About
Brian Chirls is a media artist, technologist and founder of Three Eyed Labs, a research and development lab based in New York, developing original cross-media content, tools and innovative business models for filmmakers, journalists and musicians.
Brian became known as an industry leader in online film promotion and distribution for his work with the cult film Four Eyed Monsters. With the film’s directors, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, Brian pioneered a variety of innovations, making Four Eyed Monsters the first full-length film featured on YouTube; the first film to screen in a virtual world and the first film distributed to theaters based on audience demand. These achievments, among others, have been reported in Wired, Variety, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and Businessweek. Brian has since consulted on Internet-based audience outreach on films such as John Sayles’s Honeydripper, Nerdcore Rising and Lynn Hershman’s Women Art Revolution.
The work on Four Eyed Monsters led Brian to launch Crowd Controls, a web service for filmmakers and musicians to track audience demand around the world to drive distribution. Crowd Controls is being used by a number of upcoming films, including Iron Sky, 2011 Sundance hit Pariah and Tiffany Shlain’s Connected.
Most recently, Brian has helped to create a new genre of interactive video pieces that demonstrate ways to combine the interactivity and connectivity of the web with the aesthetic power of cinema, while promoting the power of open source technology. Brian has built interactive versions of archive documentary footage for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and citizen journalism documentary 18 Days in Egypt, as well as an interactive “making of” version of Ok Go‘s music video “White Knuckles“. Brian is currently developing a tool for real-time chroma key and other video effects inside a web browser, as part of Mozilla’s Web Made Movies project.
Brian continues to write about media innovation on his blog and regularly speaks at film festivals, conferences and other venues, such as New York Foundation for the Arts, Tribeca Film Institute, the New Zealand Film Commission the Open Video Conference and the South By Southwest Film Festival. Before becoming a media innovator, Brian built financial software and worked in construction on New York City subway stations and expressways. He is a graduate of the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania.
