We recently connected with Vigo Vargas & Richard Pizarro Of Playground Social and have shared our conversation below.
Vigo Vargas & Richard Pizarro, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
Vigo – Trial and Error. It still feels like that. No better teacher than experience, right? Too many times we approached producing sketches or short film ideas wide-eyed and ignorant to the actual behemoth’s we were taking on, Unrealistic concepts and ideas we’d dream up with absolutely no budget for sketches. But we’d get so caught up in how much fun we were having to realize how grandiose we were thinking, and that’s when things get interesting; it certainly drove us to innovate and learn how to achieve the end results we wanted, with minimal casualties.
I don’t think we could have done anything to speed up our learning process. Even knowing all of what we know now. All of the experiences and mistakes and successes, those were the lessons we had to learn, and we had to learn them at our own pace. I think everyone does. Especially as you reach those levels of madness and midnight hour creativity, and maybe you get a little overly ambitious with the scale of a project. You quickly start to learn what you’re doing right and what you’re screwing up, and hopefully how to fix it.
Richard- The most essential skill we picked up during any of our productions was, that collaboration is key. So often, non-creatives think that a whole project is the sole vision of one person. You quickly find out in the production world that it couldn’t be further from a one person show. There’s a million departments on set for a reason. Even when it comes to the creation of the idea of whatever is going to serve as the basis for what you’re filming, maybe one person spit out the main idea, but by the time it’s actually been laid out on paper to be produced, it’s been chewed and regurgitated so many times, its rarely the same creature. But hopefully, if it’s done right, with the right team and the right care, it’s been chewed on and stomped on and crumpled and retyped all for the better. 18 heads are better than one — and weirder.
The only obstacle that ever really got in our way, was ourselves. Is that cliche? I don’t know, but it’s definitely true. You work in the business and produce ideas year after year, and all of a sudden there’s no sweet mysterious romance to it. You know about the countless long days and even longer nights. You learn about the expenditures and the curveballs people will constantly throw your way, and you can kind of grow tired of it, or you don’t look at it through the same rose tinted glasses.
Or even, you work so hard on making each project you produce better than the last, and it can start to slow down the creative processes. Especially if you get caught in the trap of comparing and relating new ideas to old ones, or the time it may have taken, or the blood sweat and tears you had to pour in, it makes you shy away from taking on a project. You can’t think like that. Avoid the idle comparisons if you can.
Vigo – Yea, that’s been the biggest obstacle to overcome. Always remembering why it was you started to do this in the first place. Never losing the love you have for this passion of yours. Easier said than done, but it’s really freeing when you get back to that simpler way of thinking. Just creating because it’s what you love to do.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Richard – We are Playground Social. We’re a sketch comedy and production collective. We create original productions as well as crew and equip others. At our core, we’re a group of friends who began creating sketch comedy 14 years ago in Miami, FL. I moved to Chicago in 2012 to go to acting school at Roosevelt University and I really loved the city and the opportunity here. I met Michel Sinas, who was crucial to creating our visual style early on— because we lived in the same dorms. I told him that I had friends back home who were comedians too, and we wanted to start making sketch comedy, and he was very into the idea. He was going to film school in the city and wanted to work. So I slowly convinced my friend Vigo and our two other lifelong friends, Richie Greenberg and Danny Leonard, to move to the city so we could give this Comedy thing a shot. It was a very natural forming of the team from there. We kept meeting people who were eager to work on something big! Not just work in the industry and freelance, but be the whole creative team behind a project. Things really got serious when we met Rudy Scheider, a Buffalo native enrolled at Columbia and managing the Magnanimous film equipment rental house. Rudy really gave us the technical edge we were missing. Somewhere along the line, as people figured out what they loved to do and what they were proficient at, we became a fully functioning production company. But before all that, there was no studio, there was no fancy equipment. There was just an idea of of what we wanted to create, and, thankfully, a lot of people around us who were down to come together around a common goal: wanting to make something funny and worth watching!
We managed to carve out a sweet little niche in our industry by being ourselves. Our style is very unique to us. Whenever you watch a Playground Social production you can tell pretty quickly who it was made by.
Vigo – It feels like we’re still trying to get into “the industry.”
Which is to say: Somebody pay us to make what we want because what we want to make is so gooooood.
What’s in our wheelhouse? You have a concept or an idea you want to develop, we can help with that. We’ve got a phenomenal team of creatives teeming with a ton of exciting, boundary-pushing ideas. We love to help you achieve the best version of what you’re making, and sometimes that’s not on the creative side, at all. We’re also a fully equipped production studio. You’ve already got your concept developed and you need a team to bring it to life? We can handle the technical aspects.
Richard- What sets us apart is our ability to create a unique universe, both conceptually and physically, that our ideas come to life in. Over the years we’ve built an entire conceptual world that Playground Social lives in, and combined with our technical skills we’ve been able to bring that world to life in an immersive way that can be experienced in short videos and short films, feature lengths, live studio shows that interact with live audiences, as well as virtually. We have no fear in tackling creative productions. Our years of experience has given us a keen understanding of Chicago’s entertainment landscape.
Vigo – What I’m most proud of when I think about Playground Social, is our body of work. It’s pretty eclectic but it all feels cohesive. In particular, our live shows. We were throwing these huge live comedy and music events at our former studio, and we were writing some pretty, pretty elaborate shows. But we always made them work, and more than work, we always left those shows having had an insane amount of fun and the crowd always left happy and asking us when we were going to throw our next one. That kind of live feedback and almost instant gratification— after pouring weeks or months of prep into a show— can be the perfect catalyst to keep you creating.
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
All I know is, when I walk into a restaurant I don’t want to scan a QR code, I want the real thing baby! Bring back physical menus!
BBPM!
How did you build your audience on social media?
Great question! We suck at social media, so if you have any tips or secret formulas, feel free to share.
Actually, if you’re reading this right now, share this interview with 10 friends, and then please ask those 10 friends to send us 4-8 quarters each.
We’ll use those quarters to boost our posts and increase engagement—help us help you!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://playgroundsocial.com
- Instagram: @PlaygroundSocial
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PlaygroundSocial
Image Credits
Images and captures by Andrew Degner, Andrew Ziemba, Sam Paakkonen, Rudy Schieder, Playground Social