Here’s the Catshack interview with Rob of DerDer Video Productions. DerDer has become a renowned producer of quality paintball films featuring some of the pros and greats involved in paintball. Living in Vail, Colorado, in 1999 I got my first taste of paintball. My friends had a couple of Raptors and we went out in the hills and shot each other after a day of snowboarding. I was instantly hooked. I bought a Tippman 98 the next day. Shortly after, I moved to San Diego for school. Got a weekend job at a paintball field as a ref, and practiced with the local team. Within 6 months of picking up a paintball gun, I was playing NPPL 10 man events.
I’ve played with a ton of the guys that are now on the Bushwackers. In 2000, I played a couple events with Navarone – they were a top team in the late 80s and early 90s, but when I played with them, we sucked.In 2002, I was working in Los Angeles as an assistant editor and playing paintball in San Diego on the weekends. I didn’t like my job, and loved paintball. After watching every paintball video to ever come out, I convinced my former business partner, Matt Hurdle, to invest in a couple cameras, and in 2003 we started DerDer Productions. We filmed the PSP series that year, and in October 2003, we released the hugely successful “300 Feet Per Second” DVD.
People that have never tried editing have no idea what it takes to create a quality video. I think our latest DVD, “Bring Out Your Dead” took about 1500 hours to edit. With the eight events it covered (and 1-3 cameras at each event), I think there is close to 2 Terabytes of footage (and that’s AFTER deleting the crap we can’t use). The fun part of it was blowing people up. For those that haven’t seen it, there’s a section of the video where we re-created some events and had people explode as if they were playing with real weapons. It was really funny.
“Bring Out Your Dead” is a documentary and highlight reel. We only really focus on the teams that made it to the finals. We take out the boring stuff, and add some interviews with the players. The soundtrack was from Victory Records and is the best soundtrack we’ve gotten. Each year the footage gets better and the editing gets tighter. The feedback we’ve gotten has been extremely positive. It’s really gratifying.
I am currently working on two projects simultaneously. The first one is a training video with a twist – Derder ‘Short Bus’ style. If you haven’t seen the Derder “Short Bus” with Todd Martinez, Nicky Cuba and Catfish, watch one of the trailers here:
