YouTube Millionaires: The Warp Zone Is “The Perfect Combination” For Its Team

By 05/21/2015
YouTube Millionaires: The Warp Zone Is “The Perfect Combination” For Its Team

Welcome to YouTube Millionaires, where we profile channels that have recently crossed the one million subscriber mark. There are channels crossing this threshold every week, and each has a story to tell about YouTube success. Read previous installments of YouTube Millionaires here.

For five friends who love video games and know how to sing, YouTube has proven to be the perfect outlet. Since 2010, The Warp Zone has provided a steady stream of entertainment by delivering a cappella renditions of famous themes and putting pop culture twists on Top 40 songs. Now, The Warp Zone has more than one million subscribers to show for its efforts, and we helped the channel’s creative team celebrate by asking them a few questions about their work:

Tubefilter: How does it feel to reach one million subscribers? What do you have to say to your fans?

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Warp Zone: It feels awesome! It’s taken us nearly 5 years of consistent uploading to get here so it feels like a huge milestone and kind of makes us look back on the incredible journey it’s taken us to get here. A lot of fans, friends, and family have been sending us their congrats so it’s felt very special. It also happened on Davis’ birthday, which made it even better!

To the fans, we’d like to say “THANK YOU,” to everyone old and new who has subscribed to the channel. We read all of your comments, positive and negative haha 😉

TF: How did your YouTube channel first come together?

WZ: The 5 of us: Michael Davis, Brian Fisher, David Odom, Michael Schroeder, and Ryan Tellez started making YouTube videos together in college as part of a film club at Santa Clara University. After graduating, we all wanted to continue pursuing filmmaking together, and made a pact to move to Los Angeles. Upon moving to LA in September 2010, we started The Warp Zone YouTube channel and partnered with Maker Studios, where we also worked as production employees. We worked at Maker for 3 years until going full time on TWZ during the summer of 2013. We’ve since joined Defy Media, who has had a huge impact on our growth over the past year and a half.

The Warp Zone as a concept came from a bond that we all shared in college over playing video games and making videos together. Several of our most popular sketches in college were focused around gaming. We also all enjoyed watching superhero movies together and still attend midnight showings as a group to this day. A few of us were even in a band together. So, a nerdy sketch comedy and music channel seemed like the perfect combination of all our interests and talents.

Another fun fact, Odom and Fish were high school friends, as were Schroeder and Davis. Ryan is the glue that holds us all together.

TF: For your music videos, what does your creative process look like? How long does it take to create one of those videos?

WZ: There are a few different ways that we get inspired to make music videos. We hang out and joke around with each other a lot, so sometimes an idea will come up just out of conversation. And then the critical part will be if one of us writes it down so we remember it. Sometimes, we totally forget and those nuggets are unfortunately lost from the internet forever, never to see the light of a computer screen, phone, or tablet. Other times, we’ll have a brainstorm session where we talk about different games, tv shows, and movies we’re currently watching and see what we can poke fun at or match with a popular song. And honestly, sometimes it just comes from a fun play on the original title. Examples include “Steal My Kill,” “One Ring,” and “One More Fight.” There have been several instances where someone just comes up with a title, and then everything else developed from there, haha!

It normally takes us about a month to produce a music video from concept to upload, depending on how many Red Bulls Ryan consumes during music production.

TF: On a similar note, how do you choose your song subjects, and do your fans play any role in that process?

WZ: We covered this a bit in the previous question, but we also try to be timely with uploading videos around the same time as a popular game, TV, or movie release. A great recent example would be our “Mortal Kombat A Cappella” video which we uploaded a week after Mortal Kombat X came out. That video resonated very well with our fans, who were excited about the new game.

Also, though we don’t typically consider requests for our major music videos, we do look at comments when deciding what a cappella to do next. So while we don’t explicitly ask fans for suggestions, we do pay attention to what people are requesting in the comments.

TF: Do you guys have a favorite video you’ve made?

WZ: The most special video to all of us is probably our “Halo 4 – Glad You Came” music video. This video was the first sponsored project that we made and we really put our all into it. We rented a cabin up in Big Bear for the weekend, got a big boy film permit for the location, and shot into the wee hours of a freezing cold night, leaving our cinematographer with a bad case of bronchitis. He’s dead now…just kidding, he’s fine.

While the video is comedic, there’s also a lot of heart to it, and it actually makes us feel kind of sad and nostalgic at the end. We all really like the Halo franchise and were genuinely excited for Master Chief’s return in Halo 4. We feel like that probably comes across in the video and led us to making something that is very sincere, which seems to have resonated with the fans. To date, it is our most viewed video with 8.2 million views. We’re all very proud that this is our most popular video!

TF: Have there been any video ideas you’ve had that you have deemed unfeasible?

WZ: Plenty! We have tons of ideas we would have loved to do, but couldn’t for a variety of reasons like budget limitations, or the subject matter being too racy, or no one but Schroeder wanting to do a shot-for-shot remake of Newsies. Most of the time, though, it comes down to not having enough time in the day to do everything, and therefore needing to prioritize certain ideas over other, less topical ones.

TF: What has been your favorite aspect of your collaborations with other YouTube channels?

WZ: We have a couple favorite aspects of collaborations. The first is that we’ve been able to work with super awesome people with talents and skillsets we might not otherwise have access to, such as acting, music production, vfx experience, etc. And by working with them, we’ve been able to produce videos that are of a higher quality than we would normally be able to make on our own.

Another aspect that was unexpected when we started, is that we’ve become very close friends with many of the people with whom we have collaborated. People like the Smosh and Smosh Games guys, TJ Smith, Jesse Cox, The Completionist, Rosanna Pansino, Husky Starcraft, Katie Wilson, and many more. It’s something we didn’t see coming but are very grateful for and honestly, without the support of these people, we would have never hit a million subs.

TF: Ever think about taking your act on tour?

WZ: We’ve actually played live a couple times. Once was on What’s Trending, and once was at The Escapist Expo in Durham, North Carolina. Both times we played our song “One Ring,” which is probably the song that best features all of us in it. We would love to perform live more and incorporate other songs as well, but honestly we’re so busy producing our weekly content that we just haven’t had time to plan it.

Also, Davis has crippling stage fright, so we’re working on that too 😉

TF: What’s next for your channel? Any fun plans?

WZ: For the most part, what’s next is to just keep what we’re doing but better: Bigger and more frequent music videos, as well as live action sketches and a cappellas. Long term though, we’d really like to build on the success of our “The Office of Smite” series from last year. “The Office of Smite,” was a web series parodying the mockumentary style of The Office but featuring video game characters from Smite interacting with each other between matches. This web series, which was released over 8 months, was a surprise hit with our fans.

We’ve always wanted to make more long form narrative content, and this proved to us that there is a taste for it with our audience. We have future hopes to create another web series, that would be released on a more condensed schedule, but nothing set in stone just yet. For the time being, you can expect to get your standard weekly Wednesday Warp Zone content!

On Deck (channels that will soon reach one million subscribers): Shawn MendesCineFix, Clevver Movies

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