Fermilab music video hits the web

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland is (finally) up and running! While the folks over in Europe are busy celebrating, we thought we’d take this opportunity to pay homage to the ORIGINAL king of the particle accelerators; Fermilab in Batavia, IL, USA. The LHC got it’s own rap video back in 2008 so we figured it was about time Fermilab had one too!

Filmed on location in and around the Tevatron particle collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, “Particle Business” is rapper funky49’s hip-hop tribute to the “O.G. Atom Smasher.” The video was directed and edited by Dan Lamoureux, the filmmaker behind the Nerdcore hip-hop documentary, “Nerdcore For Life.” Huge thanks to all the fantastic folks at Fermilab that made this crazy thing possible! For more music from funky49 visit funky49.com.

And check this out, we even got a write up on the Discovery channel’s website: http://news.discovery.com/space/where-da-higgs-at-fermilabs-particle-rap.html

It is on like a Tevatron

One of the best things about being a filmmaker is that sometimes you get to go places and see things that are off limits to the general public.  My camera has opened a lot of doors for me but of all the crazy things I’ve been allowed to shoot, the stuff I got to film this past week takes the cake.  For reasons that are still not 100% clear to me, I got to spend 2 days filming a music video at one of the most important scientific facilities in the world; FermiLab.  FermiLab is located in Batavia, IL and is home to the world’s largest particle accelerator. (Though the Large Hadron Collider at Cern will be taking over that title soon)  Anyway, it’s a big ass machine called a tevatron that flings particles at each other at mind-blowing speeds.  When the particles collide they rip apart and physicists are able to catch a passing glimpse of the stuff that makes up those particles.  But that’s just one of the many types of world-class science they are doing at FermiLab.  Those people are hardcore over there.

I grew up only about an hour from FermiLab.  I was kind of an atomic energy nerd when I was younger and I always hoped that my class would go to the lab for a field trip.  We never did and I always regretted it.  Well, I that is to say I did regret it.  Over the last few days I got to see every nook and radioactive cranny of that place.

Me, Funky49 and our bodyguards in the Tevatron control room

How’d it happen?  Well a few weeks back a Nerdcore rapper from Florida named Funky49 e-mailed and said he had written a rap about FermiLab and he was flying to Illinois to visit the facility.  Funky makes a brief cameo in Nerdcore For Life and he knew that I lived not to farm from Batavia so he asked if I’d want to shoot a music video with him while he was in town.  I said ‘heck yeah’ and that was that.

Funky49 outside FermiLab's Wilson Hall

FermiLab was really, really, REALLY supportive of the whole project.  As it turned out the Fermi rap was even the brainchild of FermiLab scientist; Dr. Ben Kilminster.  Funky49 had created an entire hip-hop album about Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry.  Dr. Ben heard it and thought Funky would be the perfect guy to do a rap song and video about FermiLab.

Now, if you are a gigantic mega-nerd this whole concept might sound a little familiar to you.  A rap video shot at particle accelerator?  Hasn’t that been done before??  It sure has and that’s the point!  As I mentioned, the tevatron at FermiLab is about to lose its “world’s largest” status to the new particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland.  Last year, some staff members at CERN created their own hip-hop video entitled “The Large Hadron Rap.”

The video is pretty good and damn did it blow up on the web-o-sphere!  The Large Hadron Rap video is up to 5.2 million views on youtube.  So the FermiLab folks figured that perhaps it was time for the Americans to rebut with a hip-hop video of their own!  And so, I now find myself on the front line of history’s first international, particle physics hip-hop feud.

Me filming the camera-shy buffalo

Funky49 and I spent two days running around the FermiLab compound.  And man, it really is a “compound.”  It’s a huge, amazing place.  What I like best about it is that the designers of the facilities really tried to reflect spirit of the mid-west in the grounds.  There are vast fields of open prairie between the buildings and there’s even an entire heard of buffalo living there.

It’s going to take me a few weeks to cut the video together but I have a feeling it will turn out to be something really cool.  We were allowed an absurd level of access.  We even got to film the open tevatron!  After we were done, we had to get “frisked” by a Geiger counter to make sure we hadn’t been irradiated.  And that wasn’t just some overcautious act.  The hardhats of our two chaperons tuned out to have been contaminated with radioactive dust while we were filming!

Inside the Tevatron room with our guides and their irradiated hard hats

So anyway, it was a great couple of days.  Huge thanks to Funky49 for asking me to do the video and extra big thanks to Dr. Ben and all the great people at FermiLab for showing us around and putting up with our shenanigans.  Check back in a few weeks to see the finished video!

OMG! LOLcats musik video unleeshed on teh internetz!

