The journey of Chalk Warfare
“My buddy Eric Leigh and I, had been creating content on our YouTube channel, for quite awhile now. We started off making sketches and comedy videos in the beginning, before getting into visual effects back when the DSLR revolution was happening.”
“We had been brainstorming a bunch of new ideas when Eric started talking about making weapons out of chalk. The big problem with this idea, was how you could execute it. We were both at high school at the time, so it was a really tough thing to figure out back then.”
“So we sat on the idea for over a year, until I was working on another video that was also based around a weapon! In this video, there was a ‘bad guy’ holding a rocket propelled grenade launcher, which I then had to track and replace with a 3D version. Although, my workaround for the RPG looked absolutely terrible, it did prove that I could replace prop weapons in CG.”
“All I had at the time, was a $300 computer with an integrated graphics card that I bought at Staples. But we had at least figured out that chalk weapons could be done! Then in 2012, we decided to go back to Eric’s idea about a chalk warfare type film. We both had a bunch of ideas for weapons that we cut out of cardboard, painted, and added some tracking markers to.”
“It was a lot of work, because I wasn’t doing anything properly. Lens distortion and all that stuff wasn’t something that I was even thinking about at the time. I was just focused on the art of the video making and creating the chalk warfare concept. Honestly, I thought ‘Chalk Warfare 1’ was going to be terrible.”
“I don’t get to see these films like everyone else does for the first time. The way I get to see them, is over and over again with these really weird props for weapons. Eric remembers me saying that this will be the worst video we’ve ever made! He said, ‘just finish it and post it’.”
“When we finally uploaded the finished video, it started blowing up in just two days! The internet was different at this time, and so too was YouTube. It wasn’t as filled with vloggers and stuff, like it is nowadays. So you could have a viral hit back then and everyone would hear about it. From memory, we got 30,000 subscribers in just one night; and all this was while we were high schoolers! We were really shocked at how popular it turned out to be.”
“There we so many things that people could see in this thing. I remember the Smosh Pit Weekly on the Smosh Channel, made a compilation about the first Chalk Warfare, and that really helped it explode. And then, Gizmodo did an article, and before we knew it, all of these media outlets were on it in a big way. We then decided to take all the revenue we got from YouTube and to reinvest the whole lot in building a new computer that could help us with VFX.”
“This wasn’t a dream computer or anything like that, it was just a home PC with an external GTX graphics card that I built myself. I put this overclocked Intel i7 2600K processor that I then water cooled. I think Eric still has this computer at his home now! But ultimately, this was the machine that allowed us to improve the quality between ‘Chalk Warfare 1’ and ‘Chalk Warfare 2’.”
“With ‘Chalk Warfare 2’, I could now use fluid dynamics to cruise around in 3D much better, because I had an external graphics card. I could now do so much more stuff, and of course, the weapons got better and better too. But then on top of that, we also did this flame thrower effect which was all simulated fuel. I remember that took multiple days to simulate, which was wild at the time.”
“We now felt really confident in making all of these new weapons that we could use in ‘Chalk Warfare 2’. When we finally posted this one, it also exploded in the same way as the first one. Funnily enough, I remember being upset at the time because we just couldn’t get a million views on either of them, first up. They did eventually cross over, but I was really hoping they would explode immediately over that magical number.”
“In the months after ‘Chalk Warfare 2’, I don’t really remember what happened next. I guess life just happened and things went back to normal again. Both Eric and I continued making videos together, but I was really burned out by the second ‘Chalk Warfare’. It was just so much work, and all while we were still both at high school.”
“With these things, every shot was a VFX shot. And when it is just the two of you doing it all, you can burn out doing a whole film this way. And that’s what happened between the second one to the third one. It was literally a two year break from doing anything ‘Chalk Warfare’ related.”
“We came back and filmed ‘Chalk Warfare 3’ in 2013. I was actually sitting on it for months and months, before I could even go near the edit. It had been two years since the last ‘Chalk Warfare’ and I was convinced it was absolutely gonna suck! I convinced myself there was no way it was going to be better than the last two. And that was because, Eric and I had taken such a long break before coming back to make ‘Chalk Warfare 3’.”
“What was really cool about this version, other than the other two. Is that, if you were a kid when you saw the first two, well, now you’re a young adult! We saw that from our YouTube comments. The other thing that surprised us was the demographic because our fans were so much older now. It was fascinating that the concept still held up by ‘Chalk Warfare 3’, and that people were still interested in the idea.”
“What we have seen over the six years of doing ‘Chalk Warfare’, is how many people were kids when they saw the first one that have gone on to become VFX artists or filmmakers. We still get a lot of emails from people graduating from college saying they grew up watching ‘Chalk Warfare’, which is just so cool for us.”
“It’s great to know that ‘Chalk Warfare’ still connects with all of these people, and that the idea is still fresh for them. But for me in particular, it’s kind of ruined, because I know everything that is about to happen next. So I never get to see it fresh, and to experience the surprise! It’s really ‘the creators’ curse’.”
“When you create these things, you get so focused on the little things. Like the things you can’t paint out, or the things that were just way too expensive to do. I feel like watching these films six months later when you forget all of the things that annoyed you during their making. But it’s certainly humbling that other people are so passionate about what we create.”
