Since 2010, Freddie Wong has brought video games to life on the web. When YouTube was just establishing its rep as the place to get funny videos to send to your friends, Freddie Wong and his friends took the special effects knowhow they learned from film school and working on direct-to-DVD films to create shorts that blended real life and games. It wasn’t long before his shorts (like “Real Life Mario Kart”) were getting millions of views.
And that’s when Wong decided to move away from his “freddiew” YouTube channel and, with Desmond Dolly and Matt Arnold, create a production company named RocketJump. Wong then grew the operation, raising $273k on Kickstarter for a web series called Video Game High School. Season two of the show raised $808K, then season 3 raised $898K. The episodes have averaged 5.3 million views on YouTube. Now Wong and RocketJump are making a new show for Hulu that will debut in the last quarter of the year.
RocketJump: The Show will feature a new short film from RocketJump, but also a behind-the-scenes look at the company. “What does it mean to be a media company these days, when there is so much going online? And what does it mean to be a production company when the traditional barriers to global distribution are no longer there anymore?” says Wong. “It’s a mix of cool awesome shorts, that hopefully people find as entertaining as we do, as well as an in-depth look at what it takes to run a media company in this day and age.”
We sat down with Freddie Wong and talked about his career, from shorts to VGHS to Hulu and distilled some of what he’s learned over the years on his path from viral video maker to television producer.
Read the full article at Co.Create.