1-UP Show/CO-OP Alumni: Kickstarter: VG Culture Docu Series (210K Goal)

Do the bigger sites see it as competition? Polygon for example seems to report of every promising kickstarter games project, but they haven't mentioned this project yet.

I haven't kept track that closely. Kinda sucks if they didn't considering a few guys from Area 5 are on Rebel FM.
 
Matt,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask but since you're here... Other than the SF and TLoU docs where have you guys been since Co-Op ended? Just working on a ton of lower-profile stuff? Shooting weddings (half-joke)? Anything you can share? You guys still exist as an entity so you're financially solvent (at least for the most part, right?) but I can't imagine two projects sustaining the company for years. Just curious! Adore you guys, glad I have the chance to give back with this KS. Backed early, spreading the word as best I can.

You've pretty much got it! While we haven't done any weddings, we would have if the price was right and we had the time. Fortunately most of our time was taken up doing work directly for videogame developers and publishers. It's what's kept us afloat and allowed us to purchase the cameras, lenses, and computers that we now have for making Outerlands. So, yeah, no way those two projects by themselves could have kept us in business, but fortunately we've had a lot of repeat clients over the years that have liked our work. I'm not allowed to show you the work or even refer to it directly without their permission, unfortunately. Hope that answers your question!
 
man, im gonna be really bummed if this doesn't reach its goal. i really want to watch these

@matt: will you guys look into other ways of producing this anyway if the kickstarter fails? or maybe a scaled down version

We've been looking into those "other ways" for years. No one wants to fund it as it's a risk to their bottom line since it doesn't line up cleanly with other content offerings out there. The new attention Outerlands has received may course-correct some of those conversations, but I'm not optimistic about that.
 
I find that it's not getting enough word of mouth. I follow tonnes of industry and journo folks on twitter, read a few of the bigger blogs, and so on, but I found out about it here on GAF. And I'm still not really seeing mentions of it on twitter. I think we need to start talking about it there (again).

Over 40% of our funding referrals have come from Twitter. If you can get people to talk about it on Twitter, there's practically no better way to help get the project funded!
 
#WhyWeNeedOuterlands

Let's give this a try.
 
I backed (8-4 Bump and all). I've been a huge fan of Area 5 since the 1UP Show days and just saw Grounded (great doc BTW), so hoping this will get funded!
 
This keeps coming up, and I never bothered to dig up the link until now but hell, why not.

This is the Rebel.fm podcast where Matt Chandronait goes into detail about why Co-op (aka rebirth of the 1UP Show) failed financially. The Area5 guys have generally been quite open about the resources (money, time and effort) required to keep their business operating. Starts 97 minutes in.

Because there probably won't be a lot of people who will bother to listen to the clip (I know, I know, Arthur--but he doesn't do much talking during this stretch), here's the summary. An aside about the death of Co-op: when Area5 signed their contract with Revision3 to make Co-op, they didn't ask for a minimum payment, just a cut of advertising revenue. Matt says he (as the bizdev guy) made a mistake in not asking for that minimum. Now he's older and wiser etc. etc., but you could use this point against Area5 if you were feeling especially critical.

"What would it take to get Co-op running again?" was the initial question. Matt pegs the cost of a successful Kickstarter to do Co-op again at $600,000. Here's the breakdown

  • Amazon takes a 30% cut.
  • Salaries for the four principals need to be paid. "Right now we're actually paying ourselves a lot less than you need to live in San Francisco and we kind of make up for it in other ways."
  • They also need an editorial staff + associated salaries, because they can't play all the games they do AND do video production at the same time. Aside: if you look at the 1UP Show this makes sense--any given episode of three game reviews required something like 8-12 people who had all played one of the three games.
  • Matt estimates four editorial staff, and average salary of $60k for everyone. So for a year of Co-op, that's $480,000. You're already $60k over the Kickstarter take of $600k minus 30%.
  • Office expenses would have to be $3k/month for rent, utilities, technology, etc.
  • No health plans, or paid for largely from each employee's salary directly (i.e. against that $60k, though I'm inferring here).
  • That's to operate for one year; at the end of the year they'd have to put up another Kickstarter to cover the next year's expenses. And assuming they spent all their time making Co-op (which, from other stories about 1UP Show production, seems totally plausible), they wouldn't be spending time doing the one-off projects for Capcom/Naughty Dog/etc., which is their core business right now.
  • No bizdev people (besides Matt I suppose) or ad salespeople included in all this.
  • No travel expenses included either.
Matt talks about how smaller-scale projects like the Street Fighter documentary are more feasible for them, and that hopefully making a name for themselves that way and taking on publisher-directed projects will allow them to set aside some cash for one-off documentaries of their own choosing.

