How Corridor Crew Made One of the Internet’s Favorite Shows

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out.

1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. Hi, welcome back to VFX Artist React. Roll the clip. Right now it feels like YouTube's saturated, right? There's so many people making stuff, but it's not saturated at all. It's always been easy to break out on YouTube. As long as you can... Ooh, let's talk about that. 20 ,000 views, 28 ,000 views, 60 ,000 views in one day. What? That's crazy. No, no, no. It's not the first principles of YouTube. It's not even the first principles of filmmaking.

1:44It's the first principles of being interesting. My biggest category was perspective on AI. And if you're aware that you've alienated a portion of your audience based on your perspective on AI. I have a lot of feelings about AI. This is how you hook people into watching somebody do anything. The first thing is... Today on The Colin and Samir Show, we're joined by Nico Perringer. He's one of the founders of Corridor Crew, which is a group of filmmakers and VFX artists who have been building one of YouTube's most creative and long-lasting channels for the past 15 years. The Corridor takes movie magic and special effects, and they break it down in a way that's fun, funny, and accessible.

2:18Their most popular series is called VFX Artists React, where they sit on a couch and they analyze the best and worst visual effects in movies and TV. And they've had major guests join them on that couch to react to VFX. They're also artists themselves. They actually started with this channel called Corridor Digital, where they made short films, viral skits, and they're still doing that to this day. Between the two channels, Corridor Digital and Corridor Crew, they have over 16 million subscribers. We had such a good time talking to Nico because he's this YouTube veteran who has gone through a lot of different iterations to find what works on the platform, has found this format, but also still retains space for these creative experiments.

2:56Now, before we jump into this conversation with Nico, I want to thank the sponsor of this episode, Lexar. Now, if you're a creator, you're definitely familiar with Lexar. You've probably used one of their SD cards or maybe one of their SSDs. So if you're anything like us, you're dealing with a ton of footage. Like when we sat down to record with Nico, we record across four cameras for over two hours. So our bottleneck isn't actually our creativity. It's not our ideas, it's workflow. And that's where the Lexar Professional Workflow Dock comes in. It's a customizable six bay dock for serious creators.

3:25It lets you mix and match card readers and SSD modules so you can offload footage fast and back everything up without breaking rhythm. So when we finish recording, we take all of our cards, put them in the workflow dock and back them up all at once. And then we get to editing faster. And it's a really powerful machine. It's powered by Thunderbolt 4. It has up to 40 gigabits per second in transfer speeds. And it's literally designed to let you edit in 8K without like melting your gear. Now, if you're someone who edits on the go, they also have the Lexar Workflow Go dock. It's small enough to just throw in a bag, and you don't even need a laptop.

3:58You can use your phone to back up the files immediately when you're done shooting. So if you're a creator, check out the full workflow lineup at Lexar.com. It will totally change your creative process. And thanks again to Lexar for powering our creative ideas and for sponsoring this episode. Now for our conversation with Nico from Corridor Crew.

