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.
— Freddie Wong
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Online is another way for all of us to reach people.
Defying genre conventions is instantly a risky move.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As you reach more people, there is a potential to make a living with what you are creating, and that's the goal.
I'm not even very good at most video games.
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.
Content financing is a difficult beast no matter what era of Hollywood we're talking about.
One of our goals is to figure out ways of diversifying where we are.
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.
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.
Thanks to Netflix and Hulu, people are getting more and more used to consuming longer stretches of content on their televisions or computer screens.
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.
Non-studio entities can experiment with storytelling that might be too niche... for a studio.
