THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP
Debdoot Das
film release (news)
Digifilm and Navarre release "THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP" Dance/Exercise DVD on 10 May, Celebrating National Fitness and Sports Month.
New York, NY (PRWEB) May 11, 2011
Digifilm celebrates National Fitness and Sports Month by releasing director Debdoot Das’ instructional epic “THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP” dance/exercise DVD.
Featuring popular and iconic Hip Hop dance moves taught by Syndee M. Winters and Phil Turay this funky hip hop dance and workout DVD promises an extraordinary and unprecedented learning experience.
The trailer is available on Youtube.com, Vimeo.com, and Digifilm.com.
The DVD is being distributed by Navarre Corporation.
THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP takes us to a spectacular virtual New York City of our imagination, where professional dance instructors Phil Turay and Syndee M. Winters embark on a step-by-step journey of dance training and instruction, as they lead the novice to ultimate Hip Hop dance mastery.
The idea was first conceived by Das four years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the cutting-edge technology used to create the production, acts as a catalyst to Hip Hop dance to produce a magical learning experience.
Scientists recently identified certain dance moves that make you look more attractive to potential mates. Instinctively, that is what Syndee and Phil teach in this DVD. This DVD contends that the body communicates more clearly than the brain. To put it simply, dancing is better than talking.
"After the success of 'The Quick & Dirty Guide to Salsa,' we wanted to make something even better. So we found a way to make a feature length CGI project with little or no resource" said director Debdoot Das. "The gigantic virtual set of New York City was distributed on many old and borrowed computers and somehow the job got done."
"Learning was never so much fun," wrote Angelique Flores of Home Media Magazine describing the THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP. "And it's a good workout."
Underscoring Digifilm's commitment to helping inform and educate THE QUICK & DIRTY GUIDE TO HIP HOP is designed to promote a healthier lifestyle.
About Debdoot Das
“I had a heavy dose of cinema growing up,” says India-born Debdoot Das. “I wrote my first script when I was 11. Living in central Calcutta, which has a really old film industry. To humor me the movie people gave me strips of negatives to play with.
So it wasn’t mere fancy for the movie-loving son of a photographer to imagine himself directing his own feature. It is slightly more improbable that what has brought Das within reach of his dream is the unexpected success of his dance instruction video, “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Salsa.”
“The Quick and Dirty Guide to Salsa” has been a best-selling dance video on Amazon.com, leading to distribution deals with Navarre and NetFlix.
About Digifilm
Digifilm (R) Inc. is an independent publisher and distributor of instructional and entertainment software for the home and mobile devices. Established in 2003 in New York City, DigiFilm both produces and acquires high-quality home video/DVD products, publishes them under proprietary and third-party brands, and distributes them via its own web and mobile interface and through partnerships with larger distribution organizations worldwide.
About Navarre
Navarre (R) Corporation is a publisher and distributor of computer software, home entertainment media and related products. Navarre Distribution Services provides complete distribution and third-party logistics (3PL) services to North American retailers and their suppliers. Navarre was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Learn more at http://www.navarre.com.
About Syndee M. Winters
Born in Queens, New York, Syndee could sing before she could speak. Excelling quickly as a dancer, she developed the skill of choreographing for dancers and non-dancers alike. She danced back-up for the Daddy Yankee Tour, Reggaeton artist Lisa M and traveled the world as a working dancer. She spent a season as a NY Knicks City Dancer at Madison Square Garden, and has danced and sang with the likes of American Idol Winner Jordin Sparks and Pop Star Demi Lovato. She worked with the legendary DJ Grandmaster Flash on his heavily anticipated album, co-writing two songs and collaborating with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Red Café, and Big Daddy Kane. She is currently making her Broadway Tour debut in the role of Nala in Disney's The Lion King U.S. National Tour.
