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?
Freddie Wong
The moment you've brought a toothbrush to work, then you're getting into crunch time.
I get occasional tweets from people asking what shampoo and conditioner I use. I go straight for the Costco brand, Kirkland brand, the bulk shampoo. That's as far as I go.
YouTube is the place where people go to consume advertisements willingly. It's some capitalist dystopian nightmare.
When we started out doing YouTube videos, I think we were very, very early on in terms of people doing a behind-the-scenes component.
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 firmly believe the future of television is online, and Hulu has recognized the value of quality long-form series.
From a creative perspective, we've been very fortunate in that doing it the 'VGHS' way gave us unlimited freedom. Whatever we wanted to do, however we wanted to do it, we had that.
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.
Venture capitalists don't pay attention to you unless you have an app or a widget.
In general, a lot of content creators find that their success is unable to support any sort of organization of scale. It's pretty difficult to support even three or four employees.
We're able to push the envelope with what we're doing, both on a technical and artistic level, which is the most that any filmmaker can ask for.
You have to figure out some way of making money without relying on video ads or people paying to download.
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.
I want to see more people push what it means to be a web show... because it's very difficult to make a living making those types of shows.
Views online is a real weird and sticky subject. One view on a 30-second piece of content is not equivalent to one view on a 30 minute video. In my mind it's not quite the same thing.
Youku Tudou gives us the reach into China that we've been looking for, and we look forward to sharing even more content with international audiences in the near future.
Deep engagement is much more powerful and valuable than fleeting mass market engagement.
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.
There's a lot of history here. In terms of Asians in this country, you have a big influx after the Cultural Revolution, a big influx after the Korean War, a big influx after the Vietnam War.
A better quality of video is better for everyone.
On the advertising side, view count is not the most important thing. It's engagement.
We don't believe in competition.
Film gives us the luxury of deciding where the viewpoint of the audience is, and by knowing that, we can very effectively design around what is actually seen on camera.
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.
We are video consumers first and foremost, and we hate anything appearing in the videos that isn't organic.
Defying genre conventions is instantly a risky move.
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.
I don't think a lot of people really know what goes into something that they see.
Kickstarter has shifted from funding creative projects to funding products and videogames; the biggest funded are consumer electronics and video game projects.
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.
I think some people have a vague idea, but the general public has no clue what the actual behind-the-scenes of filmmaking is and what this profession is.
Drift racing is expensive.
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.
Hulu understood how much content costs. By remaining defensive, YouTube is losing various aspects of video - long-form, for example - to other companies.
A vlog look is a very specific look, and it's basically a phone look.
I don't think any reasonable person would object to you, as the advertiser, having say in who and what you want to pair your ad with.
We have an audience, the ability to fund our own projects, own our own projects, the ability to display our projects unencumbered by any middlemen. That's the perfect scenario.
Hollywood is just a bunch of middlemen, people trying to facilitate content transfer between creators and viewers.
Great visual effects serve story and character and in doing so, are, by their very definition, invisible.
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.
I'm not even very good at most video games.
Non-studio entities can experiment with storytelling that might be too niche... for a studio.
As you reach more people, there is a potential to make a living with what you are creating, and that's the goal.
Online is another way for all of us to reach people.
Thanks to Netflix and Hulu, people are getting more and more used to consuming longer stretches of content on their televisions or computer screens.
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?
People predicted in the 1910s that live theater was going to be all gone and that we'd just be watching movies. No, live theater is still around, because it does things that are specific to it.
VR has a whole range of things it's very good at, and there's a lot of things that it's going to be deficient at.
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.
