Nerdcore For Life: Now on DVD!

I can’t believe the day has finally come. Today is August 3rd, 2010 which means that our documentary Nerdcore For Life is now officially available to own on DVD! If you’d like top purchase a copy, just head to www.nerdcoreforlife.com to place your order. What does the DVD include? Well, here’s a breakdown of what’s on there:

The Movie
-The feature-length documentary (of course)

Bonus scenes
-Nerdcore Night After party
-The Sucklord meets Nomad
-Nerdcore in Las Vegas
-Monzy performs at Stanford
-The Nerdcore For Life team in Amsterdam

Music videos
-LOLcats by Doctor Popular
-Buggin’ Out by MC Router

As much as I love our film, I think the bonus scenes contain some of the best moments on the entire DVD. There’s some really awesome stuff in there. Basically the bonus scenes contain the footage that we thought was a little too harsh for the documentary.  (Check them out and you’ll understand what I mean.)

The release of the DVD closes a really huge chapter in my life. This Friday, August 6th it will be five years since I first heard of Nerdcore and got the insane idea in my head to try and make a movie about what was then, a totally underground and nascent genre. I’ve been trying to write a new description of the film for this announcement but I think our official synopsis still describes the film perfectly:

Two of the 21st century’s most powerful social forces; Hip-Hop and geek culture collide head-on in the feature-length documentary, Nerdcore For Life. Born on the internet, Nerdcore Hip-Hop is rap music made by geeks, for geeks and covers such traditionally nerdy topics as comic books, video games, sci-fi, anime and technology. This new and fascinating genre is founded on “Do It Yourself” ethics and most Nerdcore rappers create their music on home PCs and disseminate their work for free on the internet.

Though it has existed on-line for almost a decade, only recently has Nerdcore gone from being an internet fad to an underground cultural phenomenon. Filmed over the course of two years, Nerdcore For Life profiles the top names in the genre as they celebrate “geek Life” and their passion for hip hop to the fullest, fight anti-nerd stereotypes, and attempt to overcome the common obstacles that block musicians of all types from fulfilling their dreams. The documentary follows these dedicated artists as they go from recording rhymes in their mother’s basement to performing live for thousands of cheering fans. From their first song to their first MTV appearance, Nerdcore For Life chronicles the amazing transformation of a group of unknown nerds into internet celebrities and rising hip-hop stars.

I’m quite proud of this film and what we accomplished with it.  Now all that’s left for us to do is sell a copy to YOU!  So click here to do just that:  http://www.nerdcoreforlife.com/

Movie meets world

I’m very happy to finally announce that we’ve signed a worldwide distribution agreement for Nerdcore For Life with a fantastic company called Journeyman Pictures.  Journeyman is based in the UK and they specialize is distributing offbeat documentaries.  They do a ton of business throughout Europe which is a market that we all think will be really accepting of a crazy documentary about rapping nerds.  Journeyman has some really interesting plans for Nerdcore For Life. The DVD release is already in the works but the film should hopefully be accessible to people in lots of other ways.  For now though, the focus is getting the DVD ready to ship.  So stay tuned for a release date!

Nerdcore For Life, featuring…

I wanted to keep the complete list of Nerdcore artists that appear in Nerdcore For Life a secret so that certain cameos would be a suprise for the hardcore-nerdcore fans out there. But now that the film has had some public screenings I think it’s a good time to release the official lists of names. The final cut of Nerdcore For Life wound up featuring more than 40 Nerdcore rappers and producers from all across North America. I think the acts that we included in the doc offer a really full and diverse cross section of the people that were out there making Nerdcore from 2006 to 2008.

Here’s the official list of artists that appear in Nerdcore For Life:

MC Plus +, Ytcracker, The Lords of the Rhymes, mc chris, Ultraklystron, Doctor Popular, MC Hawking, Nursehella, Optimus Rhyme, Beefy, MC Router, Zealous1, Jesse Dangerously, Shael Riley, Baddd Spellah, MC Lars, The Former Fat Boys, High-C, Nomad, The Sucklord, Monzy, Tanuki, The Krondor Krew, Maja, Schaffer The Darklord, My Parent’s Favorite Music Ham-Star and Emergency Pizza Party featuring Fanatical, Sir-Up, Benjamin Bear, Betty Rebel and MC Wreksion.

Brief cameos are made by Funky 49, MC Gigahertz, the Stunt Junkies, IllGill, The Futuristic Sex Robotz and Rai.