Basically, what you want (and really, what I want, I loved the 1UP Show!) isn't financially feasible unless you rely on a lot of volunteer or contractor effort to handle things like reviewing and writing scripts (however vague) about games, or you want a lower-quality project done by someone who isn't Area5, whose whole schtick is professional-quality video content about games.

You are correct that I will not be listening to rebelfm so thank you for the breakdown.


I think what I really want is a videogame equivalent to Half in the Bag. A show I can watch every now and then where people I like talk about stuff I like. Their financial situation seems to be sustainable since they've been doing it for a while now. Living in Milwaukee probably helps keep costs down. I get that movies and games have a much different time commitment, but the area 5 dudes are gamers so they will be playing stuff whether they talk about it on camera or not. I also understand that something exactly like co-op doesn't make sense financially, but there's a lot of ground between tv quality production and no show at all.
 
With a few days left, they'll probably squeak on by. It's not a direction I'm personally interested in but obviously best of luck to the dudes!
 
Damn, I think they are fucked (maybe the last stretch bump will be huge). but I thought that this kickstarter was going to be easily funded.
 
Backed today, but it really doesn't look like they will make it. They pulled in about 5k so far today but need to be pulling in over 10k for each of these last few days to make it.
 
So, now they are bringing back Co-op as well for 7 episodes? Time to increase my pledge and make this shit happen

Are you fucking kidding me? After all that jazz about requiring this astronomical budget to produce CO-OP, they're going to produce this documentary series AND CO-OP?

Sorry, now they've lost me.
 
Are you fucking kidding me? After all that jazz about requiring this astronomical budget to produce CO-OP, they're going to produce this documentary series AND CO-OP?

Sorry, now they've lost me.

Outerlands has a significant portion of its budget set aside for travel. It is a documentary. covering gaming topics all over the place, to do it properly.

Co-op, which is a bunch of guys sitting around talking about games, is super cheap to produce, since they have the equipment already. They did it for weeks with no pay at all, and basically just had to stop to devote their time to work that would pay the rent. It was doable, but not for a living.

I see no reason why throwing some more of those in breaks the deal for you. To me it just shows they're willing to work harder to fulfill what people want.
 
Perhaps I should have raised this issue earlier but the reason why I haven't backed it is because I have no idea what they're creating. Yes, I know it's a documentary about the "culture of video games" but I want an episode by episode breakdown.

This image below doesn't tell me anything. They're just ideas that they may more may not cover in this season.

ae4245f2b7a6ac2e933ed9d76d363c1a_large.jpg


I would have loved to have seen something along these lines:

If they said episode 1 was about video game magazines and showed that awesome short. But then at the end of the video they explained they were covering PC gaming, European and Japanese magazines with the same depth. That would have been brilliant!

They don't need to flesh out every episode with a short but having an episode by episode synopsis would have been helpful to me as the consumer. What if I wasn't interested in topic X, Y or Z? Right now, this pitch sounds like: "Hey! Give us some money, we'll make stuff about video games and hopefully it will cover topics that you enjoy."

I agree they're talented folks and I wish them all the best but I'm just treating this like any other product that I would buy.
 
Are you fucking kidding me? After all that jazz about requiring this astronomical budget to produce CO-OP, they're going to produce this documentary series AND CO-OP?

Sorry, now they've lost me.


Haha, they can't win.


I guess I will have to back this thing if co-op is involved
 
So, now they are bringing back Co-op as well for 7 episodes? Time to increase my pledge and make this shit happen

Who needs weekends, AMIRITE?! If we can get funded during our livestream Marathon tomorrow we will make a "season" of CO-OP to match a season of Outerlands. Should correct that by that we means 6 episodes, not 7. We came up with this idea after work late one night last week, realizing that if we did some double-up shooting (like shooting some CO-OP stuff at the same locations we were shooting Outerlands stuff) it wouldn't impact our schedules enough to make Outerlands unfeasible--particularly if we weren't tied to an exact weekly release schedule and could make CO-OP episodes happen in our own time.
 
Are you fucking kidding me? After all that jazz about requiring this astronomical budget to produce CO-OP, they're going to produce this documentary series AND CO-OP?

Sorry, now they've lost me.