4:21All right, Nico, welcome to the show. Hi. we're going what's up everybody what's up everybody out there hi dude how long have you guys been doing corridor how we've been doing corridor since 2008 2008 yeah was that the youtube channel not the youtube channel just the studio corridor and then became the youtube channel in 2010 became the youtube channel in 2010 so it's been 15 years yeah of youtube wait it's may wait the very first video we uploaded wait no we started the channel in may oh it might be our 15th birthday like today today that's crazy check we should probably do something at corridor to celebrate you're gone on the day of the 15th anniversary we had our big 10 million subscriber point that we hit last fall which we're trying to hit before our 15th birthday and we hit that we're like yay we all stopped thinking about the 15th birthday so so 10 million on corridor digital yep six million on corridor crew what are the other channels corridor cast quarter cast and that's really all the other channels but we did have we did very briefly have a kids animation channel we were doing uh space science animations cool that mostly was headed up by jake and another guy from the company and we did briefly have a channel called the guillotine channel where we built a full-size guillotine it started off as a joke the whole idea is they wanted to build a full-size guillotine for a video and they're like what we made a channel their whole goal was to build get enough ad revenue to buy craft beer that's hilarious we made like six dollars so diversions like that are absolutely necessary for a creative career yeah at some point you're gonna have an idea like that and you're like i just gotta follow it i gotta see what happens here i do want to talk about inflection points for you guys as corridor over the past 15 years of building this business like was there like a video that you uploaded where you go all right that's the inflection point now we've we figured this out right so i actually thought about this a lot in the car right here and it takes about an hour drive from glendale to here so i had a lot of time to think about it uh i think thinking about things as an inflection point at least for the way stuff happened with corridor is uh it's not dangerous but it's it's it's the wrong way i think to think about things because if you approach things like waiting for an inflection point or trying to be like okay this is you know things were flat and then this one thing happened and it spiked and it went viral and it popped if like if that's what you're waiting for is an inflection point then once you have your video pop and it goes viral the next two to three weeks can be the worst weeks of your life because it turns out that having one video go viral doesn't mean your whole business changed direction right um you know i would say the closest things like because we have lots of inflection points it's it's all been consistent and it's it's you know it's art some things are going to resonate some things aren't you're doing experiments all the time meaning some things will pop and some things won't but just because a video pops doesn't mean your business has changed that said when we were starting youtube like sam and i had already been making videos together since we were 14 years old and like starting in eighth grade uh so by the time we're starting youtube we're like 22 years old now um so you know we've already been making videos for eight years there wasn't a youtube but we were putting them online we had forums you know where we talked to other people about our videos we were part of communities online so we were already doing the online video thing even like the shorts thing to a certain extent before any platform existed for that like we'd have to pay for our own video hosting service now it's such a big deal when there was i don't know if you guys remember like uh ifilm.com like they had the promise of like being able to upload your own videos you didn't have to pay for hosting and then youtube comes along it's like you upload your videos you have to pay for hosting vimeo and you know youtube pulled it off somehow um you know they lost billions of dollars but google decided to buy them and just take that loss you know so we were already making videos and we had just finished shooting a feature film up in vancouver and this is back in 2008 and going into 2009 you know we're working on the feature film but we'd already done a bunch of shorts action shorts things like that like i'm feeling that itch i got to make another action short we've been working on this feature film for like two years uh and so we went and you know started shooting something and as we were putting it together it was uh it was freddy freddy wong because we were all housemates at the time working on this movie um he's like why don't you guys because we loved call of duty modern warfare for uh the first modern warfare had come out uh call of duty 4 and we were loved that game put played it a ton and he's like why don't you just you know instead of just having your short be a bunch of army guys fighting like why don't you just make it a call of duty short see the exact You don't have to change anything at all.

8:41You know, it just, you give it like something that people can connect to. And now there's like a reason for an audience to watch it. It has more reach. And so we're like, yeah, okay, let's try that. And, you know, we dropped the first short. It hit number one on Reddit. People were talking about it. And it's like, okay, adding that little bit of Call of Duty, like IP in there, even though it's not our IP or anything like that, but that little bit of fan film, like just hit a way bigger audience. And that really informed a lot of the kind of video game themed videos that we've made early on. thing what I say is like you know you take something familiar and just give it a new twist yeah it's like people like video games give it a new twist hey here's a cinematic version of it that doesn't suck you know there's a new twist um and that was you know kind of what we did so I'd say that first call of duty was kind of an inflection point but from there it's like we didn't make any money it didn't go on our channel it went on the freddie w now rocket jump channel right um and then the second one went on their channel too but that that moment actually teaches you a lot about the internet and like internet filmmaking right what you just said of like familiarity but give it a twist is actually like still it's the core of like how to make a youtube video right it's like is this format familiar but how do i give it my own twist how to make it a little unexpected exactly yeah and there's a because that still exists right like gta in real life obviously you guys have done that ryan trahan did that like that still exists that format yeah Um, but like, I mean, that exists in even your reacts format, right?

10:08Like reacts is a familiar concept. Right. We didn't invent that format at all. And then you look at someone like even Eric and you look at some of the stuff he's doing and you're like, oh, he's doing punked. Right. When he's like got an earpiece in and he's doing a prank show, he's doing punked. It's a familiar format. That's, you know, whether it's punked or it's a impractical jokers, right? It's like this thing has existed for a long time. He's just putting a different twist on it. The video where you guys fix the rock, the, what is the title of that one? Yes. Fixing the worst VFX shot of all time.

10:40Yes, exactly. Scorpion King. So you're fixing Scorpion King. It reminded me so much of Pimp My Ride on MTV because you're basically exhibit and you're sitting there and you're asking all the guys like, what do you got for me? Right. And like, what do you got for me with the fire? And they're like, well, I'm going to come in here and I'm going to add this element and this. And you're like, great. Yeah. You know, what do you got for me for the face? like it just reminded me so much of pit my ride we'd had to become more careful about using the term fix when doing those kind of projects because as our so channel has grown with the visual effects artist react series um coming out and be like we fixed this has not sat well with people all the fans i think or the actual artist things like what do you mean you fix we worked on that for months yeah and you just like it's like screw you and it's like whoa sorry just being funny you know um so we've tried to change that vernacular a little bit more recently when we do that kind of stuff but we did fix the scorpion it's also like whenever there's something kind of like another great part of youtube is like when there's something kind of dumb but that people put a lot of effort into it's like really appreciated yeah right and like a lot of work on our channel i think that's like that also makes it feel like a friend group because you like I don't know, at least with my friend group, sometimes we come up with like bits and like just play jokes on each other or pranks or whatever.

