We appreciate everyone who enjoyed GOT Rewind last year however we are no longer making it.
GOT Rewind was an experiment to make a quick topical show. The experiment was a failure. We are no longer doing it. We are only canceling GOT Rewind and do plan to continue making other Game of THrones videos in the future.
We did try to get GOT Rewind moved to another outlet. Over the winter we asked three other companies who produce content for You Tube if they would be interested in producing GOT rewind on their own channel with CBG19 coming in as a host and them taking care of the production (filming, directing, editing, and release). All of them turned us down.
Our channel has done a lot of growing over the last 12 months and we have many practical reasons to no longer produce the GOT Rewind show on our own, however we are not ditching GOT entirely and plan to produce 2-3 GOT related videos during the GOT "season".
1. Limited Resources: Due to our limited resources last year we were never able to get the episodes out soon enough to satisfy our audience's demands. Other channels have an advantage with live production equipment, switch boards, dedicated camera crews and editors, and they always beat us to the punch with recaps the day of or the day after. Also, there are now dozens of channels doing GOT recap shows making ours not only late but redundant. At one point we requested HBO to give us press screeners, as other media outlets do, but HBO does not consider Youtubers to meet press requirements. We are still a small time operation of only two people with occasional interns, paid production assistants, and part time editors when we can afford them.
2. We have a major GOT troll infestation. For some reason there are thousands of individuals who find pleasure in attempting to spoil major events from the books that have not yet happened in the show. Everyone knows YouTube has a flawed comments board and most channels don't have the resources to police individual comments like they do on proper forums. To combat this, last season we ended up having to turn off comments completely. Moving forward, we don't want to have to turn off comments and we don't want that kind of negativity on our comments section.
3. The Show is becoming radically different from book. Game of Thrones is an unusual show, as it is based on a book series that is not yet finished yet and the show version has now mostly caught up with the books. Season 1 and 2 were great because they followed the book closely. However, by Season 4 they began diverting from the books and season 5 is expected to start going in its own direction entirely, making up new plots and eventually (potentially) spoiling the ending of the books before GRRM has a chance to publish them. The show may last to 7 seasons but some are saying HBO wants 10 seasons. Because of this, anything could happen; and because of this, my expertise as a book reader will become useless. Some book readers are even stopping watching the show so that they don't spoil the eventual book version. I want to be clear, I love Game of Thrones. I definitely appreciate the amazing hard work the producers of GOT and HBO have done. It is incredible to have a show on this level and it has helped change the landscape of TV. However, we need to come to terms with the fact that this is a dangerous and scary undertaking in diverting from the book so much. They are going to just start making stuff up. It could be great, but I think the brilliance of Game of Thrones shows success is still 80% George RR Martin, and 20% HBO. Without George's 80%....well, I wish them luck.
4. I don't talk about subjects just because they are popular. When I first started talking about Game of Thrones, it was new and nobody was really talking about it yet. I was excited to help share something amazing with people new to the series. Our first Game of Thrones video had very few views. Then something weird happened after season 2. Game of Thrones became super popular! Our Game of Thrones video took a sharp curve upwards in view counts. Here is where things get tricky. “A Trend is always a Trap”. These are the wise words of George Lois, from his fantastic book “Damn Good Advice for Artists”. Covering subjects only because they are popular can help you become popular too but definitely has it's downside. You can get trapped as an artist into a corner, and people end up only knowing you as the person who only does this one thing. We have very big plans for the future, making TV shows, movies, comic books, becoming astronauts, who knows! The world is so eagar to want to label people and stick them in a box they can't get out of. Being labeled as a Game of Thrones channel is not the direction we want to go. Edward Norton seems to have felt similar when he turned down playing the Hulk in the Avengers. Some people said he was crazy and making a huge mistake but I completely understand his statement. “I think you can sort of do anything once, but if you do it too many times, it can become a suit that’s hard to take off, in other peoples’ eyes. And if I had continued on with it, I wouldn’t have made Moonrise Kingdom, or Grand Budapest, or Birdman, because those all overlapped with [Avengers]. And those were more the priority for me, but I continue to be a fan and I’m really, really happy I got to do it once.”
5. Bigger Projects take precedence. I love Game of Thrones and if you have watched my videos you can tell I am very passionate about it. However, Game of Thrones is NOT my favorite subject. There are lots of other topics I am just as if not more passionate about. We have major up coming projects we are working on that will show a new level of work people have not seen before from us. Those projects are currently taking up nearly 100% of our energy to produce. We want to always be getting better as artists and people: growing, changing, and learning new things. We are currently working on a documentary series on the X-Men for Vimeo. This is the largest project we have ever done to date on the fastest time table we have ever taken on. As to be expected when producing multiple documentaries, the amount of videos on our YouTube channel will go down. We will still be putting out YouTube videos as frequently as we possible can in between Vimeo releases. And we will still be making Game of Thrones centered episodes. All in all, we are cranking out more higher quality content then ever, its just that we are not turning into a Game of Thrones only channel for 2 months. We are very excited about what we are creating in 2015 and can't wait to share it with you!