It was exactly one year ago today, on July 12th, 2008 that Nerdcore rapper/producer Doctor Popular and I spent an afternoon in a garbage filled alley in San Francisco filming a music video for his song LOLcats. Nerdcore For Life is roughly 84 minutes long.  It took about 5 months to edit.  The music video for LOLcats is under 3 minutes.  It took me 12 months to edit.  Ok…I didn’t spend all 12 months editing the thing.  It just got pushed to the back burner for a minute.  But when I realized that the one year anniversary of the shoot was coming up, I dug through my hard drive, found the files and finally finished our nerdcore magnum opus.  I didn’t exactly plan to post the video one year to the day that we shot it but sometimes the universe just makes cool stuff like this happen.

I think the video turned out awesome.  I’ve watched it 500 times at this point and it still makes me smile.  The song is great and Doc Pop is actually a really good actor too.  I think the reason I like the video so much is because I think LOLcats and Icanhascheezburger.com are like the most hilarious things to take up space on the internetz.  I look at ICHC every day!  Doc Pop is an LOLcat fan too and when you combine our geeky affection for this bizarre little meme, you get a very strange music video packed with in-jokes that only the most die-hard LOLcat fans will understand.  Even the San Francisco ally where we shot the video is an in-joke!  (details here)

So watch and try to enjoy the fruits of our Audio and Visual labors.  If you get every single LOLcat reference then congratulations;  you win a cheezburger…..and a belly rub…and a bukit!  We took a bunch of pictures during the shoot.  Here are a few of my favorites:

This might be my favorite photo of the set. It's just 2 guys; one performing and one filming. I didn't even own a decent camera this time last year. The one in the picture is borrowed.

End of the road?

I stopped submitting Nerdcore For Life to film festivals a good while back and now that I think about it, I don’t think the doc has had a festival screening since October!  Oh my God, that feels like it was last month.  No wait!  We screened in the Lake County Film Fest a few months back.  Well anyway, I thought we’d go for one more and as it turns out, we were accepted to what will probably be Nerdcore For Life’s final film festival.  The fest?  The Hardacre Film and Cinema Festival in Tipton, Iowa.  It’s our Iowa premiere!  There are only 5 documentary features selected for this year’s festival so it’s quite an honor to be accepted.  Couple that with the sentimentality that comes with our last fest screening and I’ve got enough motivation to get in my car and drive out there.  The festival runs August 7th and 8th at the very cool looking Hardacre Theater.  Is “Hardacre” the best name for an Iowa film festival or what?  Like I can just imagine that the theater got its name because the farmers would go there at the end of the day to unwind after working their “hard acres” or something.  Or maybe it was just built by a guy named “Arnie Hardacre.”  I don’t know.  I’ll check on that when I get out there.

http://www.tiptoniowa.us/hardacre/

New news about impending news

Well things are really going strong behind the scenes at Crapbot Productions.  Problem is that we can’t really talk about any of those things yet.  We’ve even managed to make some decent money this summer but I want to keep that on the DL for a few more weeks since I don’t want to jinx what we’re doing!

If you can think of a better name for this guy than "Crappy the Crapbot" be sure to let me know.

Our big news though is Nerdcore For Life related and we should be able to announce it this month I hope.  (we’re very excited)  But other cool stuff is in the works too.  I found out that I’m going to get to shoot a music video this summer at one of THE most important scientific research facilities in the entire world.   I don’t even want to talk about that one until the shoots are done lest homeland security find and put the kibosh on the whole thing.  In other video news, any day now we should be posting an epic music video that took over one year to make!  Ok….it didn’t exactly take a year to make.  It took me a year to make it.  It was something we shot in San Francisco last summer and there were always more pressing things to tend to.  But I finally dusted off the footage and now it’s almost ready to go.  Again, we are excited.  Oh, we also have two Nerdcore For Life screenings happening later this summer but again, I have to wait to give out the details.  One screening will be in the Midwest and the other will be somewhere in Europe.  Can you guess where?  I’ll give you a hint:  Vienna sausages don’t actually come from there!

In self-reflexive news, this very website you’re looking at is brand new!  Currently I’ve got like a dozen blogs, facebook pages, myspace pages and websites dedicated to our various projects but Crapbot Productions itself didn’t have a home on the web.  I think the site turned out very nice but I especially like our new mascot.  Un-officially I have named him “Crappy.”  But officially he’s just the Crapbot of Crapbot Productions.  I paid some dude from craigslist 50 bucks to whip that up for me.  I like him.  Crappy, not the craigslist dude, I mean.  I’ve already got him on my new Crapbot Productions business cards

Finally, in what may be the hugest news of all we are one week away from starting production on a brand new, feature-length documentary project.  This one I can really not talk about though.  We might keep this one under wraps all the way until we start post-production.  Shooting should last about 6 months and I’m hoping the final film will be ready to screen after the start of the new year.