11:58And like when you put a ton of effort into it, it's very funny. Right. Right. And so I think that plays into like the friend group nature of it. It's like, you guys put so much effort into this kind of dumb bit, but it also showcases your skills and the craft. Like that, that is an amazing YouTube video. Thank you. It kind of reminds me of the old world of YouTube of like, do you remember the um the david blaine comedy yep yep you know exactly what i'm talking about yep he has walking down the street and there's like the two other guys he like puts his friend on the roof and like puts the other guy in the trunk of the car like stop it leave us alone that's like that was a glorious time of youtube because it was just like i don't know it it reminds me of that time like where it's just so kind of accessible but still like just so well done well like so thoughtful the concept is thoughtful and that's what matters cool yeah i think we've hit like two key tenants here of familiarity with a twist and then accessibility yeah right being like core reasons why almost everything that you guys have made has resonated i wonder if there's other core tenants that you think about i do have one more which is to say you yourself need to be able to offer a unique perspective this is something we struggle with a lot because like for example we had this one idea for video i loved this idea for video it's called bob ross with sauce and the idea was that we were going to go to the grocery we're going to pick a bob ross movie or video you know a lesson we're going to go to the grocery store and we're going to pick out our paints which is to be sauces you can pick out whatever sauces you want chocolate sauce mayonnaise tabasco whatever you need for your painting and you come back and we're going to follow the bob ross tutorial but you're going to paint with condiments uh great idea my painting actually turned out pretty good not from a taste perspective but from a aesthetic perspective um and the video just underperformed so hard why because we're not painters who's interested in watching us paint i have nothing new to the ad add to the world of painting you know it's like you know you can watch us have fun as personalities doing this activity but then again they're also not like activities or not an action we're not personalities necessarily like we are but like people don't really tune into corridor just to watch me say things you know and just you know act and be funny uh they usually watch corridor to watch us actually do something specific that's interesting and we just happen to be able to carry it on camera a little bit um and it's really like you know that lesson really sticks which is like if you're going to make a video especially if it's like an interesting video you need to find something that you yourself bring to the table that only you can bring to the table.

14:37Like another example is we were talking about trying to do like a little game jam, like contest where you find two teams that both make a video game. None of us are video game designers. So why would anybody want to watch that video? You know, some people would, but that's until you can find like a reason that makes it unique and special for you to try doing it. And there's a reason now for people to watch a video. Like that's where like it actually clicks. So do you guys have kind of like a maybe filtration system or some type of system to evaluate ideas where like you come up with the video game idea but then you sit in a room and are you like but wait we don't yeah it's kind of me and sam we're like we're all filters but sam and i tend to be like a little bit more of the filter um so like you know we all get together we throw out ideas i mean like i said we run on bits we run a bit for a while it's really funny maybe we turn it into a video but every once in a while it's like you know there's like i don't know guys i don't know i think we should try a different idea like it tends to come from me and but it can come from anybody in the studio yeah i want to talk about vfx artist react okay that to me from the outside looking in feels like a major it's definitely an inflection point that feels like and we we always talk to you know whether it's like young creators or even established creators that like a format on youtube is a key that unlocks kind of the world that's true it unlocks the world on youtube if you can find a format if you can find it and we're all looking for it.

15:57Some people like, you know, I brought up Rhett and Link earlier. Once Good Mythical Morning has been running for over a decade. Once they found that format and unlocked that key, it's like, boom, now the world unlocks to them. And so I'm curious to hear the story behind VFX Artist Reacts and how you find that format in 2019 and what that has done for the business. Well, you know, so we had gone through a lot of different formats by that point. and formats may be a bit of the wrong word to use but you're always trying to figure out what's what's going to click with people and you're always experimenting at least we were we would rarely do sequels to our stuff to the point where it's like we'd make a video that go mega viral and be like that's really cool and then we would never make a follow-up and you have like five youtube channels doing the exact thing like our real gta video is a great example we made that video it blows up gets the most views uh in 24 hours out of any video i've ever had which to say got 4 million views in 24 hours um and we're like that's great and we never made another one because you scratched that itch yeah we did it like we're done we did it you know what he showed the world it's like it was the first video to really use a a gimbal camera to mimic a third person video game view which is one of the things like when we had a gimbaled camera like oh this is just like a video game camera we need to make this before anybody else does you know so boom go out there do something new nobody's ever seen it before blows up of course we're in la which is where GTA, you know, it's so serendipitous, right?

