Graham here this week, I thought I’d tell you a bit about this video.
It wasn’t supposed to be so hard. But for some reason it was an absolute slog to get this thing finished.
On the Escapist forums, user pigsnoutman noted the following:
“…this should’ve been the Commodore hustle to introduce to the escapist.”
And, interestingly, having been written 4 months ago, it was going to be.
You’ve asked for them. You’ve pleaded for them. You’ve practically begged for them. So here they are: Bill and Morgan, starring in a new episode of commodoreHUSTLE.
As is usually the case with commodoreHUSTLE, this episode is based largely on real events. Morgan is truly the king of ‘flapping’, and Bill is, without question, the king of remaining unflapped. Even the tactic used to obtain ultimate victory in this video was word-for-word taken from the events as they actually unfolded.
You’ve likely noticed by now that Bill and Morgan have scaled back their involvement in videos somewhat, but Hustle just wouldn’t be Hustle without them – so fear not, though they may not show up as often as they once did, they’re not going away forever.
Finally, since Graham apparently doesn’t respect his work as an actor sufficiently to grant him a place among the credits, I’ll be the bigger man and give credit where it is due. The cat in this video is named Khavren, and he belongs to Kathleen. He is one of the precious few cats on this earth that I don’t dislike, so let’s all congratulate him on his stellar performance, and his being generally tolerable.
Rock on kitty.
(Oh, it occurs to me that Kathleen’s other cat, Annika, made his debut on tehz intarwebs today, too. He’s on this website, being extrememly bewildered.)
If you’re here, you probably like us. We like you too. That’s why we like to keep you guys in the loop for any changes we make.
We figure that even if you’re not 100% behind a given change, at least we’re being direct about it, right?
Now, commodoreHUSTLE. You love watching it, and goodness we love making it. And it’s not stopping, but it is changing. I’m going to do my best to explain how, and why.
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So, way back, we started cH for a bunch of reasons. Essentially they run down like this:
But, to be perfectly honest, a huge reason was:
See, we think we’re really good. I mean, we’re extremely biased of course, but we think we’re one of the best sites doing what we do, and it’s always been sort of apparent that we don’t get as many viewers as we feel we ought to. We love all the viewers we have (you guys!) but more would allow us to turn the site into at least a part-time job for us.
The problem with bring viewers in through sketch comedy is that it’s different every week. We happen to love that, because it lets us be creative and try new things all the time, but with no ongoing plot or recurring characters, it can’t hold an audience week-to-week. And we don’t want to stop doing sketches, certainly. So we started a web series.
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But to bring an audience in, you have to be targeting an audience. Every popular web series has an audience, and so does cH, but unfortunately cH’s audience (and one who’s interests we targeted with laser precision) was people who were already fans of LRR. So, in that regard, it didn’t work.
As the series went on, the plot became almost too self-referential (is there such a thing?) and the jokes (while still great!) became more about getting characters to where they needed to be for plot-reasons, instead of character, or even comedy.
I’m saying: We learned a lot.
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Something else that cH Season 1 was, as well as fun: a lot of work. A 15 – 17 minute episode every month, as well as three standard videos? That’s a tough workload. Each episode of cH was shot over at least three days, and that’s a huge time commitment for people who (as a reminder) aren’t being paid to do this. It’s also interesting to note that since Season 1 of cH ended, there have been a lot of comments on how the quality of our weekly videos has improved, and I’m sure that’s related to us not feeling completely worn out every three weeks.
Which brought up the question: If it’s not bringing in new fans, and we’re not making money from it, can we validate putting in the huge time commitment to do it?
Considering we now have Unskippable, and ENN (which are projects we actually get paid for) we really can’t. So what does this mean?
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Well, we’re not going to stop making cH, certainly. We love it, you love it, it’s win-win! But some changes have to be made.
For one thing, it’s going to be shorter, probably around the 7-minute length you saw in the Season 1 epilogue. Secondly, while it will still retain continuity and maintain the persistent “cH Universe”, the videos will be largely self-contained. I guess they’ll be a hybrid of cH and the “us playing us” videos of previous years.
I know this is going to be a blow to many of you, but trust us when we say that it was a hard decision for all of us, and the subject of several, tiring discussions.
Also, if previous changes to site layout and video content are anything to go on, you’ll get used to it soon 🙂
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In addition to the reasons I mentioned above, there’s another big reason not to have a monthly update that’s exceedingly self-referential and 17-minutes long, and that reason is something I can’t tell you about now. Speculate all you like, but I can’t say yet. I will say this:
– It’s a good thing.
– We’re not stopping.
– It doesn’t involve nudity or animals (No promises).
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One more thing, sorry for not mentioning all this earlier (I know a lot of you were really looking forward to the next season with readied expectations) but a lot of these things came about recently (especially that last, secret one) and we didn’t get a chance.
Hope that answers most of your questions about the new commodoreHUSTLE. If you’ve still got more, I’ll my best to answer them!
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Thanks guys,
Graham
Hustle 09. LONGEST VIDEO EVER!!!! Oh man, our goal after the mind blowing length of episode 8 was to bring back the episodes to more reasonable length, say 15 minutes (shorter if we could) But it’s painfully clear that we failed on all accounts. So with a long video came a long shoot, with several different locations.
We shot most everything with Kate and the WCMLG’s the first day of shooting, all of which was shot in and around Oak Bay High School. Which is where a large majority of the pictures that I will be adding are from and hopefully Graham can add a couple more later as I wasn’t at certain locations.
No pictures from the first scene but it’s a brand new locations for you all to add to the ever growing list of places in this city we have used. This time around we were at the Oak Bay Rose Garden (sans roses) which worked out really well. As well the suiting up scene with Graham and Paul was shot in the Kabuki Kabs garage. You will of course recognize the area the rap was shot in as we have used that part of town in numerous videos and even other raps. And then there was of course the final scene, which while on the UVIC campus isn’t somewhere we have shot before.
All in all it wasn’t the easiest video to get done but the final product is something we can all sit back and enjoy, and we hope you can as well!!! PICTURE TIME!!!
Update: Added some more pictures from the LARP scene (thanks to Krystyn for taking a bunch) and corrected some of James’ typos. -Graham
Update 2: You WOULD correct some of my typos! –James
So it’s a little late but you know what they say… better late then never!!! So without further ado I present you a handful of pictures from the last episode of hustle.
EDIT: Thumb nails fixed, two more images added.
