RocketJump November Update

Hey everyone! Wanted to put out a little update and give you some idea of what’s been going on in the RocketJump offices.

By now we’ve begun the process of transitioning “FreddieW” into “RocketJump” and have begun some of the things we want to do for Phase Two. This included changing over the channel art, temporarily changing the channel name to “FreddieW (RocketJump)” so people weren’t completely confused when “RocketJump” suddenly started posting things to their sub boxes, and starting up weekly shorts again!

In addition, we’re also posting our podcasts to our channel. While this might seem like a weird thing to do, let me walk you through our reasoning for it:

1. YouTube seems to be rapidly transitioning away from the old system of “multiple channels” and into a system that encourages multiple playlists.

This makes complete sense – it doesn’t make sense to have tons and tons of off-shoot channels – it splinters your brand, it’s confusing, and it’s an absolute nightmare to manage and navigate. It doesn’t make sense to do freddiew2 or rocketjump2 anymore, especially if the system changes in a year or so. Therefore, we need to plan for the direction the site seems to be heading, and not for what it used to be.

2. We’re not really breaking new ground

Our personal heroes over at RoosterTeeth have been putting everything they do on their channel with great success.

3. We need to get our audience acclimated to a diversity of content

This is really the most important thing.

Right now, we are in a weird position because we have a lot of people who expect and only want short weekly videos (and within that group, a lot of people who only want certain things). We have another group of people who expect and only want VGHS. It’s impossible to keep both groups happy. And to be frank – if we only kept doing weekly VFX/action/comedy videos, we would bore you. And if we only did VGHS as our sole webseries, we would bore you.

The only way to keep things fresh both for us as creators and for you as our viewers is to keep coming out with cool stuff, and that means understanding that, realistically, not everyone is going to be huge fans of everything we do. Long story short – if you’re only expecting the shorts, don’t worry – you’ll get those. And if you’re only hoping for more VGHS – you’ll get that too. But you’re going to be getting a lot more, and we encourage you to approach everything with an open mind and the understanding that if you don’t like something, that’s cool.

For now, we’re only doing the Facerocker Podcast (which, don’t worry, will still have Logan episodes as well – it’s just that our schedules have made that a bit more difficult), but his To The Future Podcast may show up on the channel as well.

 

In other news, we’re doing a quick survey! Please click here and fill it out and you’ll help us plan out our content moving forward.

Currently, Dez is hard at work managing podcasts and putting together a new, super secret webseries, and Matt is locked in the writer’s room all day getting VGHS Season 3 on paper. The plan at the moment is to try and shoot first thing 2014 with a similar release schedule.

In the meantime as we approach the holiday season, we’re putting together our new products and getting things ready for new stuff for our store and getting product together for the Season Two Kickstarter backers (keep an eye out for an update later this week if you’re one of them). Season Three Kickstarter is in the works too, but we want to make sure we take care of Season Two Kickstarter backers too.

The biggest thing we’re all working on right now is getting projects funded. Ideally, we’d like to have a war chest where we could fund all the series kicking around in our heads, without the need to look around for funding. Of course, realistically, the way we fund our projects is a mixture of self-financing, crowd funding, brand integrations, and whatever else makes sense. Since we’re breaking new ground in terms of what can be made for how much, it means many of our projects have to be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Eventually, we hopefully can get to the point where we can simply finance and greenlight our own projects, but until then, we’ll be doing the absolute best we can with whatever resources we have. That means podcasts, the shorts, and a couple of new series that we’ll be unveiling very soon…

Thanks again, and as always, you can reach out to us directly on Twitter.