17:19It all just comes together and then we make it, it blows up. And then like a bunch of other channels come out where people just take a gimbaled camera, stick it behind themselves. And then just a life in GTA and just week after week after week, they just make those videos, which to me actually sounds a little bit like torture, you know, the plight of an artist. Yeah. Because an artist goes like, that was cool. I just kind of made something new. Like Colin said, like I scratched that itch. I'm good. Now where, where can I make something new again? Right. And that's like at odds with how YouTube works.

17:46Right. That's the opposite of a format. Our format is we come up with a new format every day.

17:57So needless to say, at a certain point, our main channel, Corridor Digital at the time, I guess, which is no longer really our main channel, even though it has more subscribers. Our format was effectively take something new or take something familiar, do a novel twist to it kind of visually and cinematically and release it, which is not to say that's not, that's not very much of a format. So like we're kind of reinventing viral videos every single time we'd make a video. And we did it enough that we felt like we kind of, you know, we had a 50, 50 chance of every video of doing it. It was never guaranteed, but like we didn't feel like we were shooting in the dark every time at a certain point.

18:33It was like, it's like, yeah, this is going to be a good video. This one's going to get some views. This one's going to be viral. Like you kind of knew. And like, we're doing it consistently enough where we kind of felt like we could just perform when we needed to perform. and that was kind of how our business format worked and then after kind of like the era of game streaming kind of started on youtube you know after that came the the vine collapse and all the viners came over to youtube and vlogging became a thing on youtube and we held out for a while and then once again i give credit to our my partner jake he's like we need to start doing something like every other day doesn't matter it doesn't matter how long it is doesn't matter how good it is we just need to start doing it and we're like i don't know man everything we do is so high like high effort he's like just put it on the second channel which at the time the sam and nico channel just put it there it doesn't matter it's like the channel gets that many views anyways like okay fine and like and that was the whole like foray into it we're gonna make vlogs we're not gonna care about how long they are we're gonna make them good of course we're gonna apply all of our tricks of like movie storytelling to the vlogs but if i only have time to make a 30 second vlog then that's all that comes out like all that matters that it gets done make it as good as you can but just get it done and make sure it's short enough that it can be good like don't put out junk make it good so we started doing that every other day just putting out vlogs and we did that for like a year and i remember you know starting off it's like 14 000 views 15 000 views 20 000 views 28 000 views 60 000 views in one day what that's crazy and i remember like uh car michael's like when can i get a new camera this one's old not pretty good for vlogs i was like when you get two videos to get 100 000 views in a row we'll get a new camera and it took a while and eventually had two videos get 100 000 views in a row which was kind of an anomaly it was another long time before i had another 200 000 views in a row but he got his new camera and that just got us into this mindset of like just make stuff just make stuff just make it fast just get it out there you can still do the high effort stuff on corridor digital the youtube channel but on the you know eventually named it corridor crew because it's about us in the office.

20:31It's just makes up, just get it out there. And then that started to change. It was like, okay, this is working. We're building an audience. We can see what they like and we can see what they don't like. We can see what they like us doing. We can see what they don't like us doing. Now it's time to start putting effort into this. Everything else we do is high effort. Now it's time to start making this high effort. So we started getting a little more like refined. We started writing the videos. We started putting goals into them as an artist where maybe making a video essay. I remember I did a video essay about how, you know, when people would post things to Reddit, they would just post video clips, gifts, et cetera, zero credit to people and, you know, get a million views and that'd be that.

21:03And I was really feeling this like loss of like, you know, as an artist, like the best thing you can have is for somebody to watch your work. And it's cool if they're watching it on a site like Reddit, but they never know who made it and they never go and watch more of your stuff. So I made a whole video essay about basically stealing content on Reddit, but with this kind of like uplifting educational tone of like if you want to support an artist once you see a clip make sure there's a source posted or ask for a source and if you really liked it the greatest compliment you give to that person is to go to their page wherever it may be and look at a few other other of their things and that's it if you look at somebody else's artwork after seeing one of the pieces that's the greatest compliment you can give them and like that changed a little bit like the culture you know a little bit changed the culture on reddit and sources became more prevalent and things like that but that was like kind of what that channel became is these pointed videos that had goals and they're still quick and they you know weren't like the huge high effort cinematic pieces that was on quarter digital but in that process was this idea of carmichael's idea once again actually it's nick and carmichael were like hey what if we did like a like a gq style or wired style like kind of reacting with you guys the sonic trailer just dropped everybody's talking about you know how bad it is why don't we get you guys to sit down and actually take like put a critical eye on it as vfx artists and so okay we said we did and just didn't do that we also did uh detective pikachu and a few other clips kind of talked about why they were good and we compared and contrasted and it was just a regular sam and nico video like every other one but when that one came out just blew up and it was one of those things like it has sonic the hedgehog in the thumbnail like at the height of like the sonic drama and it's got pokemon in the thumbnail you It was the perfect storm of a popular experience with a new perspective from only a certain kind of person who can give that new perspective.

