Matt Bettinelli-Olpin

Matt grew up during the 1980s in the Bay Area of California. He soon became involved with the music scene and in 1993 formed Link 80 with Joey Bustos, Adam Pereira and Jeff Acree. The ska/punk band became one of the leading sounds of the '90s ska revival in the Bay Area. He recorded two albums with the band, 17 Reasons and Killing Katie before leaving Link 80 in 1997 to work as a music journalist covering the emerging punk scene. One of the many interviews he did was with Illinois punk rock band Alkaline Trio. This was to prove fortunate as his association with the band would result in the production of his first music video for their song "Goodbye Forever" in 1999. Producing their music video led Matt into acting roles in a series of shorts by fellow Bay Area filmmakers The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone) for several years and in the process introduced him to a new medium he was to embrace wholeheartedly.Always a consummate storyteller, he began to experiment with developing his own video shorts. It wasn't long before he formed the filmmaking collective Chad, Matt & Rob, in 2007. They took the art of the found footage video to new places with their online hit "Alien Roommate Prank Goes Bad"(2008) and soon were exploring other new video formats. The group developed the concept of the interactive adventure video, a term they coined for their "choose your adventure" video shorts. After a series of personnel changes in 2011 and 2012 the group changed their name to Radio Silence.With Radio Silence came several important opportunities for Matt, including an invitation to make one of the segments in an anthology video project, "V/H/S" (2012). Critics singled out the closing segment by Radio Silence as the outstanding contribution to the video, which played at Sundance and was nominated for Best Motion Picture by the Catalonian Film Festival. The success of the film led to the collective's opportunity to create a full length feature film for Fox using the same found footage techniques they used in "V/H/S" for the horror film "Devil's Due" (2014).