06
Youtube: The Subculture Club
From 2009 to 2014 I ran Team Fish, a production company in LA I built with a partner, making short documentaries for clients. We took on a lot of jobs and a lot of docs, and that body of work is what got us noticed. Around then YouTube started paying for original shows for the first time, funding around a hundred channels to see if the platform could become something closer to television. One of them was Thrash Lab, run by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg’s company Katalyst, and they reached out to us to make two series for it, Subculture Club and Profiles. From 2012 to 2014 we produced over twenty episodes, going deep on communities most people never see up close, from teenage magicians to off-grid desert towns to urban beekeepers to the National Beard and Moustache Championships. It was two of us making it at the pace of a much bigger crew, figuring out what a YouTube show even was while the format was still being invented. The episodes later ran on airline in-flight entertainment too.