22:47And that blew up. We're like, that's crazy. And we'd already had other vlogs blow up once in a while. We put a camera on the end of an arrow and that got like 15 million views or something like that. I mean, that sounds really cool. It was really cool. It led to a whole series of putting GoPros on things. um but after one week passed i was like we need to do the exact same thing one more time exact same name exact same thumbnail format exact same idea just let's do the exact same thing one more time i know we never do it but in this case let's find some more visual effects clips to talk about and i think i can't remember what the second one was might have been the superman mustache or something like that it was like some other famous vfx gaffe and i remember that one going up and I was on my way to play a nerf game out in the desert.

23:34I was in the car, you know, it's like a two and a half hour drive and I'm looking at the YouTube analytics. I'm like 80 ,000 views in an hour is insane. I got 80 ,000 views in an hour and it's not going down. I'm getting 80 ,000 views the next hour and the next hour and the next hour. It was just this giant mess. Like there's the views we get on a video in one hour that would take us a week. Right. I was like, okay, the second one performed just as well as the first one. Don't change anything. Make it again. And that was, that was the hardest thing. is like really emphasize don't change anything because people are naturally like well let's do this let's try this like no do it exactly the same we never do it do it exactly the same and naturally things do evolve no matter what you can't help it um and for the better but that like the goal there was just like do the exact same thing again and see what happens and so i did it for a third week and performed exactly the same as the first two and it was like okay we are never going to miss a saturday we're going to do this as long as we can until the numbers fall off and here we are six years later numbers haven't really fallen off so we're gonna keep doing it and it hasn't changed that much like if you watch the first one there are so many core elements is the couch the same so we still have we have two couches the one we used at the beginning was this tiny two-person couch with a third person like wedged in the middle so we don't use that couch anymore yeah we have the sister couch is the long couch but it's been the same couch the whole time sense but even like the cutting to the tight angles like so much of it is so similar yeah why did you have a hunch then that this was something you needed to repeat again and again and again is this what was happening on youtube and you were just hearing it seeing it okay we need to start is this six years ago it sounds like also performance six years ago yeah yeah like it performed but but it's a mindset shift sure like it was yeah it was prioritizing performance a lot of it's just driven by experimentation it's like oh people like this one like because you know we have a lot of videos that perform well and you make a second one they don't perform well so it's like let's just see what happens if we do this a second time oh perform well let's see what happens we do it again weird it's still performing well um let's do this until it breaks you know there's a little bit of that mentality there's a little bit just the business sense which is like oh this is really good for the business we need to keep doing this it's also like really fun you know it's it's it's me sitting down and trying to impress my friends with vfx clips at its core and them doing the same to me and it's kind of a podcast from there and then all gets edited down and refined etc etc until you have the show um but it's just really enjoyable to do and something i would just naturally want to do and we already kind of naturally did all the time with each other um and so it also doesn't hasn't changed that much because at its core it's still that and that's what drives it but uh yeah it was just it was one of those things where i knew like if we could get like a million views a week off of a show that really puts us into the operational ends of youtube it makes things really consistent it makes things good for getting brand integrations it makes things good for our channel's notoriety it's it's a positive all around so let's keep doing it until it breaks also we all really like doing it also it only takes like a half day to a day of our time and then we can still have the whole rest of the week to do other things so it's like this perfect perfect thing um and that's that's kind of what drove it and drove us to start doing it after we had those first few successes and then since then like it's definitely undergone subtle uh evolutions and little things that we're trying to change you know we've found that having guests is amazing but makes the episodes underperform a little bit but at the same time it brings legitimacy to the show so it's like this balance it's like we need a guest once every like three to four weeks to five weeks to come in and we love having guests and it's awesome but it's also like if we want the show to get more views then it's just us that's interesting i love seeing seth rogan in the chat for me it was just like oh my gosh like yeah like seth rogan this guy that everybody knows out knows my world he reached out he reached out yeah he was just like hey i'm a big fan of the show and i'm like and then like i realized like i said wow that's amazing that's so cool and you know whatever and like half the day passes like i need to ask him to be on the show that's probably why he's talking to me i follow up with another message like a few hours pass and he doesn't reply and then he's like yeah dude if you didn't ask me i was going to try to invite myself that's so cool yeah but yeah he he's like the same reaction that you have of like, oh my gosh, he's a fan is the same reaction.

