Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. One of the joys of watching Austin boom from the odd little hippie outlier to the major metropolitan city (that still somehow clings to its core mantra “Keep Austin Weird”) is seeing the rise of local businesses as they attempt to take over the world.
The Alamo Drafthouse is an obvious example, but as well known and popular as that franchise is it doesn't hold a candle to Rooster Teeth.
I've known the core team at Rooster Teeth (Burnie, Gus, Joel and Matt) since Rooster Teeth consisted pretty much just those guys in a small room making goofy videos while playing Halo.
Stepping onto the soundstage where they were shooting their first movie was a bit of a shock, I must admit. They've grown so popular and so big that their regular offices are at the Austin Studios, so this wasn't just a blip of bigness on their screen. When I saw cameras rolling on their first feature it was par for the course for them. I mean, they had a few million crowdfunded bucks behind them, but in terms of scale this scene could have been something they were shooting for one of their Immersion videos.
The movie sees a bunch of dumbasses accidentally stumble across bits of an alien super suit meant to be delivered to the US Government's chosen warrior in order to protect Earth from an incoming alien threat.
This suit unfortunately binds to its host once it is put on. Legs, helmet, and two arm pieces all carry extra powers and abilities. Put on one single, highly trained warrior it would create our own Superman, but these doofuses find the suit first and each one puts on piece.
Yep, that pretty much means the Earth is fucked.
The main cast is a mix of old RT, modern RT and some new blood. Burnie Burns represents the old school with Gavin Free and Michael Jones representing the modern and Key & Peele's Colton Dunn the new blood.
The scene I saw them film takes place after those four have bonded with their alien armor. The Government is trying to get them to work as a team, which is the only way to salvage this hopeless situation. I mean, how much good are legs that make one run super fast if he has no shield to protect himself from incoming fire?
Dunn gets the legs, which is ironic because he's the chubby one of the group. The armor makes him run super fast, but the exertion of that running is the same as if he was doing it himself, so he can only go in short bursts and even that usually ends with him puking his guts out.
Burnie's got the left arm, which produces a shield (funny because he doesn't much like the other guys and is probably the last person you'd want to have covering your back if you're the rest of the team), Jones has the Metroid-like right arm canon (he's a dumb irresponsible jock who now has a massive weapon at his disposal) and Gavin's got the helmet.
The helmet is probably the best piece of gear because it analyzes the field (like Iron Man's HUD) and also makes the wearer smarter, an advantage diminished when the dumber than Forrest Gump one of the group is the one to bond with that helmet.
We only saw a little bit of the guys actually filming. It was a quiet scene where all four are bunking down for the night after a hard day of training to be a cohesive team (not very successfully, mind you).
Normally, I'd describe the scene I saw shot, but thankfully they've included the majority of it in the trailer, so I can get real lazy with this part. Heeeeeeyyyyyyy...
It wasn't long before the cast and crew broke for lunch and that as our chance to talk with Burnie Burns and director Matt Hullum a bit about how this crazy ride got started. There's a whole lot of real talk about the state of the internet and some great details on what goes into a crowdfunding campaign.
I hope you give the full thing a read. I swear it's not your typical on-set surface level interview. There were a few other reporters there, so when you read a question from me I labeled it as “Quint” and the others are Qs, but you can attribute them to me if you want because some of them are smart.
I began by joking with Burnie that he totally sold out after Rooster Teeth partnered with Fullscreen and while he did laugh, he took the moment to actually run with some cutting thoughts about the current state of the internet and the evolution he's witnessed over the years.
Enjoy the chat!
Quint: According to the internet you've totally sold out!
Burnie Burns: Oh, God. You just wait. They're going to get so much content out of it.
Q: I think a lot of people don't have the perspective of what kind of benefits it would give you. It just seems more like “Someone's sitting at our lunch table and we don't know who this person is.”
Burnie Burns: That's it. I mean, after a week it's already completely died down. Change is tough. I've been doing content for the internet now for 13 years and the internet demands progress, but hates change. You have a choice of just sitting there and make a thing exactly like it has always been and then the audience, on their own, gets tired of it. It becomes stale to them. Then they just leave.
There are people out there on the internet who are just there to be outraged. Before there were people who were just pissy, that were there just to complain about stuff or piss on stuff, but now there are people there to be offended. It's like “What am I going to be outraged about today? Somebody retweet something so I can jump on this week.”
Quint: That's one side of the internet, but then the lighter side is the sense of community you can build with the internet, like you guys have done. I mean, you've funded this film via that community. Maybe that's a good place to start. Your expectations going into the fundraising side of the movie and how important the Rooster Teeth community was to that.
Burnie Burns: When we went into the crowdfunding campaign for this thing, we knew how big our audience was based on just numbers. I mean, you're swimming in metrics on YouTube and we have RTX (their convention), but we still studied everything else that was out there. While we were not surprised by the audience's response to the crowdfunding campaign, we didn't expect it either.
