Company & Product Info

About “Tender Loving Care”

An interactive DVD movie starring John Hurt

Plot Synopsis

“Tender Loving Care” (TLC) is a tense, psychological thriller based upon the novel with the same name by Andrew Neiderman.  The plot centers around a young couple that has lost its only child in a car accident.  As a result of this tragedy, the wife begins to lose her grip on reality.  In an attempt to cope with the wife’s spiral into a dark fantasy world where she believes and acts as if her daughter were still alive, the couple starts seeing a psychologist played by two-time Academy Award nominee, John Hurt.  He recommends that they hire a live-in psychiatric nurse to monitor the wife more closely and assist with her treatment on a more intensive level.

The nurse, who is quite attractive and mysterious, employs seemingly questionable psychiatric methods in her treatment of the wife’s condition.  The nurse and the husband clash vehemently about this, yet they are simultaneously drawn to each other by a dangerous, erotically-charged attraction and test of wills.  Ultimately, the story becomes an emotional roller-coaster of lust, power, and deception that challenges everyone’s sanity with dramatic and dire consequences.

About the Developers of “Tender Loving Care”

“Tender Loving Care” was created by David Wheeler and Rob Landeros, co-founders of Aftermath Media.  David Wheeler wrote and directed TLC, and Rob was the Creative Director and Designer for the project.  Both have extensive experience in various entertainment media and are keenly interested in exploring ways to further the art of storytelling through the most advanced interactivity options available with new media technologies.  Indeed, they’ve established themselves at the forefront of a new style of movie-making by trail-blazing both the concept and execution of “enhanced movie experiences.”

Landeros and Wheeler amassed impressive track records on previous best-selling interactive titles such as “The 7th Guest” and “The 11th Hour,” while working at Trilobyte, Inc.  Landeros was a co-founder of Trilobyte, as well as the company’s President and Creative Director.  Wheeler, who is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, was the resident filmmaker at Trilobyte and also scripted many projects.

Aftermath has combined the best elements of cinema, literature, visual arts and music to create TLC – a stunning, provocative, and engaging interactive movie that is unlike anything else.

How the interactive elements enhance the experience

At Aftermath Media, story means everything.  Wheeler and Landeros bring the most important elements of good literature and cinema – excellent plot development, drama, and characterization – to interactive storytelling, and the interactivity exists solely to support these elements.

In TLC, the interactivity is based upon a psychological theme, since sanity, hidden agendas, personal motivations, and psychiatric treatment are central topics in the story.  The actions of the characters, and the plot directions, are actually affected by the viewer's own ideas, perceptions, predilections, and aversions – as determined by the viewer’s answers to various psychological questions posed by John Hurt’s character, Dr. Turner.

In fact, TLC is structured to develop a psychological profile of the viewer – for entertainment purposes only – through a series of fun, provocative questions designed to gauge the viewer’s reaction to the story as it unfolds.  In large part, the viewer also gets to play the voyeur in TLC by investigating the environment and even snooping into the characters’ personal effects to gain insight about secrets or hidden agendas.

This enhanced movie experience is somewhat like offering viewers the best of both a book and a movie.  Like a book, TLC offers a rich experience with great detail and insight, yet it incorporates aural and visual elements for the more visceral experience of a movie.  This experience is so intuitive that even a novice computer user can understand how it works and interact with it immediately.  There is no “scoring” as in games, and a viewer cannot make an incorrect response.

Perhaps most importantly, the action – and interaction – of TLC isn’t dependent upon weapons and body counts.  Instead, it revolves around more true-to-life (and by many people’s standards, more compelling) scenarios based upon how human beings perceive their circumstances, how they respond to uncomfortable situations, what motivates them to act or feel a certain way, and how they are affected by the actions of others.  In short, TLC represents a sophisticated new entertainment paradigm for the rest of us.

Production and Technical Features of “Tender Loving Care”

TLC began with Wheeler’s 118-page linear screenplay.  Once Landeros began developing the interactive design, Wheeler expanded the script to 207 pages to accommodate a multitude of plot directions and endings.  TLC was then shot on 35mm film, both on location and on a soundstage, in Southern Oregon.

During filming, the artists on the TLC production team measured and photographed everything on the set, then recreated the sets and the props in extremely realistic 3-D so the viewer can explore the very same environments in which the live action takes place.  The numerous interactive elements, which include the characters' diaries, phone messages, the various psychological tests, etc., were incorporated during post-production.  Because of TLC’s enormous amount of content and high-end production values, it was designed specifically to take advantage of the cutting edge entertainment media of DVD-ROM and DVD-Video.