That astronomical budget is based off producing 50+ weekly episodes a year. We spent upwards of 80 hours a week doing that show and still had to take on outside work to keep the company afloat. It's six episodes of CO-OP, not 50. We figured it would be some nice icing on the cake for people who enjoy our previous work. We're no strangers to all-nighters or weekend work, and over the 18 month production schedule of Outerlands we figure it's feasible to line up guests in the locations we might end up in order to produce said episodes, particularly since we won't be tied to an every-Friday release schedule. In video/film production people always talk about the Quality-Time-Money triangle. Push any one side and you have to push another. By giving ourselves time, we save money and can still keep quality to our standards. CO-OP as a year-round weekly production is and will continue to be prohibitively expensive.
 
Perhaps I should have raised this issue earlier but the reason why I haven't backed it is because I have no idea what they're creating. Yes, I know it's a documentary about the "culture of video games" but I want an episode by episode breakdown.

This image below doesn't tell me anything. They're just ideas that they may more may not cover in this season.

ae4245f2b7a6ac2e933ed9d76d363c1a_large.jpg


I would have loved to have seen something along these lines:

If they said episode 1 was about video game magazines and showed that awesome short. But then at the end of the video they explained they were covering PC gaming, European and Japanese magazines with the same depth. That would have been brilliant!

They don't need to flesh out every episode with a short but having an episode by episode synopsis would have been helpful to me as the consumer. What if I wasn't interested in topic X, Y or Z? Right now, this pitch sounds like: "Hey! Give us some money, we'll make stuff about video games and hopefully it will cover topics that you enjoy."

I agree they're talented folks and I wish them all the best but I'm just treating this like any other product that I would buy.

From the outside this kind of request about a show outline seems reasonable. In fact, it's the kind of stuff people ask for when you're pitching shows to them. But, it's not a promise we can deliver on. I could do that outline for you, but what happens when Outerlands is delivered and sticks to only a few of the basic story tenets? Are you going to feel "screwed" because you didn't get what you "paid" for? Frankly, that's not how documentary works. What we're doing is more akin to No Reservations or This American life (God I HOPE we approaching as good as either of those!). We can't know exactly which stories will become the most salient until we're out producing and shooting them. Unfortunately, that's how documentaries function. You can't know if you've got crap until you're actually shooting it, much of the time. I bet if we could get some insight into how many stories This American Life has cancelled or decided not to air, we'd all be shocked. Also, we might get a story that's amazing but doesn't fit in any episode. We ran across this all the time with The 1UP Show, especially. In fact that's the biggest tragedy about The 1UP Show source tapes being nowhere to be found (we actually have master tapes of the full, edited shows, not all the source material) is that there's hundreds of hours of footage, interviews, stories, and so forth that just never fit in an episode. Some of it is probably great, a lot of it is crap. I'd rather have us have the option of throwing the crap out and you never having to deal with it than forcing it into an episode because we committed ourselves to a topic for which every story turned out to be a bust. Incidentally, this is why we're delivering everything all at once instead of as each episode is finished. We want to be able to shoot something for episode 1 if a story pops up while we're finishing the shoot for episode 6. That probably doesn't address all of your concerns, but hopefully it at least shows where our thinking is at and that we haven't made these decisions lightly.
 
The content didn't sound like it was for me but I backed this project anyway because it was by Area 5.

Now they have added CO-OP into it I have to go back and up my pledge! HURRY UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
 
haha!

"They're giving us what we want. FUCK THEM!!!"

Much simplistic interpretation. I'm concerned they're only doing this to score basic funding and will now split resources between two thematically different projects. It's the classic case of promising the world to attain funding (ie. Republique). It's two shakes away from saying they're also reviving the 1Up Show.
 
Okay it's a 24 hour twitch stream. If the raise 10k during the stream it's another episode of Co-Op, if they raise the whole amount it's 6 new episodes.

If you want to tweet, use
#BackOuterlands
@OuterlandsDoc
http://twitch.tv/outerlands

Too bad I can't watch the stream. I have work to do... :(
 
CO-OP can only work in a cable channel. Too expensive it seems.

There was an amazing long-form special on the evolution of comic book heroes and the transition to mainstream blockbusters on PBS. I forget the name but they nailed it. It had a really great narrative.


I think what's missing to me in this kickstarter is an overall narrative. Every great documentary has some theme/narrative and it doesn't feel that the subject matter they've chosen really plays to that.

Also, to me, it seems likely it gets bogged down with a bunch of footage of videogame culture staples like collectors, old game creators, old game nostalgia and competitive gaming and I can't see anything exciting or new coming out of it.
 