Matt Hullum: It's like not surprising, but totally shocking. We knew that they would step up, because they always do, but when you have a raw number like that and it gets hit it puts things into perspective. It does kind of blow you away.
Burnie talked about this in a speech at Bitcon, but engagement is the most underappreciated metric of all.
Burnie Burns: Yeah, it doesn't show up on a spreadsheet.
Matt Hullum: It's hard to qualify. Our fans who contributed to the IndieGoGo and bought the contribution levels where they could visit the set or come do a tour of Stage 5... they're coming down all the time. They're coming in droves. We had a huge crowd scene at a football stadium and we filled it up with everybody who contributed... They're kind of contributing a second time because they're free extras!
Burnie Burns: Some of them came from as far away as Australia. And it was a bitterly cold night.
Matt Hullum: Barbara (Dunkelman), our community manager, is from Toronto and she said that night in Manor was the coldest she's ever been in her life.
Burnie Burns: Well, she was in a cheerleader costume, standing around in 32 degree weather...
Matt Hullum: That's how she dresses in Canada!
Burnie Burns: That's true. But yeah, it was great, the whole campaign. We looked into other people's crowdfunding campaigns. Actually, one of the guys who's in the principal cast for this is Alan Ritchson. He was on Blue Mountain State on Spike, the TV show, and he was just ran a campaign on Kickstarter for a Blue Mountain State movie.
Matt Hullum: They were the fifth most earner, right?
Burnie Burns: Yeah, $1.9 million. He was in that, so I was post-gaming with him in terms of rewards and the structure of it. Right now you can go into a crowdfunding campaign and fuck it up big time. You can raise a bunch of money and then look at how much you've committed towards actual, physical rewards and it really stacks up. Luckily we had 12 years of a merchandise model to look back on.
Matt Hullum: Yeah, we knew how to deliver goods and what it would cost and where the pitfalls were.
Burnie Burns: Robert Khoo at Penny Arcade gave us good advice. We talked to everybody who ran crowdfunding campaigns and he said, “Be prepared that this is a two year job. It's a two year customer service contract at the very least.” We hit 35,000 backers and at that level we had to hire a campaign manager to do that. This stuff comes with a lot of overhead. You've got to be careful about the way you structure it 'cause at the of the day, and we were very careful about talking about this with the audience, this is to fund a project. We want all the dollars that exist to go to the project. There are definitely some people who are like, “Where's my stuff?” Well, it gets delivered when the movie's done. We can't deliver a DVD until the movie's done. “I want it now!”
Quint: You've seen Spaceballs, right? Why don't you just send the movie before you make it?
Burnie Burns: (laughs)
Q: I've been to the old offices, but stepping foot here... the scale is quite impressive.
Matt Hullum: In terms of scale we've got some pretty cool stuff in the movie.
Q: Did that scale with how well the campaign went or was this always the level you guys were reaching for?
Matt Hullum: Definitely, how well the campaign went made new things available. Even beyond what we do on set it'll make additional things available in post that we probably wouldn't have been able to achieve. Some of our perk levels were pretty transparent about things like that. Like, we wanted to get to a level where we could get a full orchestra score...
Quint: And then the level where you can add Jabba the Hutt in there...
Matt Hullum: (laughs) And add Jabba the Hutt. That's actually a great example because once you get into visual effects and do all the post stuff... you can't quantify it. You can't say “It's going to be 10% better if you give us a thousand more dollars!” We really were trying to make every single dollar, at every step in the process, go towards the final look and make everything on the screen look great.
Burnie Burns: The original goal was we were going to set it for a million dollars. People could wrap their minds around it, it was a big enough number that it was far different from any other web project. (IndieGoGo suggested they lower the first target). People could hear about the project through milestones like hitting first goal, then another milestone when we hit a million dollars, which is another reportable thing as well. IndieGogo said, “If you're confident you can hit your goal, then a few days later or a week later you hit the million dollars and you can report that as well.”
Problem was those two things ended up happening 8 hours apart. The first 40 hours were so fast. Like a lot of campaigns. When we were looking at them they had this kind of U-shape to them. You launch the project and there's a ton of interest, then there's 30 days of “okay, let's remind people this exists” and at the end, as you're trying to make your goal, there's a big ramp up.
We knew we couldn't flatten that out, but we tried to change that into W and have an event in the middle that had a lot of publicity surrounding it.
Matt Hullum: In Texas don't we pronounce that “Dubya?”
Burnie Burns: Yeah, dubya. So we did a 12 hour livestream where we had a lot of different stuff from the Rooster Teeth shows, lots of personality-driven stuff, and we revealed more information about the movie, too.
Quint: You did a Save Our Station fundraiser!
Burnie Burns: It wasn't so much like the Wikipedia guys putting links everywhere...
Matt Hullum: But it was a telethon.
Burnie Burns: It was! A lot of stuff we do at Rooster Teeth seems like new media stuff, but it's all really old tactics. Like, we have windowed media strategies where things go first run, then they go to home video and then to syndication.
