The Man Who Makes It All Happen - Production Blog

It's time to learn about the person who prevents my chaos from destroying the team - Michael

Hi. I'm Matt, producer for Bellular and Coffee Box Games. A nebulous term, producer. Even I'm not entirely sure what it means, as it has wildly varying meanings in every industry. A film producer is different to a music producer, and a game producer is another beast still - and better than that, it depends on who you ask and who you work for. To get the point across quickly, I attempt (and often fail) to provide a backbone to the organisation. My main role is to keep everyone on track. I'm responsible for ensuring everyone is working on the most important thing they can, including Michael, although we decide on what that is in unison and reevaluate it regularly. Our schedule on the YouTube end is highly flexible, but I attempt to keep it as workable as possible, knowing our rate of output and avoiding bottlenecks - like any Just-In-Time production, really. As for Coffee Box, I communicate with the team to figure out what we can and can't accomplish. That is, ensuring we reach the goal of getting the game out according to time and budget. They can handle making the best game they can, I just have to make sure they finish it.

For a basic example as to how production works for us here, specifically for the 'breaking news': One of us, through our many avenues of finding news, will catch something that we think has potential to make a quality video. We'll discuss it for a few minutes, going over all the facts we can find, figuring out what interesting story we can tell about it. Then Michael will do any additional required research, write the script, record it next door in the set, and pass it off to whoever is free for editing. This can basically happen any time, day or night.

If it won't make a good report but is still worth talking about for a minute, we throw it into the roundup queue. We have a broad range of knowledge and interest as gamers, so there's not much of note that happens that gets past us. We're also constantly bouncing ideas for deep dives and other videos we can do. This applies to the Warcraft side, too, as I've been an on and off raider and lore enthusiast for years.

As someone who has a decent understanding of various elements of tech, I manage equipment, networking, security and generally keep inventory of the office. When we were planning our 10Gb/s editing workflow I was excited at the prospect of getting to play with the network side of things, so there's more than enough enjoyment of the work. Aside from that, I keep on top of everything no one else has time to do, or rather, I do whatever I can to ensure everyone can give their best. Given we're only a handful of people, that doesn't fill my schedule entirely, so I assist with editing, research and writing where necessary. I'm no expert at any of these things, but I think I'm learning from everyone, and it's a fantastic experience.

If you have any questions, or if you want to know more about any aspect of production, let me know below.