We had seen the way the print industry had been disrupted; we'd seen how the audio industry got disrupted, so it just seemed like a natural progression that video was next. We thought we were late to the game in 2003.
People think that if you get a lot of views, the ad truck just shows up at your front door. That's just not true.
In the entertainment industry, careers don't last very long - and online, careers last an even shorter amount of time.
Flash Video made platform sites like YouTube possible as well, and helped kick-start the online video revolution.
We've always had a roadmap to feature filmmaking, and making a feature film could have been three or four years away for us. But crowdfunding helped us get there in a year, and it allowed us to take a much bigger step.
I gotta admit, when you've been doing this a long time, going out to the audience and asking for them to help out with crowdfunding, it's a gut check. You never know how that's gonna turn out. Luckily for us, it turned out well.
We started on April 1, 2003. So long ago, you couldn't watch video in a web browser; you had to watch it in a different player, like in Quicktime player or something like that.
I feel like we always kept our core philosophy of making content that we would wanna watch, and there's definitely a different scale we are offering that at today.
'The Amazing Race' has always been the gold standard of reality television to me. It's smart, it's funny, and it's entertaining as hell.
I have been playing video games since the Atari 2600 days.
To us, 'The Amazing Race' takes the whole world and turns it into a giant game. What could be better?
I lived a significant portion of my life before the Internet and smart phones.
Anybody who has traveled with a significant other before knows it's tough.
It's really great to see fans all over the world.
Even in the days of early YouTube, we always focused on narratives, and we always focused on franchises. We didn't do a lot of vlogging and stuff like that.
To me, the machinima artform has essentially evolved now into the Let's Play streaming world. That's what it is: it's people performing and creating art using video games. It's just more personality-driven rather than story-driven these days.
'Red vs Blue' as a show has evolved dramatically. It looks an entirely different show to what we started with, but the format of the show has changed so much over the years, too.
We're so used to financing things on our own that we always have a plan in place to sort of scale our ideas.
There is an animated version of 'Lazer Team,' with all the action sequences, that exists. It's a pre-visual fidelity, and the voice acting is terrible because it's one of our animators doing it. But we could sit there and watch what the scene is supposed to look like while we're doing individual shots.
We are proud to be the No. 1 most funded film on Indiegogo... and with a totally new property. In a world filled with sequels and reboots, Lazer Team is a brand-new IP being made possible by the people who want to see it.
