Debuting at New York Comic Con 2015, filmmaker Freddie Wong and the RocketJump team, best known for their YouTube channel and online series Video Game High School, sat down to talk about their upcoming Hulu series entitled RocketJump: The Show, following the RocketJump team as they create their wildly popular YouTube shorts.
The team spoke in depth about how their company has grown over the years, the ups and downs, and what to expect from the upcoming series.
RocketJump: The Show will follow the RocketJump team, as they create single shorts, with half the episode focusing on the creation and the other half displaying the actual short the group has created, in a documentary style series.
“It’ll be a different short per every episode and they range quite a bit, we’re showing one here later today. But, each episode will focus on a short, the shorts like anywhere from six to twelve minutes long. We’re doing like a Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton silent film. We’re doing like a horse race western. We’re doing the one today, it’s like a sci-fi space lightsaber fight. It’s everything…everything you can think of,” said Wong.
Wong also felt that in this series, the shorts will be in a way more evolved and fleshed out, than the shorts people are used to on their Youtube channel.
Reflecting on how his company has grown over the years, with their series with Hulu becoming another step forward,
“Looking back like you know five years ago, when we first started, it’s like whoa that’s a big step! But then going through it, it never felt anything was a big, huge step. It always felt like, oh let’s doing something else and this is more interesting to us and let’s kind of go in this way,” said Wong.
When asked about what has been the most difficult part, in creating this series, Ben Waller, the RocketJump showrunner stated, “I think for me personally the most difficult part, as the show runner, you have a very specific set of concerns, like budget and the overall picture. But then, I dove in on one of the episodes to direct one of the shorts and as a director, you want to be enabled to do whatever you can or whatever you want to do on the day, as long as it sort of fits in the boundaries of the script. And sometimes the director and the producer or the showrunner, push against each other, to figure out what that best direction is. And that’s just sort of a natural part of the process and functioning as someone on both sides of that conflict, you don’t know which side to choice.”
On the opposite side of the spectrum, when asked what the most enjoyable part of creating this series was, Ashim Ahuja, the RocketJump producer said, “Putting it that all together and then actually doing it, we really developed like a family and a bond. And multiple times, this has always been something big for me, we’ve had people that are industry professionals for 20 years and they come to work with us and they time, time again say we’re the best people to work with. And that’s like the best compliment for us because we’re all so cool together and kinda developed this family of filmmakers.”
Wong did go on to talk about the short they showed at Comic Con, entitled Fan Friction, “It starts off like the most fan fictiony thing like ever. Oh, it’s the Battlestar Galactica, the ship Serenity, Sherlock Holmes, then Dracula shows up and they got a lightsaber fight. It’s like come on guys, but then it cuts out and you realize what it is, you’re watching the depiction of two girls watching fan fiction and they’re fighting about it.”
RocketJump: The Show is set to debut on Hulu December 2. Listen to the complete New York Comic Con interview below.