About Phil Turay
Phil Turay was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York; Phil has been dancing since the tender age of three. He began taking tap lessons at the local PAL and fell in love with dance as an artform. In high school, Phil dabbled in musical theatre, playing Tyrone in the stage production of FAME. In college, Phil joined an international dance group specializing in multicultural styles. After college, Phil joined the ReMIXX Performers in New York City and began performing for various music industry artists and events. Phil currently resides in Los Angeles where he is pursuing a professional career in dance as well as a Graduate degree in Psychology from Pepperdine University.
August 2010
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| Jam Station are Jam Station are Vishal, Sudharsan, Jaan and Tapan |
Vishal Sinha
Jam Station is not a coincidence. It is a conscious effort to provide some diversity in the Bishnupriya Manipuri music scene. Four different individuals with different tastes of music and a Rock Band!! This already sounds rebellious!
Most BM people are not even aware of rock or they are not used to heavy distorted guitar sounds and the thumping of the bass guitar and drums.
But we thought it was high time to start something like this because the youths have started to accept the influences of different types of music, and at the same time, the usual BM "modern songs" are not doing any better. So why not give them something in our own mother tongue? Also, various groups in the Northeast have already achieved remarkable feats. Therefore, this is something that was very much needed.
The idea is to introduce alternative lifestyles, break the status quo of the BM society and make the community more accommodative with the influx of modern thoughts. There could be hundreds of other ways to do this, but we chose what we thought to be the best and easily accessible way. MUSIC!
The youths can shape the future for us if properly guided, and we want to tell them that it is the same sky above all of us. You can still do what you want. We chose to rock unlike a fraction of the crowd who keeps criticizing the community.
We know who our crowd will be, and to welcome more, we have just concentrated mostly on simple and straight melodies. We are not experimenting with too many different things at the moment. Lyricwise, we can be easily called the Black Sheep of the community. We do not follow any standard or traditional pattern of song writing. We do not sing of age-old themes of struggle and revolution. There's more to life, and we have included everything a young man can possibly experience in his lifetime -- love, hate, rebelliousness and freedom. EnjOi!!!!
Contributor
Vishal Sinha lives and works in New Delhi.
July 2010
Anshuman Acharya
(excerpts)
Excerpt 1:
"The first memory of coming back is the rains. They came gushing in torrents, thick clumpy cascades rippling against the buffeting winds like billowing saris on the wash line. They pounded and rushed along the sloping courtyard, washing away the gritty summer dust settled in its pores and revealing it in stark grey. An eddy swirled and rippled at the corner where a granite slab lay an inch lower than the ridge dropping into the garden. The sound of them, like a thousand hooves on the tin roof shed across the garden, on the leaves, on the stone, on the flooded lawn and the drains in spate, on the sky-windows and the walls, dripping in buckets under leaking ceilings, the occasional rumble in the sky – relentless, unceasing, cathartic; filling and drowning every other sound, like the inside of a blowing conch shell. Colours burst in the gardens, the grey dust turned a deep brown, the leaves a livid green, redolent with the tumescent fragrance of wet earth. I watched, fascinated and silent. It is this moment – a room half-dark and lit from the outside, billowing white sheets of rain seen over a knot of fingers laced in the mesh of the rhomboid window jaali, and a steady drumming all around – where my memories of Lucknow vividly begin. I had never seen a rain before."
Excerpt 2:
"When we asked Ba about her life before us, she told us that her mother had died a long time ago and that her father was always drunk and in his rages would beat her and the new mother who was retarded and there were goats to take out to graze and there were the mountains and rocks she would scamper over before evening fell and then the scattered flock had to be herded and brought back. We accepted the unfaltering finality of her monotone, unbroken by a pause for breath, and asked nothing more. The idea of her life before us was not without a tinge of jealousy, suffered only with the consoling reasoning that she had to be somewhere till we were yet to be born. In fact, the brevity which summed her life before us sounded reassuring, very much like the waiting which it ought to have been.
