Linear films and books

Vlack recently completed The Revisionist, a novel and feature film script, which he will direct. Currently in pre-production.

He also recently completed Anna, also a novel and feature film script, a love story about a woman in her 70’s; and Upstate, a home invasion script about the clash between classes in Upstate New York.

He wrote Everywhere, Always, a poetry book for children; White Eyes and Skipping Stone, a middle grade novel set in 17th Century Japan; Captain Salt, a middle grade novel about a very salty old man and his two thirteen-year-old nemeses; The Revisionist and Anna, both novels based on his screenplays; and Spin and Snap, an adult literary novel about a homeless man with a supernatural dancing ability who becomes a superstar under the tutelage of Jay-Z.

He produced and edited Wisdom and Music, each a book and a feature film on cultural figures, from Nelson Mandela to Jane Goodall to Ravi Shankar.

He wrote, produced, and directed (with Damani Baker) Still Bill, a feature documentary on the musician Bill Withers, which has won numerous awards for best documentary and aired on Showtime. 

He wrote and produced High Falls, a short film with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won Best Short Film at the Woodstock Film Festival. 

For New York Times Television, he produced the NOVA “Battle Plan Under Fire” and “Raising the Flag”, an hour-long documentary on American occupations of foreign lands.  

Interactive storytelling and spatial media 

While VP of Creative at eko—a technology company with a platform for creating branching narratives—he wrote the virtual reality interactive film Broken Night, starring Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival; Executive Produced That Moment When, the first branching narrative comedy series; the interactive reimaginings of Fame and Crime and Punishment; and First 30, an interactive romantic comedy, with Sharon Horgan’s Mermade/Merman Executive Producing.

In 2011, Vlack founded the media department at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, building a team of producers and content specialists, as well as talented artists in various disciplines. Under his leadership, the media department completed nearly $40M worth of productions, including the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, IBM’s THINK exhibit at Lincoln Center, and a 200-monitor installation for the 2015 World Expo, which was the focus of a Daniel Libeskind-designed pavilion.

He wrote, produced, and directed the Centers for Disease Control’s two-hour Global Symphony, a nineteen-screen media installation of animations and documentary films. He wrote, produced, and directed the orientation film at the National Museum of the Marine Corps and wrote all media treatments for the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Advertising

He has created some 50 commercials for Puma and The Gap, and made launch videos for Apple products, among them the iPad and the iPhone 4, which at the time was the most successful product launch in history.