I think what's missing to me in this kickstarter is an overall narrative. Every great documentary has some theme/narrative and it doesn't feel that the subject matter they've chosen really plays to that.
It's a documentary series. As in more than one, and different.

Also, to me, it seems likely it gets bogged down with a bunch of footage of videogame culture staples like collectors, old game creators, old game nostalgia and competitive gaming and I can't see anything exciting or new coming out of it.
What else do you see in your crystal ball?
 
You are correct that I will not be listening to rebelfm so thank you for the breakdown.


I think what I really want is a videogame equivalent to Half in the Bag. A show I can watch every now and then where people I like talk about stuff I like. Their financial situation seems to be sustainable since they've been doing it for a while now. Living in Milwaukee probably helps keep costs down. I get that movies and games have a much different time commitment, but the area 5 dudes are gamers so they will be playing stuff whether they talk about it on camera or not. I also understand that something exactly like co-op doesn't make sense financially, but there's a lot of ground between tv quality production and no show at all.

I think that already exists, actually: Giant Bomb. Especially when they're doing stuff like Unprofessional Fridays, which is just them fucking around on random games, or Quick Looks (especially longer-form ones like Vinny/Drew's flight club antics). They actually avoid the more elaborate, well-edited production style because they decided it was too expensive and too resource-intensive to put out content on a regular basis that way.

Much simplistic interpretation. I'm concerned they're only doing this to score basic funding and will now split resources between two thematically different projects. It's the classic case of promising the world to attain funding (ie. Republique). It's two shakes away from saying they're also reviving the 1Up Show.

To be honest, this worries me a little bit too. I can only assume that whatever CO-OP they do, it'll be a lot smaller in scope than the original show (or the 1UP Show), which may end up disappointing a lot of people. Otherwise I can't see how they could do Outerlands, CO-OP, AND continue their white label production stuff. Unless they kill themselves with exhaustion or something.
 
To be honest, this worries me a little bit too. I can only assume that whatever CO-OP they do, it'll be a lot smaller in scope than the original show (or the 1UP Show), which may end up disappointing a lot of people. Otherwise I can't see how they could do Outerlands, CO-OP, AND continue their white label production stuff. Unless they kill themselves with exhaustion or something.

Well they did quote an 18 month production schedule for Outerlands. I think 6 episodes of Co-Op across all or part of that timeframe (filmed in locations along with Outerlands, so probably all) seems workable. Matt said they were sacrificing weekends.

That's the kind of thing you do to make a dream happen, you know?
 
Looks like we'll get at least one episode of Co-op if they get funded as I believe they've scored at least $10,000 during the live stream!

Five more Co-op Episodes if they fully fund by 10am!

http://twitch.tv/outerlands
 
To be honest, this worries me a little bit too. I can only assume that whatever CO-OP they do, it'll be a lot smaller in scope than the original show (or the 1UP Show), which may end up disappointing a lot of people. Otherwise I can't see how they could do Outerlands, CO-OP, AND continue their white label production stuff. Unless they kill themselves with exhaustion or something.

Same show, smaller in scope in terms of number of episodes. I know it might seem silly to reference the production triangle again, but it's a useful tool to think about. Three sides: time, money, quality. You can have to out of the three. If you want high quality and low time, it's very expensive. If you want high quality and low cost, you need a lot of time. That's the model we're going for. We'll be able to do six episodes of CO-OP in pieces over long periods of time.
 
Nice. 200k.

If they make their full funding in the next two hours we get five more episodes of Co-op.
 
May not be obvious from my username unless you were around in The 1UP Show days, but this is Matt Chandronait, part of AREA 5. I'm up to my eyeballs in managing the Kickstarter, of course, so I apologize that I don't have time to go back and read the whole thread, but it makes perfect sense to me that there would be questions about the budget. If you've got something you'd like to know, (budget or otherwise)--reply back! I may not be able to respond right away, but the whole beauty about this Internet Forums thing I keep hearing about is that even if I don't have time to reply until the meager depths of night we can still have a discussion. Hooray modernity!

Haha, that's so cool, had no idea you posted here!

On the subject of the KS goal - they just got to $200'000, only 10k left on their goal, and a little over 2 hours left on their live stream - if they reach the goal by then, we get a whole 6 episodes of co-op in addition to the documentary. Awesome.

Probably time for another link to their Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/area5/outerlands-season-one

:D :D
 
Just backed last night -
As much as I'd like to see a full season of CO-OP, it seems unlikely they'll hit the full amount in the next few hours.
Still, at the pace they're going, I think it's safe to say that they'll hit $210,000 by the end, so that's good news.
 
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