Our intrepid reporter Adam Rorke made the journey up the Hume highway to attend the first ever Rooster Teeth expo in Australia. Dubbed RTX the show was host to some amazing games, films, anime and various other pop culture related stalls. Adam has used his time well, managing to get a host of interviews, previews and reports together for your entertainment. Welcome to Player2’s coverage of RTX Australia 2016
Interview – Freddie Wong – RTX Australia
The man who brought us VGHS (Video Game High School) himself! Freddie is one of the main founders for RocketJump, a studio that creates many popular and hilarious online movies and rarely needs an introduction. Freddie had a sit down with us on the second day of the event and talked about the Expo as well as what 2016 has in store!
Adam – So, this is the second day now, how was your first day?
Freddie – It was good! I’ve seen a lot of conventions from their very early onsets, from their beginnings and this is probably the best one I’ve seen in terms of just starting out in a new place. Yeah people were good, a lot of stuff going on, the Rooster Teeth fans are all fantastic people too, so yeah it was a good first day.
Adam – You always seem to be shooting stuff with new content, how do you find time for stuff like this?
Freddie – Usually its gaps. Throughout the year there are months where we’re not doing anything, very rarely we get those gaps and I like to take advantage of them as we can.
Adam – I watched you play Rocket League and let me just say, you’re a God damn gun at Rocket League
Freddie – Let me be clear, I was throttling my skills. I wanted to make sure we didn’t just wipe them out. Cos if I wipe them out too bad they’re not going to invite me back, I had to make it competitive. It was fun though, I don’t know they keep challenging me at Rocket League because I don’t think anyone in the entire organisation stands a chance. They can pick any other game and I’ll take em down … take em doooown!
Adam – This your first trip to Australia?
Freddie – Yeah, first one.
Adam – What do you think about it?
Freddie – It’s good yeah. I’ll try and regurgitate everything I learned. Number one, it’s not ‘Mel-Born’ it’s ‘Mel-Ben’ and *laughs* everyone from Melbourne hates Sydney. They’re all like “yeah Sydney is ok, cept it SUUUUCKS”
Adam – Have you ever been to Melbourne though?
Freddie – I haven’t and now I have to, given how much shade the Melbourne knights are throwing Sydney’s way.
Adam – Yeah Melbourne has a lot of nice things, they have a nice sense of community and general vibe, PAX AUS is there …
Freddie – Oh is that where PAX is? When does that happen?
Adam – About October 30th – 31st, see we should talk about getting you on a Panel there!
Freddie – Ahhh yeah there might be a gap in our schedule that might be good yeah!
Adam – You talked yesterday on your Panel on building a community and that one of your biggest challenges is having a really popular show and it gets so popular you start thinking is it time to start fragmenting that off into something else. I assume VGHS was quite popular for you guys?
Freddie – Yeah it was. I think that problem is not something we only have, TV has that all the time and people go oh ok now people are only watching us for that and it really depends on what you want to do, if you want to have that show and keep running it you can certainly do that with say, Survivor but for us its less about any individual show it’s more about our channel, our network, whatever you want to call it. So we try to keep it all under one roof, if you like something you won’t necessarily like everything else, but this is what we do, this is what we put out and if you wanna see more of it, this is where it is.
Adam – So is VGHS done? Buried? Moving on?
Freddie – No not quite, we’ve been working on an animated series for a while. One of the big problems is that it’s hard to do a show in high school where people keep getting older, you know. There’s a certain point where these people are all 30 year old people and we almost got there with season 3. But with an animated show you can keep that going, we love the universe, we’re going to continue it, but it’s going to take some time after the events of the live action.
Adam – Moving forward, what do you guys have plans for?
Freddie – 2016 is going to be a big year for us. 2015 was all infrastructure, setup and planning. We just finished up a show that we did on Hulu, we just did Rocket Jump the show, we’re gearing up to do a big sci-fi anthology series which we haven’t quite announced totally yet and we’re working on a feature film and in addition to that we’re doing a lot of stuff with our film school which focuses on not how do you do this, it’s more so why do you this.
Adam – Sounds like you’re actually going to be pretty busy this year.
Freddie – Yeah we’re pretty busy.
Adam – Any surprises that we can get a sneak peek here?
Freddie – Ahhhh I think the sci-fi show we’re really excited about. We’ve been working on it for about a year and a half now, nearly two years. Just writing scripts and pre-production.
Adam – Is that the hardest phase, the scripting phase?
Freddie – I think so yeah. That’s where the majority of time is spent I think. Because shooting is just a train, it just goes and when you’re done you’re done. And post can take a bit longer, but you only have so much you can work with, you have a finite amount of resources that you work with, what you’ve already shot. So definitely scripting phase and just the planning for things is what takes the most time.
Adam – I know you didn’t have much time so thank you for taking the time to talk.
Freddie – Yeah thank you of course.
Adam Rorke
