RocketJump Shorts
Heroes of the Storm – Firebat Reveal + Vancouver!
Earlier this month, Blizzard asked us to make a little trailer for the reveal of Firebat "Blaze" in Heroes of the Storm, so we drove up to the snow in Vancouver and did it!
Hi! My name is Ben M. Waller and I have been with RocketJump for four years now. I used to sit in my crappy apartment and send my parents Freddiew videos every morning, starting the email with, “If only these guys were hiring…†At the time, I was finishing up a documentary; I would bring hard drives into the Apple Store and plug into their Mac Pro towers because my computer at home wasn’t powerful enough to handle color correction and rendering (computers used to have to render footage!) Apple didn’t like the idea of me using their retail front as a co-working space, so I finished the documentary and stepped into unemployment. But that’s when I found a craigslist post that was clearly written by Freddie, found the email of the domain holder of the old FW website, and barraged them until I got an interview. Said interview consisted of cutting this video together. Hundreds of videos later, and I’m now showrunning of RocketJump’s latest show… RocketJump: The Show!
Wait, what is the show?
RocketJump started as a group of friends who made weekly videos and took you behind the scenes to show our process. And as we’ve grown to the point where we’ve become a modern “digital production studio” hybrid (or whatever it makes sense to call it) and are making full-on tv shows, we still wanted to make a show that reflected those roots… This is that show. Every episode you follow us as we ideate, create, and release a short that is at once in line with our classic videos, but enlarged to fit the scope and size of larger Hollywood productions. And every episode takes you inside RocketJump to learn about the crew and show the trials and tribulations of doing something chaotic as filmmaking. The end result will be a little bit BTS, a little bit action comedy extravaganza, and hopefully a lotta bit of heart. Just like the company, the show is a hybrid: ‘Project Greenlight meets Parks and Rec meets Looney Toons’… okay that one is a tri-brid.
Development is a long and strange process.
We have two amazing partners to help us bring it to life. Lionsgate believed in us enough to give us a first look deal, and this show was the first product of that agreement. Together, we then took the show to Hulu. They signed on and agreed to support us 100% on their platform. It’s hard enough to find an audience online, let alone finding the people who want to finance your creativity, and so far we couldn’t have asked for better partners.
But since television development is such a strange and cryptic process, I wanted to share a little bit of the story so that it all seems just a little bit less nebulous. So here are the several levels of “pitching” that had to happen to bring the show to where it is now.
In short, it has almost been a year since we started talking about the show, and we are just now entering the last week of production. For a lot of people, creating a television show takes even longer than that. We are beyond lucky and beyond excited. But we have so much work left to do. You have to remind yourself that everyday you are starting from scratch. Right now, Rocketjump: The Show is just 40 TB of data sitting on our servers and it’s our job to cut it into something great. Something that you hopefully love as much as we already do.
Get ready for some bus-punching.
-Ben
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