaborators for the project, drawing upon contacts from open collaboration network The Workbook Project and his transmedia company Seize the Media.

I envy those who get to interact with the Pandemic 1.0 alternate reality game live at Sundance, but as the experience’s name suggests, I suspect there will be more to come.

Artwork by Reinier Clabbers.

Between January 21-31, cinephiles and celebrities will converge on Park City Utah for the annual  Sundance Film Festival, immersing themselves in a rich tapestry of stories from independent filmmakers around the world. However, the immersion will start a few days early for Lance Weiler. Seize the Media’s upcoming transmedia project HiM was selected as one of twelve projects for the Sundance Institute’s Screewriters Lab. Weiler and his co-writer Chuck Wendig will spend the five days leading up to the Festival at the Sundance Resort honing their writing.

Over the course of the workshop, writers meet one-on-one with a distinguished group of creative advisors. Reflecting on his experience, 2009 Sundance Lab Fellow Avi Weider explains that the Lab served as “a great opportunity for everyone who got to go to really work intensively on the script and not to be able to hide from any of the soft spots that are lurking in all of our writing.” Weiler notes that he looks forward to the one-on-one sessions as a chance “to not only be able to workshop the script, but to be able to talk about ideas about how [to] deal with pacing and focus, and how [to] execute across multiple platforms effectively.”

Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, notes that this is the first time the Lab will support a transmedia project. The Sundance Institute Screenwriter’s Lab has supported an extensive list of award-winning independent films in the past including John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, Kimberly Pierce’s Boys Don’t Cry and Quentin Tarantino’s Resevoir Dogs.

HiM has attracted attention at CineMart and Power to the Pixel for the elaborate transmedia narrative planned. Weiler admits that some of the game’s content has been out in the wild since the end of Hope is Missing in 2007. Sometime in 2010, these assets will be complemented by the release of geo-locative applications for the iPhone and Android tied to the experience. Later in 2010, Weiler hopes to begin shooting the feature film, which will serve as “just one larger component within [the] whole story world.”

Lance Weiler just got back from his trip to Rotterdam for the International Film Festival. At the festival, Weiler’s upcoming transmedia project HIM (produced by Seize the Media) won the Arte France Cinema Award.

The Arte France Cinéma Award is given out every year to the best CineMart project. The winner receives 10,000 Euros towards financing the development of the project. Filmmaker Magazine noted that director of Arte France Cinéma Michel Reilhac remarked that the award “acknowledged the visionary nature of Weiler’s project and noted that it speaks towards the type of new thinking about audience and platforms that will be necessary if our world of specialty cinema is to survive in the coming years.”

Congratulations to Lance Weiler and everyone at Seize the Media.

In a few days, Lance Weiler is going to Rotterdam to attend CineMart, the annual co-production market of the International Film Festival. Weiler’s upcoming cross-media project HIM was selected as one of 36 films to participate in this year’s presentation to an expected 850 international producers, sales agents, distributors, and funds. HIM, in addition to being the only work selected from the United States this year, is the first transmedia work to be selected at CineMart in its 26 year history. Previous films selected to participate in CineMart include the Academy Award-winning film Boys Don’t Cry, the grotesquely captivating Ichi the Killer (殺し屋１), and The Eye (見鬼), recently remade for the United States starring Jessica Alba.

When reached for comment, Weiler explained that HIM would be an interactive experience fusing storytelling and gaming, set on a global stage. The thought-provoking horror story will be a film at its core, but will fuse together elements of gaming, live events, serialized shorts, and graphic novel content taking place around the world and in your own living room. While the rules of the universe are established, Weiler has left considerable room in the story for what he describes as “controlled spontaneity”: the rules of the universe are set up, but the ripples from audience participation can have significant effects on the final product. As co-founder and principal of Seize the Media, Weiler developed the Hope is Missing ARG for the DVD release of his immersive film project Head Trauma, and worked with Hammer Films to produce the Beyond the Rave experience on MySpace.

The project is also an attempt to move away from traditional financing models for films relying on private equity and pre-sale financing deals by utilizing branding and licensing agreements. The ideal is to cement transmedia as a new media format. And one of the advantages of transmedia storytelling is the ability to set up considerable story elements on a limited budget, leading to a gradual rollout drawing on an international audience. Indeed, a number of times Weiler hinted that some elements may be floating out there relatively soon.

Presenting HIM to potential investors at CineMart is an opportunity to showcase both the potential and opportunities inherent in transmedia storytelling and alternate reality gaming as a self-sufficient format. And as one of BusinessWeek’s 18 People Who Changed Hollywood, Weiler just might be the man for the job.