27:47Kind of, I had seeing him like, oh my gosh, he's a fan like me. Yeah. It's so cool. Like it validates and connects the world. Yeah. It's a little scary now because there's a lot of like people that I really admire in the world of film that are fans of the show. It's like, also how much do you maybe shift and prioritize and bring them onto the show versus keeping the show, what it is at its core. Not to mention how rough do you get on their clips? You know, how sassy you get when breaking down vfx so i i do want to take a step back because you just kind of gave us the story of how this came together i think there's actually so many lessons in how it came together i i think the two biggest ones that stick out to me is like creative safety well that's one but it has two reasons that that you guys at least i perceive you felt creatively safe one is it was on a second channel and typically creators i'm speaking from from my own experience, I feel way safer on a second channel than I do on the main channel.

28:44You got nothing to lose. You said it doesn't get that many views anyway. Yeah. It doesn't matter. And the other one is repetition and the framework that you're going to upload something no matter what. The safety of going, it doesn't matter how it does. We're just going to do it. Like the goal is not a million views. The goal is publishing. Right. And I think those two things combined is the only path to getting to a successful format is experimenting in a creatively safe container until you find it. Until you find it. And main channels are never creatively safe containers. They just aren't. They're terrifying.

29:20Yeah. Their stakes are so high, you mess up twice in a row and like your business might be gone. Or at least that's what you think in your head. Yeah. And so I think that's like two things that I pull from that. It's like, okay, if you're trying to find your format, like A, you need to be creating a lot because you have to, when you're in that, when that muscle is going of like, I need an idea, I need to make something, I need to press publish, you just have better, you have better ideas, you know, and you're just in the flow. And then the other space is like when the stakes are low, you're going to find something.

29:52Yeah. So those are two things that feel important about it. And you need to be able to try things because there are so many blind spots out there in terms of like creative opportunities, things that right now it feels like YouTube saturated, right? There's so many people making stuff, but it's not saturated at all. It's so easy to break out on YouTube. It's always been easy to break out on YouTube as long as you can find that blind spot, the thing that no one else is doing yet, which they exist all over the place. And it's easy to forget about that when you're looking at all the trends, like, oh, I need to do this.

30:23And this is what's popular right now. It's like, nah, ignore all that. Just try things until something pops and it won't take that long. You know, assuming that you're like a competent, like filmmaker, you know, make sure your shots are in focus, et cetera, first. But like, you know, once you're actually making stuff and it's like it's not boring to watch, it doesn't take long if you're being experimental and trying things until something pops. And then try to be like, why did it pop? And try to like, you know, hone into it and then do it again. And you might not hit it right the first time, but eventually you'll kind of find like, oh, people like it when I do this thing.

30:52And then like, you know, and then eventually like, let me take a total 180 and now search in the dark until something pops again. And like little by little they do. And then you start to inform yourself more and more like what, what works. And, uh, actually after your guys' podcast with, uh, Jack Conte, super inspired. I hit him up. We had lunch together. Oh no, nice. We were talking about stuff. And, uh, you know what we were talking about the whole blind spot thing, which is to say that, cause he was talking about breaking on YouTube and how challenging it is. And there's so many creative ideas, just so many creative ideas that are just not touched, especially by people.

31:22who don't realize they have a unique perspective um that yeah i i still think it's it's not easy to break out but it's not any harder than it has been i think it's about the same it's easy to get discouraged on that and tell yourself that it won't happen but no just just go and experiment i think one issue is creators spend too little time evaluating their own perspective like what you talked about you you said as one of the core tenants of youtube is like who who are you and what do you bring to the table? And I think sometimes, you know, as we're talking about this mix of things that work, it's like, find something familiar, but put your own twist on it.