Ba’s story for us began with the unspoken story of mother’s slow death.
Much of this story I came to understand from the cache of albums I discovered once in a storage loft in one of the rooms of Windsor Manor that I reached by climbing over the grill of the window-frame. These were not like the few photographs I had seen of her –sticking her tongue out as a young girl, holding a dazzling smile in place for the photographer in a gathering, laughing as she posed in a group in front of an excavation site, the Bear crushing papa and her in with a giant paw, the wedding album. There was no self-conscious posing in these discovered albums, no smiles and laughs held in place. Instead, they seemed to chronicle unconscious everyday intimacies where she would be combing her short hair in front of an oval mirror, chewing at a pencil as she frowned at a book laid on the easel of her raised legs on a chair, or raising an eye from a book, cheek resting on the palm of a propped elbow with the other hand holding the place in the book, to look straight out of the photograph to me, the smile suggesting not a coquettish flirtation with the lens but a serene assurance – of heels dug firmly in place and the reins of the life they were building firmly in her grip.
I never saw the albums again – they might be lying buried in the rubble somewhere or perhaps they really got lost – but all my imagined memories of her got overwritten by those photographs that day. When I would develop enough sensibilities, I would realise that they were brilliant portraits, even though all I saw papa ever click with the Pentax were artifacts. But at that moment, and for many days after, I was overwhelmed by a grief that seemed larger than myself, and understood, even as a child, why the adults had interred these albums here. And I asked myself again and again, through silent rage and tears, why? – why had papa taken these photographs? Because they were not only the narrative of their life together but also her slow painful passage to death.
I had always imagined her death as something which had happened to us suddenly, something from outside which had come hurling and caught us all unaware. The albums told another story. Even as Preeti entered the albums, even as ma suckled her beneath a blanket, bathed her, put her to sleep over a shoulder, buried her face in her tummy and made her cackle with delight – even as she grew in her arms – it was clear that she had started to slowly wilt like a flower in a vase. Her eyes widened at first, with fatigue, and the surprise springing perhaps from the first brushes with the idea of her fragility and mortality, as each bout of infection left her weaker and weaker.
It is here that Ba entered the photographs. Her first photograph showed her as a little girl standing behind ma’s chair as she held out the bowl in which ma dipped a cloth, probably sponge-bathing the infant Preeti spread on her lap, Ba’s other hand resting lightly on ma’s shoulder. Slowly, she shifted to the foreground as Preeti grew – combing her curls, feeding her from a spoon, washing her legs on a basin, drying her after a bath – while ma watched from a divan on which she rested heavily, a hand on Ba’s shoulder if she happened to be sitting below her on the floor, playing with Preeti. In another photograph, she held out Preeti to kiss ma lying weakly on the bed, Preeti’s tiny arm wrapped around her neck, the blur suggesting a nuzzling of cheeks and many kisses, a long exposure, a night time and a goodnight kiss – papa never used flash.
The surprise slowly waned to tired resignation as she seemed to sink deeper and heavier into the divans and beds she would rarely been seen out of now, the eyes drooping and closing. In one of the last photographs, ma lay in bed, covered in white quilt, her head resting on a big soft white pillow; her hair, which I imagined must have grown because sitting for a cut took too much toll on her fragile health now, seemed to be tied in a loose bun behind. A cup rested on the side-table beside her head and an arm fell protectively over Preeti’s lap, who sat in a chemise beside her, her loose curls spilling over her face as she appeared to peer at something in her hand. Her tired eyes watched Preeti, the mouth slack and without a smile. I imagined Ba must have been nearby, waiting to catch Preeti if she tumbled down, but she’s not in the frame. The palm of ma’s other hand was cupped loosely over the swell of her belly underneath the quilt, discernible if you were looking for it.
It was the only photograph I tore from the album and brought down with me, hiding it in the pages of a colouring book."
Anshuman Acharya is a New Delhi-based amateur photographer and working on a book.