Matt Hullum: People would ask us “How did you come up with stuff?” Well, I'd see a movie in a theater and realize I couldn't buy the DVD for six months and I thought that was a good idea! (laughs)
Burnie Burns: It's really old school stuff. Even our merchandising... Video pre-roll ads didn't exist (at the beginning) so we had to have a more traditional business model, which the internet got away from, but is now circling back hard into. Oh, we have to build our own destinations on the web, we have to have merchandise, we have to have a live events strategy. It's been fun to watch that, but at the same time watching bigger players become aware of that... The eventually of media moving online has become an inevitability. Here it is. It has gone from this thing that is gonna happen to now everybody is running in this direction. You can throw a rock and see an announcement from somebody saying they're launching a video platform. You see it everywhere. Showtime, CBS, HBO... untethering, basically. It's a really interesting time.
Q: So, why at this juncture do you decide you're making a movie?
Matt Hullum: Money.
Burnie Burns: It's the production funds, yeah.
Matt Hullum: We were waiting for science to have the appropriate lasers that we needed. We had the team, just needed the lasers.
Burnie Burns: With the crowdfunding in particular, we were confident we could fund it eventually, but on the organic Rooster Teeth growth path we knew we could get to this budget in another year or two years. Lazer Team in particular was always the next next project. It was always the thing we were going to do AFTER this next project. And it stayed that way for two years.
We're actually pretty late to adopt stuff. We don't jump in feet first when something new pops up otherwise we feel like we're chasing our tail. We were three years late to YouTube and had to play catch up there. Freddie Wong had done three crowdfunding campaigns for Video Game High School and Penny Arcade did three as well before we even started looking at this stuff. We knew there had been pains with the Veronica Mars stuff and what Zach Braff went through, which was really surprising to me. “We funded a film and it sold at Sundance. That's terrible.” Why's that a terrible thing? That's what happens with movies, they get distributed.
So, we had to look at all that stuff and present a clear structure of what we wanted to do, even to the point that we made it clear to people that when we hit $2 million and we were breaking records, more and more people were becoming aware of this. This movie is scaling up not just based on money you guys are contributing, but ever dollar you contribute makes it more compelling for someone else to invest in the movie as well.
Matt Hullum: It also made it more compelling for talent we needed to attract. We got noticed by industry-level people we never would have gotten noticed by unless we had made some noise with this.
Quint: Could we talk a little about Matt being the one to pull the sword from the stone and step in to direct?
Matt Hullum: I like that analogy. Burnie and I worked together for a long time and it kind of gravitated towards Burnie doing more writing and I really liked directing. I come from a background of working on a lot of bigger films in Hollywood, which is not to say I want everything I direct to be gigantic or feel that way, but I felt like I was in a unique position where I understood the down and dirty, run and gun production stuff we do at Rooster Teeth and I also understood the bigger budget, Hollywood style of moviemaking. I felt like there was a place in the middle for a movie like this. Its scope is more like a $50 million movie, but we're making it for a budget that's a fraction of that. I thought if we could marry the two worlds we could have the best of both and that's basically what we're trying to achieve.
Burnie Burns: And Matt's background is heavy into visual effects, too. Most of the projects he worked on were big VFX features. For something like this it just made sense to have somebody at the helm who understands that, both on a production and post-production level.
Q: We always looked at Rooster Teeth as the biggest cult people don't know about. You have a massive audience. Did you go into this wanting to play to that audience or are you going for a broader audience that might not know who the hell you are?
Matt Hullum: I think it's a movie where we want every audience to be able to enjoy it, but hopefully there are things in it that are special for our audience, kinda like how we came into Red Vs. Blue. Anybody can watch Red Vs. Blue and like the jokes and laugh at it, even people who know nothing about Halo. People have come up to us and said, “I love Red Vs. Blue and just found out it's based on a video game. That's weird.”
Burnie Burns: Or they tell us, “You guys should make a video game out of this.” (laughs)
Matt Hullum: We get that, too. But Lazer Team is the same philosophy. Hopefully general audiences will love it as a movie and appreciate it as a movie, but if you're a Rooster Teeth fan you'll get a few extra inside jokes or a few extra references. We definitely wanted to something that was true to our aesthetics and true to our core audience, but embrace a much wider audience as well.
That was the chat and that was the end of the set visit. It wasn't a long one, but Burnie and Matt gave us a great interview to go out on.
Now that leaves us to talk about how you can catch this film, which releases this Friday in limited theatrical run. They've got some regular old fashioned go-and-buy-your-ticket style theaters, but they're also partnering with Tugg to fill theaters all across the globe. The Rooster Teeth community is rallying behind the film and the staff is totally blitzing the release with special appearances.
So, if you want to check it out, make sure to visit the Lazer Team website and find out if it's playing near you. If you're one of those new-fangled internet watcher types and have the patience to wait a little bit, the film will be available via Youtube Red in early February.
Hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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