Get Involved, Internet: Help support a documentary about the rise of podcasting

Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini, the hosts of the Comedy Film Nerds podcast, began filming interviews with various “luminaries” of the podcasting community at the Los Angeles Podcast Festival. Now they’ve decided to turn that project into a feature-length documentary called Ear Buds, focusing on the rise of the podcasting medium and the insular communities that have sprung up around it.

Elwood and Mancini have already secured interviews with Doug Benson, Marc Maron, Aisha Tyler, Jesse Thorn, Jimmy Pardo, and the team behind Welcome To Night Vale. They’ve also emphasized the importance of having the average podcast fan play a role in the documentary as interview subject—which echoes the sentiment from celebrity hosts about the intimate and supportive relationship between podcasts and listeners.

The Ear Buds Kickstarter campaign offers the usual array of DVDs, T-shirts, posters, and producer credits as rewards for donations. (Though Elwood and Mancini also tease special tiers —such as “bags of blow at the closing night party” and a “murder tier”—for anyone willing to be an angel investor and cover the cost of the entire film.) With 12 days left, the project is still about $100,000 away from reaching its goal. But this is the world of podcasting, where perpetual optimism fights a Sisyphean battle against the struggles of crowdsourcing. So whether the campaign is ultimately a success, it seems certain that whatever the Comedy Film Nerds guys have in the can will see an official release in some form.