31:57I think a lot of people are just going, find something familiar. Right. Stop and stopping there and stopping there and going what you guys do really well is like only you guys can be sitting in those on that couch. Yeah. There's not a lot of visual effects artists that also have like years of vlogging experience and friendship and friendship. You guys can give each other shit, which is like, and you can, you can laugh with each other. You know, what's going to make each other you know react in certain ways and so i think friendship and chemistry is a unique perspective and we're not employed and yeah this is actually important because then we can say whatever we want about the movies we're talking about that's true yeah i think it gets harder though for aspiring young creators because again they see something they copy it but they don't have that perspective also because they're young yeah right like some of the the best youtube creators and some of the ones that have been around for the longest are great because they had a whole life before they started uploading or they were living this whole life as they were trying to upload right like you are a vfx yeah i had over 10 years of like i would imagine vfx before we even started probably a ton of channels and creators who only wanted to become vfx artists and vfx reaction critiquers because they watched your series right and that's a totally different lens and starting point in terms of perspective.

33:14It is, but you got to start somewhere. Totally. I mean, we started out on YouTube definitely just trying to like copy and paste, copy and paste, put a little bit of perspective, but it wasn't enough. What was your guys' inflection point? Not to just boil it down to one moment. No, no, no. I'd be curious to see if we have the same inflection point. So creative inflection point or just general inflection point? I guess you guys felt like you reached an audience that had a sizable number and you could do it again. Yeah. Ooh, you could do it again. That's... Yeah, that's always been hard for us. But I would say like when we brought this show to YouTube because we were podcasting since 2018.

33:55And what I realized was that no matter what, on our hardest weeks, because we were essentially podcasting, trying to make YouTube videos here and there, but freelancing. And that's how we were making our money. And it wasn't much money, but that's how we were getting by. but even in our hardest weeks when we had tons of like big projects or even when we were editing a doc for NBC, it's just like really grueling. We can still get a podcast out. And so, but our YouTube format at the time were really intricate video essays. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we would place bets on a topic that we thought was interesting, go really hard at the edit and put it out.

34:34And if it didn't do well, it was kind of devastating because you had to start up right again. And you're like, Ooh, I'm not sure I can do that again. Yeah. at a reasonable pace it also makes you wonder like how much am i in this for the views oh yeah underperforms like i don't want to do again it's like was i just doing it for the views yeah yeah yeah so i think two things happened right as 2020 hit one is we got this big deal with samsung that it gave us enough money to basically not do freelance projects nice so now it was like oh okay our our channel and the column consumer brand is our only thing we do it's amazing and then the other thing was bringing the pot like filming the podcast and making that the format on youtube because that was the thing where we realized oh wait we could we can do this next week and actually kind of early on that filming and podcasting too huh we were pretty early and we brought it to the second channel first yeah so we had a channel called the colin and samir podcast is that called samir and colin that is called samir and colin yeah it is that's the samir and colin channel oh yeah we actually have a samir and colin channel yeah yeah so we brought to the second channel first we're struggling to get anything out on the main channel and we're turning these episodes around in a day for the second channel and they're getting 30 40 000 views we're like man we spent two weeks on the last video essay and it's sitting at 12 000 views so you guys are learning the hard truth that time and money does not have any correlation right yep yeah that's a hard truth that's a hard truth and sometimes actually effort does not have a correlation yeah a lot of times effort doesn't have a correlation that's a weird thing but but but you have to evaluate where the effort goes.

36:03Because for me, it was like effort in production and post is what I thought correlated to viewership. But actually it's like effort in pre-production, format creation. Excitement and interest was actually what mattered the most and how quickly we could get something out because we were maintaining our excitement and interest about the topic. Whereas with the video essays, after a week and a half, when you're deep in the edit, I'm just like, I don't even care. I don't even know. Do I even like this thing anymore? This is so hard. Yeah. And the extra polished graphics, the extra polished sound, is that really going to make somebody like share this with their friends more than they would previously?

36:37I think Rhett and Link, I bring them up a lot because I think that they talk a lot about when we sat down with them, they talk a lot about cracking the format of Good Mythical Morning. And one of the main criterias of it was essentially producing it as if it was a live show so that there was no, not as much post. Right. Like the post is kind of like these graphic transitions here and there, but it's like, they were like, let's film something that it's entertaining to watch live. And if we can do that, then we can turn around the episode. Right. Because it's like, doesn't post is a very heavy thing that can get you into places where you're like two weeks in and you're like, I don't, I hate this video.