There is one other artist that makes an appearance in the film but a contractual commitment requires me to redact his name from the official list of featured acts.

All in all, that’s not too shabby, I think.

Belated video from the Frozen Film Fest

Ok, ok, the San Francisco frozen film festival was a month ago but I haven’t had time to do anything with the footage we shot until now.

So here’s a video recap of all the awesome fun that was had at the screening and afterparty. There’s a little of the post-screening Q&A plus samples of the performances by Drown Radio, Nomad and MC Lars. I kept putting off making this since I dreaded the thought of uplaoding a decent looking video to youtube only to see its quality turned to gray mud like clips I’ve uploaded in the past. I’ve tried a billion different tricks to get my videos to look better on that site but I’ve never been able to get decent results. When you take a 800MB video and smash it down to 80MB so you can make youtube’s 100MB limit, you’re going to lose a lot of quality.

Or so it was back in the stone ages! Youtube has now lifted its 100MB cutoff and videos can now be over a GB big. The “standard version” of this video looks pretty crappy but if you click through and watch it directly on youtbe, you can select the “Watch in High Quality” version. The difference in the quality has blown my mind. It’s amazingly sharp. Youtube, once again you have managed to rock my world, thoroughly.

DON’T WATCH THIS VIDEO HERE UNLESS YOU LIKE LOOKING AT CRAPPY, BLURRY, GRAY-LOOKING VIDEO FOOTAGE.  CLICK THIS LINK AND WATCH THE HIGH-QUALITY VERSION:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woW66yChyGs

My tribute to Perez Hilton

There’s another video I’ve been meaning to put together and now I’m actually psyched to do it.  Hopefully I’ll have it posted in all its High Quality glory in the next two weeks.

Nerdcore For Life: Wired.com review!

I checked Nerdcore For Life’s myspace page today and found a comment from one of the groups that appear in the documentary, The Krondor Krew:

“Wired.com top story on Google feeds today, and Wired’s front page. Very nice sir.”

What does that mean?  It means that Wired.com ran an amazing review of the film today.  I had seen the article this morning but I didn’t know about the google feed thing.  I actually subscribe to the Wired feed so I checked out google and saw this ——–>

For an hyper-low budget indie documentary, we get a silly amount of press.  Every time I get interviewed or see the name of our film printed in a newspaper (see previous blog post) I’m just absolutely amazed.  As great as all the other articles and stuff are though, this one is really special.  I mean look at this.  This is an image from the front page of wired.com:

There, in the middle of the page, surrounded by stories about Star Wars and Hackers and NASA and comicon and F-ing STANLEY KUBRICK, is our film…just sitting there like it belongs.  We’re even under listed under “Hollywood” stories, presumably because they don’t have a section of the website that covers films that were produced in the south suburbs of Chicago.

The piece was written by a really great, super geek-friendly writer who was good enough to come out to the San Francisco screening.  Originally I was going to send her a DVD to check out but I’m really glad she got to see the film with an audience…especially the Frozen Film fest Audience since those people were nerds-to-the-core and seemed to really love the film.  The reporter even brought a Wired photographer and his cool/ghostly shots appear throughout he piece.  Here’s the big, eerie pic that ran at the top of the article.  Its of me and Doc Pop as we opened up Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase at the Double Dutch show.

So the article is great but I feel a little weird about the whole thing.  I didn’t realize my interview was going to be such a large part of it and some of what I said is kind of embarrassing.  I’ve had to deal with a few “haters” while working on and promoting the film.  Not everyone in the Nerdcore scene supports the film.  Some people actually go out of their way to spread weird rumors about it take public shots at it.  The consolation is that none of these people have actually sat down and watched the movie and all they can do is guess about its content.   But it seems like whenever something good happens to the project, the same handful of people feel the need to pop up and throw rocks at us.  The Frozen Film Fest screening was kinda, sorta a big deal and consequently the haters out there weren’t happy about that.  For a while it looked like two of them were even going to try and crash the San Francisco after-party but the Double Dutch is a hater-free zone and in the end they decided it would be best to stay away.  Point is, these things were on my mind when I did my interview and I used the opportunity to vent a little.  I never thought that stuff would actually make it into the article.  But now that I think about it, I’m kind of glad it did.  It just goes to show that being a filmmaker ain’t all fun and film fests.  Besides, if you’re a documentary filmmaker and you make a movie that no one has a problem with, it’s probably a pretty boring movie and definitly not worth its weight in iPhones.

Full review is here:  http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/documentary-ner.html