Matt Pizzolo

Matt Pizzolo
Pizzolo during Transmedia panel at the 2011 San Diego Comic Con
Born	Long Island, New York, United States
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter, playwright, comic book writer, actor, producer, entrepreneur

Matt Pizzolo (born on Long Island, New York) is an American award-winning film director, screenwriter, producer, comic book writer, playwright, and entrepreneur, best known for his work as creator of the transmedia franchise Godkiller, writer-director of the indie movie Threat, and director of music videos for Atari Teenage Riot.

He is the organizer of the Occupy Comics project, creators of DiY-Fest, co-founder of Kings Mob Productions with filmmaking partner Katie Nisa, and also runs indie film studio HALO 8 Entertainment and the comic book publisher Black Mask Studios with partners Brett Gurewitz and Steve Niles.

Pizzolo is known for mixing new technologies with film, previously unveiling a still in-development, non-linear film format called EtherFilms at San Diego Comic Con. Wired posted the slide deck from Pizzolo's presentation of the in-development format which adds transmedia and hypertext to film.

Pizzolo was 21 years old and living out of a backpack in New York City's Lower East Side, and working at Kim's Video and Tower Video when he wrote the screenplay for Threat, a radical, transgressive story of class struggle and youth violence. He intended to shoot Hi8 footage of the principal characters, and cutting their dialogue and reaction shots against footage stolen from obscure films, creating a unique project built on film sampling (a common practice in the indie rock music of the time). As the project developed, Pizzolo discarded the sampling format and instead directed it on 16mm film as a traditional independent film despite the fact that its massive scope of location and action was quite ambitious for no-budget indies of the time which generally focused on a single-location, talking-heads format.