We were lucky to catch up with Bryan Archilla recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Bryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I’ve learned the video world and content creation mostly by Trial & Error. All three of us have, really. We went to film school together. I was a film and digital Video Major, Jordan and Tae were animation majors. We always knew that we wanted to create content and a lot of our journey over the last 2 to 3 years has been finding ways to get better at doing that.

And It’s genuinely been a process full of trying out new things and strategies until we find a tone or a system that we’re really happy with. The podcast has gone through a few format iterations and we even changed our branding to match the evolution of our content and to align it more with the goals that we have. I’m trying to say that most of what we learned, we’ve learned by trying it and keeping the elements that work and scrapping what doesn’t.

If I could do anything to speed up the learning process of being a content creator on YouTube and Podcaster, it would definitely be learning marketing and SEO optimization. I think the growth that those things could provide would have given us an immense amount of data and we could start tailoring our content to that growth. You find your audience and then you listen to it and adjust from there. That would have speed up acquiring all the skills for this field of content creation not necessarily because we would have learned things differently, but more so it would have provided us with something to focus on or target and have the learning process be more purposeful rather than exploratory.

Learn how to market yourself, It’ll make the rest of it go quicker, I think.

Organizational skills will forever be the most important, you’re working with video gear and scripts and ideas and finding ways to execute what’s in your head or your column of video topics needs good organization. Write stuff down, editorialize your content, standardize your workflow. I’m just now learning this, It’s HUGE. Learn your cameras and editing software, but do yourself a favour and organize EVERYTHING. It’ll make your job significantly easier in the long run.

Time and Daily Life are definitely the hardest obstacles. Not everyone can afford to solely pursue artistic endeavors or follow through with their productions at the pace they’d like to. We have full time jobs, relationships and bills. It’s hard to balance. If we had unlimited time in a day to work on our creative pursuits, we’d learn and perform a hell of a lot quicker and better.

So I’d say finding time is the biggest obstacle.

Bryan , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We’re just three friends that love gaming and Pop Culture. Our Youtube channel is centered around Gaming, Film & TV. We inform, discuss and cover news that happen in the entertainment industry. Mostly gaming for the moment, but we have plans to include Film and TV more as the channel grows.

The best way to summarize us as a brand is a couple of nerds that wanted to talk about pop culture without the hint of outrage & anger that we feel permeates that industry on places like twitter or pretty much any other comment section. We find that element of media criticism, journalism and general internet culture exhausting. so we aim to deliver news and entertainment without engaging in the toxicity.

I think that’s what sets us apart from a good chunk of the people producing content these days, we do it from a genuine place of wanting to share and hear each other’s opinions on whatever we’re discussing, disagreements or not. I think that’s why people end up loving the podcast, we’re goofing around and getting heated but at the end of the day we’re just enjoying talking about something we’re genuinely passionate about.

as far as how we got started Jordan & Tae were drinking and talking one time and decided to start a podcast. I (Bryan) joined them after a year of them doing it. When it was time to level up our game I took my film and video knowledge and turned our discord podcast into a live production and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since! We’re hoping to crack 1000 subscribers soon.

All three of us grew up in the Youtube era, I think we were all interested in making the same type of content that was formative for us, take the elements of the medium that really grew on us and expand on them while abandoning what we considered to be toxic or not conducive to great conversations.

I think we’re most proud of the fact that we have three entirely different sets of opinions, and that they’re all equally expressed and valued throughout the channel because I genuinely think that translates to how we interact with the rest of the ecosystem. We’ve managed to find a way to filter through what we think is harmful to the field of criticism and media coverage without becoming toxic or dismissive ourselves. That means a lot to us.

If anything, we want all our followers and community members to know that we are in this to have a good time, have good conversation and connect through our shared interests. Please come say hi! Share your thoughts with us. It’s incredibly cool to talk to our audience.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect is, although it might be somewhat cliché , is the fact that once you’re done creating a project, or video or piece of art there is now something that exists that previously didn’t.

There’s genuinely a sense of satisfaction, no matter how simple the project or the content is that comes from having simply made something, it’s even better when that content resonates with somebody and it sparks a conversation. Even something as simple as our Film or Game reviews feel worth all the work when we get the opportunity to hear people’s thoughts and opinions in response to ours.

I think that boils down to community though, it feels good to be a part of something and being in a creative field is all about building your community and growing with it.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

You may have gotten a hint of this through my earlier answers, but I think it’s worth repeating. We want to ride through this creative journey with as little toxicity as possible, which can sometimes be challenging.

A lot of people thrive on the toxicity of the gaming industry and the clicks it generates but we find that to be problematic for the industry as a whole. We may not see the effects of it immediately, but in the long run I believe that it’ll drive away a lot of the passion that it was built on.

We’re media critics most of the time, we consume content to examine it and have deeper conversations. If we do that with any amount of toxicity we’re poisoning the ecosystem that we want to exist in. It all has to be done in good faith and with no ill intent, otherwise we’re just hurting each other on an industry scale.

So I’d say our mission is to be entertainment journalists with a net-positive impact.

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