By Matthew Lowe
If you happen to be over a certain age, Rooster Teeth may not mean anything to you at all. If you’re under twenty-one, it’s another story entirely. Rooster Teeth Productions – a web based company co-run by Burnie Burns, Geoff Ramsey, Gus Sorola, Joel Heyman and Lazer Team director Matt Hullum – are part of the millennial YouTube zeitgeist.
For the last thirteen years, they have authored a massively popular website titled Red vs. Blue, among other endeavours. The premise of that series is to take game environments and narrate the lulls with acerbic character voiceovers.
Their multi-channel YouTube page counts over 8.4 million subscribers, and their collective views stand at over 4.1 billion.
While it is small wonder that they chose to capitalise on their mammoth online success by making a feature film, the way in which they went about it was anything but traditional. Using the crowd-funding website Indiegogo, they raised over $2.4 million in donated funding within a month.
“I think what we kept saying to each other when it was happening is that it’s shocking but not surprising,” says Hullum about the influx of public finance. “It was such a crazy amount of money to come out of a community that you couldn’t possibly expect it, right? At the same time our community has always stepped up to do really great things and especially if we told them we want to cut something bigger and more ambitious, that’s when they usually get the most excited. And when we went out there and told everybody that we were doing it, they just stepped up to the plate like you wouldn’t believe.”
For Hullum, the shift to feature film had been a long time coming. Graduating in the mid 1990s with a Bachelor of Science in Film from the University of Texas, he made a low-budget indie film with his partner Burns before moving to Hollywood where he worked as a visual effects supervisor on films such as The Faculty and Driven before Rooster Teeth took off and claimed his priorities. Even then, he recalls, the idea for Lazer Team has been kicking around for at least the last five years.
“We used to have these kind of like pitch writing sessions,” he recalls. “There was one day in particular probably like four or five years ago when we were just sitting around talking about how all superhero movies seem to be the same, no matter what the mistakes are or what the weapons are you pretty much know at the end of it they’re going to be great, they’re going to be some kind of likeable person. And we thought wouldn’t it be fun if you really didn’t know your guys were going to win and they were a little bit harder to like; if there were real stakes to it. It was spawned out of that.
“One of the things we’ve always enjoyed in terms of the kind of content we make is looking at familiar tropes or familiar areas that we see all the time,” he continues. “Like how can we give a fresh spin on it, how can we have a different angle, or not taking certain things for granted that we normally take for granted in these types of stories.”
The biggest difference, says Hullum, between Rooster Teeth’s web series’ and their big screen adventure is that “we have enough money to play with to blow stuff up. The jokes, the comedy, the aesthetics of Lazer Team are very similar to Red Vs Blue and very much in keeping with our style of humour and our style of storytelling.”
Lazer Team is about four ordinary losers who find themselves burdened with the discovery of alien technology and are obliged to work with each other to save humanity – even if they don’t particularly like each other. Lazer Team, says Hullum, should not be taken as a parody movie.
He explains: “One of the biggest inspirations for us was the movie Ghostbusters, which is one of our favourite movies, and I don’t think anyone sees Ghostbusters as a parody of a horror movie, or a parody of a paranormal movie, right? Just in the way Lazer Team is not a parody of a sci-fi movie or a parody of a superhero movie. It is a wholly new story with new characters and developments, and certainly we’ve referenced a lot of other video games and other media that we like, but we’re not parodying something else, not like Spaceballs parodied Star Wars. It’s a completely new concept that stands on its own. It’s action, it’s sci-fi, it’s comedy, and hopefully all of those elements work.”
Maybe because Hullum is so assured of the originality that is Lazer Team’s intent, he and his cohorts were taken aback mid 2015 when another Ghostbusters inspired ode to ‘80s adventures and video games hit theatre screens. It was called Pixels.
“I didn’t know anything about Pixels!” says Hullum. “We didn’t know that movie was coming out, we didn’t know anything about it. And then when it came out we were looking at it thinking, this is kind of weird! Obviously it has some surface level elements that are kind of similar. But everyone who’s seen Lazer Team has said ‘Oh my God, I’m so glad it didn’t turn out to be like Pixels.’”
Later this week, the premiere of Lazer Team will take place on the eve of RTX Australia, in Sydney. Ask simply why the premiere is taking place in Australia and you get a simple answer: we paid for it! Well, a lot of it anyway.
“Australia’s always been a critically supportive country, and the people here have always just been so welcoming and receptive to what we’ve been doing, really since we began. We told everybody when we started the Indiegogo campaign that whatever country that led, that contributed the most money to the campaign, that we would hold the special premiere in that country. It was no surprise to me that Australia stepped up and that they contributed the most.”
Lazer Team premieres at Event Cinemas George Street at 6pm on Friday, January 22. You can also request a screening of Lazer Team at your local cinema through TUGG.
