From Whitman’s televisions to the silver screen, alum Bryan Reisberg (’06) is hoping to make his way into the big leagues of the film industry.

Reisberg served as the director of Whitman Shorts his senior year. And now, his debut movie, “Big Significant Things,” starring “Game of Thrones” actor Harry Lloyd, will premiere in March at the prominent South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. The festival, which began in 1987, features music and conferences with famous speakers, as well as films.

In 2008, Reisberg formed his own production company, Uncorked Productions, with fellow NYU student Andrew Corkin. After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film/TV production in 2009, he worked at an advertising agency while making music videos and short films on the side.

Reisberg started writing the film when he was 23, and after a few months he had a full script.

“By the time I had a script written it wasn’t too hard to get a lot of people involved who needed to be there,” Reisberg said. “I sent the script to Harry Lloyd and he expressed an immediate interest. After that things started coming together.”

The film follows 26-year-old Craig as he leaves his job, family and girlfriend for a spontaneous road trip south. He makes a plan to visit several of the “Worlds Largest Roadside Attractions” in the comedy/drama.

While some independent films spend a year or more searching for financing, “Big Significant Things” was fully financed within six months of the completing the script.

Resiberg and a small cast and crew travelled to Mississippi last May to begin filming. Over the course of two months, he found locals  to add to the crew, casted around 30 locals for featured and background roles and shot the film. Reisberg and his crew spent the summer editing and started submitting the film to festivals in the fall.

In late January, he found out his film had been chosen from over 2,000 submissions for one of the 115 spots in the feature film lineup.

“South by Southwest, next to Sundance, is one of the top film festivals in the country for a film this size,” Reisberg said. “From there, you see how it is perceived, you go into more film festivals around the world, hopefully somebody buys it, and then we release it.”

His inspiration for “Big Significant Things” came from his experience growing up in the sheltered environments of Whitman and NYU, day-dreaming of adventure.

“You just kind of have these fantasies of ‘what if I just left, what if I just drove off and went to go explore somewhere,’” Reisberg said. “After five minutes of thinking that, I’m like ‘I’d have to set up certain bills for online bill payment, I’d have to pay student loans on this day, I’d probably have to check in with my mother because she would be nervous back home in Maryland.’ You couldn’t just get up and leave in this day and age.”

The idea of a road trip in the movie was inspired by movies of the 60s and 70s like “Easy Rider” and “Paper Moon” that featured adventurous cross-country road trips, Reisburg said.

“It became this funny idea about if you took a character who has been for all intents and purposes sheltered his entire life [and he had] that funny desire to do something so romantic and something so spontaneous, when in the real world it’s hard to do that,” Reisberg said.

Whitman Shorts teacher Geoff Schaefer missed out on having Reisberg in his class by one year. Schaefer becoming the Shorts teacher in 2007. Reisberg and he connected over Facebook after he graduated.

“Bryan will be successful because he’s charismatic,” Schaefer said. “If he took whatever creative talents he had in high school and developed them in college, he will be on the screen in no time.”

Reisberg hopes his film catches a producer’s eye at SXSW, but said he doesn’t have a specific message he wants the audience to walk away with.

“At the end of the day, the goal is to tell a good story; the goal is to keep the audience engaged, and to create something that you’re confident in stylistically,” Reisberg said. “Then you hope at the end of the day that, maybe, you smuggled some good ideas in there that can kind of bring the film some more life than you intended.”