This interview with Brian Graden and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was conducted at the 2015 ProMax Conference. Content has been edited for clarity. See part one here.
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I think one of our secret weapons were requests videos where Joe would actually make videos in the character of “regular Joe” and motivate people to participate. Why did you call yourself “regular Joe” in those videos?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
“Regular Joe” was a username I started after the site had been going for a few years. Before that, my username on the site was just Joe. I started calling it “regular Joe” because it was another pun, and one of them is just to be like “Oh yeah, I’m like a regular Joe.” But then the other meanings had to do with the rules and regulations because I tend to think that a creative process benefits from rules and that’s maybe something to take away. If you just say to a community full of people “Hey, make something and you don’t put any limits on it,” they’re just staring at a blank page and it’s really hard to do anything. Whereas if you say “The rules are you have to start every sentence with the letter A,” or some kind of rule can really get you started.
So that was one meanings of regular, and then the other meaning was to do it consistently on a regular basis. We started making videos that we called “The Regularity.” I think that’s definitely a big part of what makes a community thrive because there’s a regularity to it. If you do something then go away, then try to start it up again, the next time you want to do something, it won’t feel organic. It’s not something that people can settle and something people can identify with. If it’s regularly going, then it becomes like a place to kind of hang your hat.
And you also gave every episode a theme which I really thought helped people
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
A prompt, yeah we call them challenges. The challenges won’t lead anywhere, they’ll just be like the weekly writing challenge and it’s nothing for any kind of TV show. There’s a new prompt every week and the point is just to write for fun. Again, if you just sit down and say to somebody “write for fun,” that’s really difficult. But if you give them a challenge, there’s something.
We also will have challenges for making a segment of television. We’ll say “this person has contributed this, but we think we want to take it in this direction, so the challenge is how can you rewrite this, or how can you take this character and illustrate it, or how can you take these illustrations and animate it”? These are the kinds of challenges that facilitate the production of our show.
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Please see part three of the interview here.