Free Colorado NC4L Screening

A nerdcore fan at Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, CO contacted me about two months ago and asked what it would take to make a screening and concert happen at his school. We exchanged some ideas and the dude actually busted his ass and made the whole thing happen! He even got the school to sponsor it as an official event so the whole thing will be free and open to all. They even made up some really sweet posters:



I’ll be there and so will Colorado’s favorite son, Ytcracker. This is a student thing but the general public is welcome.

NERDCORE FOR LIFE screening + YTCRACKER Performance!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
7:00pm – 10:00pm
Lory Student Center Theatre
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO

Cost: Free!

Neat Amp Magazine Piece

Hey so this is cool, Amp Magazine did a great story about Nerdcore For Life and you can read it by clicking right here, right now:

http://www.ampmagazine.com/index.php/interviews/comments/nerdcore_for_life/

I did my interview for this so long ago I didn’t even remember what I said. I like this piece because it’s the first time a reporter included anything I had to say about craigslist. Without craigslist, I never would have been able to make the film; I found most of our camera operators there and I even found our editors there! So I’m glad Craigslist finally got a little credit.

We Heart Amsterdam

We’re back! After some genuine concern and worry about one member of our party, I’m happy to say that all of us (Beefy, MC Router, MC Lars, Ytcracker and me, Dan) survived our trip to Amsterdam for Glitched: The Dutch Nerdcore event. I think all of us would agree that it was one of the best, coolest, most special things we’ve ever done in our lives. It’s not just that it was a fun trip (which it was) it was because the guys that brought us out there (4Worx) were just such awesome, cool, happy people and they really made us feel appreciated and welcome. They didn’t set up the fest for money…they did it because they thought it would be fun and man. oh man, did those guys have fun. Those 4Worx guys partied harder than any of us!

The American Nerdcore For Life team, the Dutch 4worx guys and a lovely fountain

My flight landed at the airport in Amsterdam at about 9am on Tuesday and I was met by Gerrit, one of the 4Worx guys. He bought me some tea and we talked for like 2 hours while we waited for Beefy, Router and Ytcracker to get there. They were all coming in on the same flight from Houston. We were soon joined at Schiphol by Stevijn, the genius who came up with the idea for Glitched. Both he and Gerrit were super great guys; both as funny and as nice as could be. They took good care of us.

About 20 minutes before the other guys were supposed to land we noticed that suddenly everyone in the airport had gathered around every big screen TV they could find. Gerrit got up to see what was on. He came back and said “a plane just crashed at Schiphol Airport.” I said, “Wow, where’s Schiphol Airport?” And he said something to the effect of “you’re in it right now!”

I’ve been asked a few times about this but no, we didn’t feel the crash or hear any noises or see any wreckage. Right away we heard the flight was from Turkey so we knew our crew was ok but it wasn’t fun hanging out at the airport anymore. Shockingly, our friends’ plane was allowed to land after being delayed by only 15 minutes. When they got off, they didn’t even know there had been a crash or that they were almost diverted to Germany. So all of us were very lucky in more ways than one.

Our hotel....for serious!

Our hotel turned out to be outrageously nice. We would have been happy to sleep at the train station but instead, 4Worx booked us into the Hotel American which is right on one of the most famous and popular squares in Amsterdam; the Liedsplein. It was absolutely the best area you could ever hope to stay in. It was right in the heart of all the action. The rooms we got were ridiculous! I stayed with Beefy and our room overlooked a canal. Ytcracker stayed with MC Lars’ manager Mark (also a great, funny guy) and they had a huge balcony overlooking the square. MC Router got here own room, MC Lars stayed with his very cool girlfriend and Gerrit and Stevijn even got rooms at the hotel too.

That first day we had an awesome time just wandering around and then that night, the head of 4Worx, Hermen came in to meet us. That dude was super cool too. Hermen, Stevijn and Gerrit all kept taking us to dinner, showing us around, buying us drinks….it was just all fun, all the time. Here’s a video the 4Worx guys posted. They took me and Router to a popular Dutch fast food place to try something that Hermen described as being “the best thing you will ever eat.”  Here’s some video trying that particular item:

MC Router VS. The Frinkendel

Dutch food is pretty crazy. Most of it was good and most of it was fried. I decided I should try a pickled herring since it’s like the beloved national snack of Holland. Here’s my herring:

Pickles and death

Not pictured: me nearly puking after a single bite.

The day of the show, the 4Worx guys took us on a boat trip around the canals of Amsterdam. Probably the coolest thing about the excursion was that all we had to do to get to the boat was walk out of the front door of the hotel and there was the boat. Here are a couple pics and here’s a video posted by Stevijn (I think) of some of the rappers freestyling while boating. You can chalk up the bizarre freestyles to a combination of jet lag and too many Frikendels.

