We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rudy Strong a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rudy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Our mission as Geekset as well as with my Acting & Voice Acting is to uplift, empower, inspire and push creativity amongst diverse groups of people. Being an African American man in America today comes with so many trials and tribulations and it is something me & my team is dedicated to not only address but take on.
We started the Podcast as “The only Place that Blends Hip-Hop Culture & Geek Culture together” to solely show that Black people were into things like Anime, Comicbooks, Video Games, Movies etc. What we grew into was a safe space for Blerds, Geeks & Nerds. We started interviewing people of the culture from big time celebrities such as Jay Ellis, Rachel True, Debra Wilson, Phil Lamarr, Kadeem Hardison, Gary Anthony Williams, KevonStage, etc to people doing dope things who deserve more light like King Vader, Krystal Shanelle, Pierre Stepz, TheBlerdGurl, Fantastic Frankey etc. We grew into a place of discovery as you will find that most of our interviews focus on the things people love.
We are now transitioning to a production company focusing on documenting the culture in unique and responsible ways. Launching our mini series “Geeked: L:ove What you Do” and our independent, self funded doc, The Black Geek Documentary – a love letter to Blerd Culture. We’re still filming for completion of that, but we already have some solid names attached to it and our hopes is to release it wide scale to the public so that way people can see what we love about this culture.
In all we want to be a Blerd space that introduces new talent and celebrates our heroes while they are still here.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
We got into this industry just wanting to discuss the culture. We’ve been embedded in it so long that it was natural. My personal walk of life came from interviewing my heroes and researching them before hand. I pride myself on not having the typical interviews so i go in depth on research, when i realized I had the equipment and drive to try out acting, I jumped all the way in and put in the time and work.
With that thought process, I ‘ve landed a spot on WatchMojo as a Narrator, we’ve been featured in Forbes, The Black Wall Street Times, TMJ4 etc. We’ve held events at major conventions such as Dream-Con, Crunchyroll Expo, C2E2, and we’re also collaborating with major brands such as SwaysUniverse, Def Jam, Sony Pictures etc,.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Funding is tricky because we’re all self funded. We’ve started the grant cycle for our film (No success as of writing this) but we essentially redistributed every earned income to the film. So our merch sales go to it , Our patreon sales, our monetization sales, donations on the website and our regular degular paycheck.
Would we love more investors and benefactors, of course, however achieving that goal has been a bit of a hurdle due to the lack of resources, knowledge of the programs and more.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The goal is to always complete and be proud. We dont want to create for the sake of creating, we really want the culture to see this documentary and be proud of the work, the start, the implications and what could be
Contact Info:
- Website: www.TheBlackGeekDocumentary.com
- Instagram: www.Instagram.com/Young_Deuces
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/YoungDeucesofSNYD
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/Young_Deuces
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/GeeksetPodcast