Production Credits

Sales and Distribution

“Tender Loving Care” is available now at retail locations nationwide and at the Aftermath online store at www.aftermathmedia.com/tlc/

Press Contacts:

Chiquita Medea (contact for Aftermath and TLC information & interviews) 
Email: info@aftermathmedia.com 

Aftermath Media is a company dedicated to creating interactive entertainment with compelling content and extraordinary executions.  Aftermath was co-founded by two recognized creative forces of the multimedia industry, Rob Landeros and David Wheeler, specifically to explore fresh, new ways to approach the time-honored art of storytelling through the use of up-to-the-minute media.

Landeros and Wheeler both have extensive and varied backgrounds in the entertainment industries.  Their different, yet complimentary, skills and talents fuel a creative and highly collaborative style, which is what led to the formation of Aftermath Media.

Landeros started out his career as a counter-cultural underground cartoonist in the 1960’s.  He transitioned into the digital age when he picked up a Commodore 64 in 1982 and discovered that it was more fun to create his own games than to play those that were available on the market.  After applying his fine art background to what he learned about computer code, Landeros embarked upon an illustrious career as an Art Director for entertainment software.  He worked on numerous best-sellers, such as "King of Chicago" and "Defender of the Crown" for Cinemaware, and "Spirit of Excalibur" and "War in Middle Earth" for Virgin Interactive Entertainment.  His work in this area eventually led him to co-found Trilobyte, Inc. in 1991 to begin work on an interactive title for the new and relatively unexplored CD-ROM market.  The result of Landeros’ foresight and considerable creative talents was the groundbreaking and highly acclaimed CD-ROM interactive title, “The 7th Guest.” 

Wheeler began his journey to Aftermath as a filmmaker.  He wrote and directed his first film, 
“Life Sentence,” while studying at the prestigious London Film School.  This highly acclaimed film was among the first documentaries ever done on battered wives, and it vaulted Wheeler across the Atlantic to the U.S., where he began directing documentaries for CBS.  The first of these, “Skid Row,” garnered four Emmy Awards.  Wheeler then helped create the CBS program, “Two on the Town,” which ran for 11 seasons and won numerous Emmys.  After expanding his repertoire to include high-end, award-winning TV commercials for clients such as Elizabeth Arden, Diet Coke, and Bill Blass Jeans, as well as writing and directing another TV movie, “The Fighter,” Wheeler met up with Landeros at Trilobyte.

It was there that Wheeler and Landeros collaborated on one of the most successful titles in multimedia, “The 11th Hour,” which was the much anticipated follow-up to “The 7th Guest.”  Wheeler wrote and directed “The 11th Hour.”  Landeros, who was President and Creative Director of a much larger Trilobyte by then, was the game designer for “The 11th Hour” and provided extensive creative  input on all other aspects of production and creative work for the project.  Through their work on this and other projects, Landeros and Wheeler learned that they each had a passion for pushing the boundaries of current thinking to achieve highly creative and often unprecedented results.   

The latest result of their collaborative efforts, which is also the first title released by Aftermath Media, is “Tender Loving Care” – affectionately referred to as TLC.  This project represents the first truly interactive motion picture ever created.  It was shot on 35mm film for big-screen quality, yet explores intimate, thought-provoking ideas – both within the story and within the viewer’s own psyche – making it the perfect antidote for mindless, couch-potato-style home “entertainment.”  With TLC, the viewer’s own desires, attitudes, and predispositions – as determined by a series of fun, provocative psychological questions posed throughout the story – actually control character and plot development, resulting in various outcomes.  In short, TLC was designed to heighten your senses – not dull them.  And it’s a lot of fun.

True to form, Wheeler and Landeros developed TLC for the most sophisticated, cutting edge interactive platform available:  DVD.  In fact, TLC is one of the very first interactive entertainment titles released that has been designed specifically for the remarkable quality and interactive advantages offered by DVD-ROM and DVD-Video.

Despite their past and current innovations, however, Wheeler and Landeros feel that they’ve just barely scratched the surface of what interactive entertainment can be – which means that they have big plans for the future of Aftermath.  They are continuing to explore new ways to integrate linear and nonlinear story lines, multiple character motivations and perceptions, and simultaneous, yet divergent, narrative expositions.  In other words, they are already prepared to move beyond what TLC can do – and that product is way ahead of everything else on the market.  Other Aftermath projects in the works include a Hitchcock-style interactive thriller, a funky, interactive science-fiction movie set in a 1960’s “hippie” commune, and a more straightforward, fun and whimsical interactive game show.

As David Wheeler points out, “We don’t sit around thinking about what the next hot interactive title will be and then try to create that.  We create interactive stories that we find interesting and compelling, and pursue every possible angle and element of those stories to ensure that other people will be just as intrigued as we are – even if it’s for different reasons.”

“We simply want to redefine the nature of entertainment media,” asserts Landeros.  “That’s all.”  

More information about Aftermath Media is available on the company’s Web site at www.aftermathmedia.com.  TLC is available for purchase at that site as well.  Press inquiries should be directed to Chiquita Medea at info@aftermathmedia.com.