James Rolfe

He married April Chmura, a cinematographer of his initial Nerd series episodes, in November 2007. Their first daughter was born in April 2013. The couple is expecting their second daughter, announcement of which was made by Rolfe on April 19, 2017, through his Twitter account.

James Duncan Rolfe was born on July 10, 1980, in Penns Grove, New Jersey, US, to the family of Scott and Marlene Rolfe. He has a younger sister Gina.

As a child he developed a knack of storytelling taking pictures with his camera and taping them on paper with a narrative about the story of the picture.

He once received an audio recorder as Christmas gift from his parents which later upgraded to a video camera thus leading him step by step to his passion for filmmaking.

He was an ardent collector of Nintendo Power magazines and was quite motivated by the American animated television series ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ and video games like ‘Super Mario Bros.’, ‘The Legend of Zelda’, and ‘Contra’ that inspired him to create his own adventure stories.

He purchased a Panasonic AG-DVX100 camcorder while in his senior year of college and would awestruck his peers with videos he shot with it. He would also illustrate comic books and keep updating them every month.

In 1989, he began filming movies that saw him using Mario Paint in some of his initial efforts. He went on to continue such hobby in the early 1990s as well and then attended university to take up hand-drawn animation lessons.

According to Rolfe, his independent video and film production company ‘The Cinemasssacre Productions’ or ‘Cinemassacre Productions LLC’ commenced in 1989. The website was however developed in 2000. There are two official YouTube channels of the company as well namely ‘Cinemassacre Plays’ and ‘Cinemassacre’.

He used his backyard to shoot the horror film ‘A Night of Total Terror’ in May 1996 that he considered "the turning point of my life". Thereafter he developed several other films till the turn of the 1990s.

In 2001 he made films like ‘Cinemaphobia’, two versions of which were made, a 10 minute one and a 15 minute one; the silent movie ‘Kung Fu Werewolf from Outer Space’ including voice only for narration; and ‘Stoney’, a spoof of the film Rocky (1976).

The following year he made a documentary short titled ‘ROLFE: A No-Budget Dream’ where he played himself and essayed the role of a Narrator in the short ‘The Night Prowler’.