37:14I hate it. You know? And so, and then you're like, I don't want to do it again. Yeah. And so I think even with VFX artists react, I imagine like, that's largely what the experience would be like if I was sitting in the room. yeah oh yeah it's a similar concept it'd be we'd seem less smart because there's an hour two hour three hours worth of us talking sure just 15 minutes of it in the final version but even with this right like if you were sitting in this room this is what this experience is like yeah like so i think that is an that is a if you can find something like that it's really great but then it's at odds with you as a filmmaker sometimes right if you got into this as wanting to be a filmmaker it can be at odds right because you're like wait hold on where do i where do i do that thing yeah so i think having an outlet for that thing is also really important but also the filmmaker background's a little bit of a superpower when it comes to doing things on cameras with certain sound you know even if you're doing real-time stuff like a vlog or a podcast it's just like you know that like if i needed to make this interesting i could like yeah if i need to get a little crazy you know yeah robot bust through that wall at any point i could we could that's your unique yeah yeah yeah i mean not not everybody but vfx aside like there's things that you learn from filmmaking from like how do you make somebody care about a character how to make somebody care about your story that applies to everything you know whether it's a vlog or not because to the person watching this on the other side of the camera it's kind of all the same we're all characters you know speaking lines of dialogue oh let's talk about that because i know we we chatted yesterday before uh doing this about the first principles of youtube and i'm just curious if this is kind of like you maybe did zoom out even further of like the first principles of storytelling and entertainment yeah i mean there's definitely like things that are good to do for youtube specifically but i think people get really caught up in the platforms like no no no it's not the first principles of youtube it's not even the first principles of filmmaking it's the first principles of being interesting you know telling somebody a story around a campfire can you do that and can you make your story worth listening to if you can do that then we're on a good start but if you can't do that then like don't go and shoot it you know so and that's the thing we talk about like you know wow we've shot it so many times yeah we've all got it we can make it interesting in post yeah yeah make it interesting in post was yeah definitely my move yeah but that was like when we were writing stuff and we're writing like fictional pieces and we still do like the first step and be like all right i'm sitting on the couch pretend there's a campfire here tell me the story and like if you can't and it's not interesting like and you can immediately feel when you're talking telling the story like and then this happens and nobody's interested okay i gotta fix that you know it's like you know immediately when something's not working but like if you can make that interesting everything else will be fine you know you're acting shooting etc like you said there's no correlation between time and effort and money spent and views it's because all that really matters is can you sit down around the campfire and tell an interesting story and if you can at least shooting with a gopro is a step up now somebody else can hear it right oh now you got some lighting and a microphone now it's a little bit better oh you got some actors you got some cinematography like you know it just gets better from there but if the campfire story is already good enough like you're starting from where you need to start from which is to say a good foundation so all these like you know kind of fundamentals of youtube really boil down to the fundamentals of filmmaking which really boil down to the fundamentals of showmanship and just getting an audience to be interested and care about what you're doing.

40:36And that's where like a lot of my mindset sits because people get really caught up in all like the surface level details. It's like we're worried about like the new little layer of snow on top of all the ice. It's like, worry about the ice. You know, the snow is important. You step on the snow, but worry about the ice too. That's all underneath that snow. And so, you know, it's things like make sure you have a story arc, make sure you have clear motivations for things make sure you're not being boring make sure your editing is like not wasting people's time make sure you're hooking the audience in the very beginning i mean in terms of fishing metaphors you know your thumbnail is your bait it's your clickbait right and they take a nibble they click on it or they hover and they watch it's just like the fish coming up and nibbling you got to set the hook right you got to get them to stay so how do you do that like within the first 15 seconds seconds of the video it's like you need to deliver something that's so interesting and in a certain way you need to deliver it for a person to be like, okay, I'm going to watch the next 15 minutes.

41:32And you need to constantly kind of like be resetting that hook throughout the video, but you need to figure out how do you make that happen? How do you trigger somebody psychologically? Be like, okay, yeah, I'm interested. I actually care. And the same thing, like the same question can be asked multiple ways and it might be completely flat one way and completely engaging another way, even though it's the exact same topic. How do you put that into practice for VFX reacts? Is there a specific intro or lines that are fresh in your head that exemplify that like first 15 seconds the the easiest way to put into practice for vfx artist react is to start the episode like this hi welcome back to vfx artist react roll the clip that's how you get into it vfx artist react why are they there to watch the clips to watch us react to it so anything else that's not that is just pain right get it out of there and just get to the stuff that you want to watch and you know people like to sit there like well you know hi guys what's up my name is like that's all self-indulgent BS, right?

42:24Just the audience doesn't care. I think what you do, what you guys do though, is you pick clips selectively that do open up some sort of curiosity. I've seen a lot of intros where play the clip, you see the clip and then it'll cut to you and you'll be like, I'm not sure I understand that one. That's all natural. That's not planned. Yeah. Definitely cold open. Exactly. The cold open. And that's taking a page from the world of cable television, which is by the way, like TV has the masters, like people on YouTube, they think they're fast. They think they're good. They think they can do a lot with a little, I was like, no, the world of TV, that's where the masters are.