“With ‘Chalk Warfare 3’ we started to reach out to our community to see what they wanted to see next, and the sort of weapons they were thinking about. For example, when we had Shama Mrema up on the water tower as a sniper, you can hear him say ‘locked and loaded’. Then someone posted in the comments, why didn’t he say ‘chalked and loaded’, which was just so cool. So we immediately replaced the audio to do that; and it really works well now.”
“When we finally came to ‘Chalk Warfare 4’, we wanted to create more of our own types of weapons. One of the things that came through on this one, was the weapons are custom tailored to its inventor. We wanted to making something that people would connect to on top of the chalk idea. We wanted this film to be bigger and better on so many levels; better story, better visuals, better production and of course, better weapons!”
“One of those ideas was to connect better with our friends and familiar faces. So people like Zach King and Jamie Costa, both have a really big internet presence. Jamie has actually been in every Chalk Warfare, which a lot of people don’t know. Because he is so big with Star Wars fan films, we thought he should have a Lightsaber this time around. Zack obviously, is huge brand with forced perspective tricks and magic, and we kept thinking on how we could draw creatively on his experiences. And then HelloImLana has this huge Harry Potter fan audience, and so we kept thinking about things like the ‘wand’ that better reflects her brand. But mostly it was about having cool weapons, even if you didn’t know who these people are you could still connect with the weapons they were drawing.”
“With ‘Chalk Warfare 4’ it was literally shot in two different states across America, half in California, and half in Greenville, South Carolina. The main reason for doing it this way, was to still have a lot of the original cast involved. I wanted the same people that we grew up with to be involved in episode four. So friends, like Justin Robinson who is a local filmmaker has been involved with all of the Chalk Warfare films. So that amounted to ten or so, of the cast and crew. And then the other half of the team in California, are these really cool people who we had meet along the way over the last six years.”
“Sam Loya, who I knew from watching Video Co-Pilot tutorials, I had been speaking with for so long but had never found the opportunity to do a project together. Sam reached out and we had always looked for an opportunity to do a project together. I grew up watching Video Co-Pilot and owe a lot of what I know today to their tutorials, so it was awesome to have him involved for this. So it is this really insane trip to come up with a film that we could all do together.”
“We wanted ‘Chalk Warfare 4’ to be a completely different experience to the earlier episodes. When we did the first one, I could pretty much memorize the whole storyline in my head. Since then, the world of film has changed, visual effects have changed, tech has changed, and so we wanted Chalk Warfare to have changed as well.”
“Before writing the script for ‘Chalk Warfare 4’, I spent a lot of my time looking at what content that was popular on Instagram and better understanding the types of visual experiences that people of my age were having. And so when I was writing the storyline for ‘Chalk Warfare 4’, I was really drawing from all of the things I was experiencing visually. And that’s when I happened upon the idea of a ‘Battle Royale’ with this opening skydiving scene. I had to craft a story that would match all of the variables I was dealing with, in terms of having half my crew in California and the other half in South Carolina.”
“The whole story actually came about because of the limitations of having different people on different coasts of America. And so it was important the idea logistically worked for the two different film crews, while still following the different changes we are seeing in video games and tech, generally! The times had changed from when we did three through to four, and I wanted everyone to immediately see that difference.”
“There were so many new techniques that we were using, that were literally brand new at the time. There was a beta plug-in for 3ds Max that Tyson Ibele gave us to do all of the chalk particles with. And then we brought Brendan Forde in to do all of the tracking on this film, because I’d never been all that great at those technicalities. Especially around lens distortion and the light hitting the sensor. Brendan has this stuff down pretty much to a science.”
“We were literally working on the new chalk weapons, some six to eight months earlier than we had on the other episodes. Because if we couldn’t improve the weapons, then the whole thing wasn’t gonna happen! We had a buddy in a prop shop to cut them out for us, so I could do all of these tests in my backyard holding the different weapon ideas. We were doing weapon tests right up until filming.”
“Putting in all of that extra work, ultimately makes us feel more proud of it. All of the collaborators involved were placing a lot of trust in us in terms of the quality, given they all have such a strong presence on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. These things are hugely collaborative projects, from the crew to all of the actors. Everybody has a role to play and they are all distinctly valuable and important.”
“You could never do this as one person, as a vlogger. We are just so incredibly fortunate to have an entire community of creators on board with these things. So these projects are a testament to the art of independent filmmaking. On ‘Chalk Warfare 1’, we had just five people in total. We had the four actors of course, and then there was me doing all of the VFX! We shot that episode in just an afternoon, and then I spent the next month working on it.”
“Four was a really big project, which took us a year and half to execute the idea. It was almost a full year in post production, so it was pretty wild. But it felt like a good thing to do. Creating something that is being enjoyed by others is a really big deal. Before we uploaded ‘Chalk Warfare 4’, I remember saying that YouTube is different now, so if it doesn’t perform well, at least we can be proud of the filmmaking.”
“You need to make something people will enjoy watching for 16mins. Occupying someone’s time for 16-30mins (some people watch them twice) is a beautiful thing. It has been great to see the response people have had to all of the Chalk Warfare films, which have now been seen over 150 million times. And that is something we are very proud of!”
