33 posts tagged “documentary”
So here are our (not so surprising) resolutions for 2009:
1. RELEASE THE FILM ON DVD.
2. HOLD SCREENINGS IN CITIES WE HAVEN'T SCREENED IN YET.
3. SET UP NERDCORE CONCERTS AFTER SCREENINGS WHENEVER POSSIBLE.
4. CONTINUE TO KICK ASS.
When will the DVD finally be available? As soon as possible I hope. Perhaps by the spring? As far as screenings go, definite targets are LOS ANGELES , NEW YORK, TEXAS, COLORADO and FLORIDA. I'm open to screening just about anywhere though. If you have some ideas or suggestions about screenings in the places I mentioned, or if you think Nerdcore For Life should come to your town (or country!) let us know! Write us at Nerdcoreforlife@gmail.com. Happy Nerd Year everybody!
That's it. That's the whole mention. But as brief as it is I still feel like the Pope of Chili-town. Why? Because I was quoted in frickin' MovieMaker Magazine! I actually buy and read that shit! It's Moviemaker Magazine man! And not only is it MovieMaker, it's their annual "Complete Guide To Making Movies: 2009" issue. That thing stays on sale for like 6 months and they send copies to film schools all over the country. Like I said, it's a tiny mention but it still kind of amazes me that we made a movie for almost nothing and it wound up being enough of a "real movie" to have its title appear in MovieMaker Magazine.
Here's a bit of a story about the whole thing from the Arizona Reporter:
Upstairs Film is excited to announce the centerpiece and closing night films selected to screen at the Tucson Film & Music Festival (TFMF) on Columbus Day Weekend, October 9-12, 2008. TFMF events will take place at various venues throughout charming downtown Tucson, including The Screening Room, The Rialto, The Loft Cinema, and PLUSH.
TFMF closing night events begin at The Loft (3233 E Speedway Blvd) on Sunday, October 12th at 7:30pm, with the Southwest premiere of "Nerdcore For Life." The documentary profiles Hip Hop's latest internet-born subgenre, Nerdcore. Spotlighting the "Geek Life's" biggest boasters, the film features interviews and performances from MC Chris (Aqua Teen Hunger Force), YTCracker, MC Lars, Doc Popular and more. A Q & A with the film's director Dan Lamoureux and other special guests will follow. The festival concludes with the TFMF closing night party at PLUSH, featuring exclusive live performances by artists featured in "Nerdcore For Life."
http://www.azreporter.com/news/index.php?itemid=485
Because I'm the curious type, I googled "The Loft Cinema" and it's a frickin' amazing venue. It looks bigger than any theater we've been in so far and it seems to be well-loved by Tucson locals. And why wouldn't it be!? They hold amazing events there. Looking over their on-line photo album, these two 2007 events caught my eye....
Last night as I walked to the fridge to grab my 5th Diet Mountain Dew of the night, I stopped dead in my tracks when a random thought suddenly entered my head:
It's August.
It's August, 2008. That means I've been working on Nerdcore For Life for three years now. I don't remember the exact date but it was sometime in August 2005 that I first heard of Nerdcore Hip-Hop. It was at an mc chris show at a club called the Double Door in Chicago. It was that night, in the middle of that show that I had the idea to try and document the world of nerdcore...even though I didn't know anything more than the little bits of info I gleaned from people at the concert. But as soon as I got home that night I grabbed a Diet Dew, hit wikipedia and started pre-production.
The Double Door is located in Wiker Park on the north side of Chicago. Here's a great shot of the neighborhood I just found via google images:
Now you wanna hear (read) something weird? While the film was essentially conceived at the Double Door in 2005, it was completed more than 2 1/2 years later in our editor's office RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET.
And it's not like I was hanging around the WP because I knew editors there. I wouldn't meet the Storyboard productions team until 2007.
Clearly this can only mean one thing; Milwaukee Avenue is the Nerdcore nexus of the universe.
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.
I'm as cheap as a marshmallow peep* but the other day my enthusiasm got the best of me and I ordered a whole boatload of super cool Nerdcore For Life stickers. And I didn't just cheap out and get the crappy paper stickers that leave that annoying white reside when you try and scrape it off of whatever thing you originally stuck it on. I went all out and ordered vinyl "Lap Top Stickers" since I figured Nerdcore fans might just be the type of people who would own laptops and possibly want to affix stickers to them....at least for a while.
Wouldn't you yourself feel like a badass if the next time you were at Starbucks punching up your novel or your screenplay (or whatever the hell it is you've been working on every saturday afternoon) you could do your work on a laptop emblazoned with the phrase that is destined to become the "Keep on Truckin'" of the new millennium? I know I would. Of course, I don't feel the need to have an audience when I write so I'll have to stick my stickers on other things that people might see. Like your face!!
Sorry, not sure what that was about. Anyway, we're going to be giving these out at screenings and at concerts plus anyone who orders a Nerdcore For Life shirt will get a few thrown in as a bonus. But I'd like to get these out into the world so if you'd like to get one just send $2 through paypal to Nerdcoreforlife@gmail.com. Did I say I'd send one? Screw it, I'll send 4 of these suckers! After the cost of postage and the bite that paypal will take, that leaves me with a pretty slim profit margin but like I said, my current enthusiasm is causing me to throw caution and cheapness to the wind.
