Nerds in Disguise

HISTORY

The crew hails from Springfield, IL, with all attending Glenwood High School (Chatham, IL.) before branching out to different colleges across the country from the Rockies to Cape Cod.

Starting back as far as the time of chili-bowl haircuts and Pokémon, most of the Nerd crew were making videos. Really bad videos. No editing or scripts. No planning or pre-production. It seemed as though their film careers were going to be isolated to simply pre-teen aspirations.

After a hiatus through middle school, Matt Hartzler (Amherst College) became interested in their high school’s TV Station. In addition to helping found and anchor a national award-winning high school sport show, The Rush, his freshman year, he climbed the ranks of the station, GCNN, eventually becoming Station Manager his senior year. To raise money for the station, GCNN had an annual music video dance with students lip-syncing to popular songs and editing them into music videos. Hartzler joined forces with Jake Giganti (Colorado-Boulder) to conceive and produce these videos. After enlisting Ben Parks (Miami University) and David O’Brien (Iowa State), the music videos perennially set the bar for the quality of production in the area.

Before their first-year of college, the group heard about a Pepsi-MTV-Rock Band music video contest held over the summer. Hartzler and Giganti employed their usual crew to produce a video, which was selected as a finalist for the competition. The video, using “Nerds in Disguise” as their faux band name, dominated the fan voting, which won them a trip to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. After winning a “Moonman”, MTV VMA’s official award, the Nerds reassembled in the 2010 summer forming a media production company, adding Carolyn VanderMolen (DePaul University) to assist with still photography and graphic design. With their unique vision and high quality production skills, Nerds in Disguise is set to provide professional media, while maintaining their creative mindset.