Beefy and Router...on a mother F-ing boat!

After the boat trip we headed to the venue; Club Panama. We spent a few hours setting up and doing tech checks and at 8pm we were greatly relived to see that a throng of people were waiting outside! I’m going to guess that overall, 250+ people turned out and some came from as far as Germany and the UK.

The 4worx guys greet their public

Everyone watched the film intently but the audio was kind of a problem since no matter how quiet everyone tried to be, there was always a soft murmur amongst the crowd. I wish we had screened a copy of the film that had subtitles. That way people could have been able to socialize while still keeping up with the film.

Stevijn had a good idea which was that as soon as the credits started, Beefy should come out and perform “Nerdcore For Life.” He did just that and the crowd went BERZERK. The audience loved the show from start to finish. I have been to more nerdcore shows than I can count at this point but I have never seen a reaction like the one that Router, Beefy, YT and Lars got in Amsterdam. People danced their asses off! And what was really, really, really great is that the people who danced the hardest and seemed to have the most fun were all the employees of 4Worx. Oh, there was tons of media people there too. The artists all probably did like 5 interviews each. Here’s a video piece about the show. Some of it’s in Dutch but you’ll get the point: http://www.bright.tv/series/nerdcore

Here’s a few random pics from the show:

Me introducing Nerdcore For Life

Router does a mid-movie interview

MC Lars tears up Club Panama

Lots of happy Dutch people

After the performances on Thursday night, Ytcracker DJed for a while and the people kept on dancing. When Club Panama finally kicked us out at 2:30am, we headed back to the liedsplein. I rode back in a cab with Router and some of the 4Worx team….they were the drunkest, craziest people I’ve ever ridden in a cab with. After a late night snack at a dutch burger king (lol) we found another club to go to. When I finally couldn’t take anymore I snuck out of there at about 4am which was just about the time that Router got up on the bar’s “stripper pole.” (that’s always my cue to leave.)

The 4Worx guys had to head back to the home base in Amersfoort on Friday and it was sad to see them go. After they left, we all did various fun things that won’t be covered here. (What happens in Amsterdam, stays in Amsterdam.) I will add that Router passed out cold on Saturday night and though we called her room and banged on her door, she slept until 11am on Sunday. Too bad her flight was at 8am. Since she didn’t give us any sign that she was in her room we assumed that she went out and didn’t come back. So our last hours in Amsterdam were a little tense. But after she awoke Router was able to catch a later flight and lived to get wasted another day.

Me and our new heroes

I can’t say thanks enough to Gerrit, Hermen, Stevijn and everyone at 4Worx for being such fun, gracious hosts. I hope they thought the whole thing was worth all the trouble they went through! I also really appreciate the artists from the film who were willing to fly half-way across the world to play one, single show. Without them, there wouldn’t be a movie let alone a “Dutch Nerdcore event.” So basically I pretty much owe like a dozen people some really giant favors. Next trip, the pickled herring’s on me!

Lots more photos of the trip on out flickr page: http://flickr.com/photos/nerdcoreforlife/sets/72157614636456032/

Greatest NC4L plug…ever

I subscribe to the RSS feed for the web show Geek Entertainment TV and the newest episode just made my day.  Rather than try and explain why, I encourage you to check it out for yourself.  Be aware:  This video is not safe for work!  Unless you work someplace where they don’t care if you watch videos of porn stars.  And if you do work at a place like that, let me know if they’re hiring.

Click to witness the awesomeness

Glitched: The Dutch Nerdcore Event

After waiting to talk about this for about 2 months I think planning is far enough along that we can announce this:

Nerdcore For Life and the Dutch web company, 4Worx are teaming up to present the first European Nerdcore Extravaganza-  GLITCHED:  THE DUTCH NERDCORE EVENT.

The date is set for Thursday Feb 26, 2009. The venue has been booked but 4Worx hasn’t announced it yet so I’ll hold off on mentioning it. Let me just say, the place is awesome and it’s featured a lot of A list concerts.

So where will the “Dutch nerdcore event” be taking place? Amsterdam, of course!

What will be going on? We will be holding the European premiere of Nerdcore For Life and immediately after the screening there will be live performances by four of the artists from the film.  Who’s performing? Just MC ROUTER, BEEFY, MC LARS and YTCRACKER that’s all. I’ll be there too to present the film…and party my ass off Amsterdam-style.

More details can be found the event’s website:

http://www.glitched.nl/

So there you go. Amsterdam….2009. Be there and witness Nerdcore History!! Or just stay at home and wait until we post videos and blogs about it afterwards.

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