*I just trademarked the phrase "Cheap as a marshmallow peep". Please send me $2 through paypal every time you use it!
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
When I'm not working on the things nerdcore-related I do have a day job and that day job takes place in the Chicago Loop. There's a free daily paper out here called the Red Eye which is published by the Chicago Tribune. Every day, walking through downtown I pass about 40,000 Red Eye boxes every day just like this one ------->
Its a great paper since 1. its free and 2. its light reading and mostly focuses on goofy stuff and short articles...perfect for killing a little down time at work. I read the paper a lot so its especially cool that they ran a story about the documentary the other day. Ok, it was really about Nerdcore in general but it mostly focused on the film. What's funny is that I don't actually have a copy of the peice since the day the paper runs the story is the day I was off work and not near one of the freaky paper boxes. The article was posted on-line though. Here's the whole thing:
Beats and Geeks
They are rebels and raconteurs who go by colorful names like Optimus Rhyme, YTCracker and MC Frontalot. The personalities behind the underground music movement nerdcore use
the technology they love to create music—about the technology they love. Now the "geeksta rap" movement may be poised to break into the mainstream.
Subjects such as "Star Wars" and Nintendo, along with a few others that you'd have to be an uber-nerd to understand. "It's an extension of geek fandom, and casual fans may not get it," Lamoureux told me.
In essence, nerdcore is geek hip-hop. Its origins can be traced back to the late '90s when young people with "cutting edge" technology like fast computers and Internet connections began experimenting and creating their own music. Before you knew it, there was a network of artists creating and releasing tracks over the Internet.
Lamoureux has met many of the characters who are part of the nerdcore movement, including female "ghetto-tech" rapper MC Router, the self-proclaimed First Lady of Nerdcore.
"She is a very interesting person," he said, "a hard-core, hard-living nerd."
Lamoureux said that when MC Router arrived for a screening of the documentary in Madison, Wis., she admitted to drinking some 40-ounce bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. She was more than boisterous, flipping off an image of Nursehella, a rapper rival to Router.
"She went berserk," he said.
That's not the sort of action you'd expect from someone who raps about dealing with a computer virus, but there are feuds within the nerdcore community, Lamoureux said, although the equivalent of East Coast versus West Coast in nerdcore is Purdue versus Stanford universities. (Both have computer science departments with nerdcore crews.)
Lamoureux told me the feud ended amicably at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year, when both crews met and decided to "bury the motherboard."
Despite its feuds and showdowns, I still wonder whether nerdcore can break through into mainstream music. Lamoureux said true nerdcore fanatics don't often buy CDs because they are accustomed to downloading music for free. This raises doubts about the profitability of the genre for most re cord labels.
Then again, video game TV channel G4 uses music of some nerdcore rappers for its programming, which may attract nerds and geeks with disposable incomes. And Lamoureux's documentary could spread the word "nerdcore" as well.
When asked whether he was a nerd or a geek, Lamoureux gave another option: "I'm more of a dork. Nerds and geeks have skills. Within the hierarchy you have geek, then nerd, and then dork on the bottom.
----------------------------------
So its an ok piece but it really could have used a photo and I swear, there is now way I used the phrase "bury the motherboard." I mean seriously, come on, give me a little credit.
Click here to check out the web version of the article which is totally identical to what I just posted above.
Yes, It's true. Nerdcore For Life
will be having an official* screening at PAX08! This year's PAX
schedule isn't official yet but I got the OK to start promoting the
screening. Lots and lots of Nerdcore artists from the film should be in attendance so it should be a really fun night. More details on that stuff later.
This is a major, major deal for us. It feels like a psychological victory. Honestly, it's almost kind of shocking to me that this is going to happen. In 2006 our crew slunk around the convention, hoping that our one press pass would keep us all from being kicked out for basically making a movie in the middle of the Expo. Actually, we didn't even have enough regular badges for everyone. If we needed a certain artist or crew person inside the convention center, some of our team would have to leave the building and hand off their badge. I didn't even think that the Penny Arcade folks would remember us. But they did. So.....see you at PAX.
*Official
as in the screening will be put on by the expo and won't just consist
of me walking around with a projector on my back.
Like the optimistic knucklehead that I am, I assumed that our insane levels of spending would fall to non-insane levels once the movie was all done. Yeah....I'm dumb. Film fest entry fees, promo materials, travel expenses to festivals, hookers, blow (that's what goes on at film fests right?) have caused our total budget to get freaky high. So to attempt to take a tiny little chunk out of our expenses we're now selling our very own, super fantastic Nerdcore For Life shirts!
We had hoped to unveil the shirts at the Seattle True Independent Film
Fest but the first batch of shirts came out all messed up and off
center. But we had some new and non-jacked up shirts for San Francisco
and we actually sold some! So how can you get yours? Visit our
website's brand new store and order via paypal:
Was that link big enough? I hope so. Shirts come in black or white and in sizes Small through XXL. But we're getting low on XXLs so be sure to check on their availability before ordering by e-mailing me at Nerdcoreforlife@gmail.com.
