NM: You recently sent My Life is a Movie (MLIAM) to the Australian Christian Broadcasting network. How did that all come about?
DW: An associate and I went to Nashville for the National Religious Broadcasters convention. There you find a lot of channels, networks, ministries, a lot of radio and TV. They gather and set up booths. We pretty much went booth to booth to give out information on MLIAM. One of the groups was from Australia. They took it back with them, they liked it, and they’re going to broadcast it there soon. And they also do a live stream, which you can watch anywhere in the world. So maybe Stephanie Swink (Lyndsy in MLIAM) will be a superstar down in Australia.
NM: One of the unique elements of MLIAM is that you shot the entire film on your iPhone, which stands in as the perspective of the character of Wyatt, played by your son Elijah. What was that process like?
DW: It was a challenge. I have seen other movies shot on iPhones, but we took it a step further. It actually was an integral part of the story; we weren’t just using the phone as our camera. It was Wyatt’s phone. The problem was you can write action, but when it comes to actually shooting that action from a character’s hands – that can become really limiting and challenging. There were a couple of scenes where the phone had to fall out of his hands so the viewer can still see that action happening.
Writers have to deal with that if they are in the first person point-of-view. If something happens down the street, they can’t readily write about it because they were not there. So I had to make sure that all the action was right in front of Wyatt. One of the devices we used was to make it as if he was shooting these little TV shows: My Life is a Horror Movie, My Life is a Home Fix-It Show, My Life Is a Spy movie. That way he turned the camera on himself to set up the scene and it helped us transition from point to point, allowing the viewer to know what day it was, where they were, and what was going on, and from there you can see the action.