Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We believe that the future for content-creators such as ourselves lies in being able to source project money from an audience and deliver on those projects in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Everyone talks about, 'Get your foot in the door,' but I never understood that mentality. Why would I want to go in that house? Why not build my own house? Why not take a chair and smash a window?
It's rare to find a corporate partner who encourages true creativity, but our meetings with Lionsgate's creative team convinced us that this is the right move for RocketJump and our millions of fans.
Five years is a very long time. If you think about it in terms of just people's lives, in terms of who our audience is: if you were in high school when you first saw our stuff, you're in college now.
The Lionsgate deal came at an opportune time. It allows us to get our projects financed and create long-form content without needing to be reliant on brand deals or crowdsourcing for external financing.
We are not frou-frou creative types. We have done both sides of the business and are constantly asking ourselves, 'How are we going to pay for this?' But the criteria is that it must fit with our world.
We always said that directors work their whole lives to get final cut on a movie. We have that. So why would you want to run away from what every other director is sprinting toward their entire careers?
The goal is not to just do 'Video Game High School' every year. We want to grow into a real content production company. We want to be Pixar or HBO. We want to make five series a year or 10 series a year.
We want to be a studio that makes a whole bunch of stuff we believe in, in all ranges of scale and time and length, and own as much as that IP ourselves and generate as much of that IP ourselves as possible.
A lot of people have difficulty wrapping their heads around what VR is good for. And the direction people go first is wrong. The wrong place is always: How can we do something we've done before, but on this?
If you can't answer the question 'What is VR adding to that experience?' - and it should be more than just a gee-whiz thing - then that project shouldn't be in VR. You're not taking full advantage of your medium.
We were looking for representation that was creatively and commercially in synch with our core DNA. The team at WME understands where we're going, and we're looking forward to taking our company to the next level with them by our side.
At the end of the day, we still make the things that we make. And we found that the best strategy in this very fluid marketplace is to not be tied into any given platform, but to be able to make good content, and good content will be able to live anywhere.
The Asian male has an interesting history as far as Western appropriation. At one point, we were completely sexless Chinamen building the railroads. Then, World War II came around, and it was like, Asian guys are coming after the white women. We became a menace for a second.
YouTube's a funny place because so many creators fall into their aesthetics out of necessity and the visuals are driven out of an urge to create. You get a lot of interesting examples of interesting design choices that have roots in practicality as well as an artistic sentiment.
I have to credit high school for allowing us to mess around with movie stuff at a time when it was a novelty. Experimenting with that and having a very good group of friends to work with made it a very easy decision that this seemed like something I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Shooting on location and dressing locations in Los Angeles is shockingly expensive, especially when you're talking about webseries-level budgets, so the opportunity to build our sets in YouTube's space gives us a lot more room in our budget in being able to create the world of 'VGHS' properly.
Gamer humor ranges all over the place. What it comes down to is taking a lot of what we see in gaming and we're familiar with in gaming and being like, 'OK, hold on, let's re-examine this for a second. Isn't this funny? Isn't this strange? Isn't this a little bit ridiculous?' That's where it is.
I feel like we cheated... because you read about these other directors, just like, 'Damn! They paid dues for 10 years before they got to get behind the camera.' We cheated because technology was in the right place at the right time, and we were alive at the right age at the right time for us to take advantage of that.