Troubled Production/Real Life/Web Original

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Troubled Productions in Real Life Web Original works include:

  • Every That Guy With The Glasses anniversary Massive Multiplayer Crossovers. Every one of them. The extent on how troubled they actually were was only known during the downfall of the revelations in the famous "Not So Awesome" document created by ex-members of Channel Awesome, and it could be resumed in two tropes: No OSHA Compliance and Pointy-Haired Boss.
    • The First Anniversary Brawl didn't really have any true filming troubles, but the camaraderie that it would be shown in later collaborations hadn't been developed yet, and it shows. More notorious were the behind the scenes troubles: as some collaborators later told, the ambient was quite toxic, mostly because a member of the group (implied to be That Aussie Guy, who would later abandon the site and got Unpersoned) spread untrue rumors about the sexual life of Lindsay Ellis/The Nostalgia Chick.
    • Kickassia. Almost everyone involved was injured somehow, the worst being cameraman Rob Walker getting a nasty leg injury on the first day, but he was still quite a Determinator as he kept cramming himself into tight places and waiting until filming was over to seek any medical attention. Also, Lord Kat twisted both his ankles, which forced his role to be severely reduced, and the extremely tight four day filming schedule meant that the climax had to be significantly trimmed down, with scenes like Spoony revealing himself to still be Insano never being filmed. Doug Walker was basically a Know-Nothing Know-It-All on filming issues, with him having to be informed by both Ellis and Antwiler that when you are filming in Nevada's desert you have to provide food and water to all the staff, a thing every filming student knows but the Walkers apparently ignored.
    • Suburban Knights was even worse, with the weather causing so many problems that Doug Walker was fully prepared to scrap the whole thing, until everyone banded together and convinced him they were willing to get the film done whatever it took. Injures were still an issue as in Kickassia, with Bennett the Sage, Iron Liz and Orlando having stunt injuries; meanwhile, Elisa of Team NChick was duct taped to a wall, was left alone a bit too long and got overheated. Somehow this got interpreted as that she was "crucified upside-down", and when news came of this before the premiere of the special, one of the site's biggest critics used this info to try and ruin TGWTG. While at the time this denounce went nowhere, after later revelations (like how Iron Liz was denied ice for her injuries until she signed a contract absolving TGWTG of responsibility on it, and then was roped into being production assistant and driver without credit nor compensation) it would be yield as yet another proof of the rampant disregard for the well-being of the contributors by the directive.
    • To Boldly Flee, the Year 4 special, was so troubled and the production was so horrible, whatever camaraderie was remaining between producers ended then and there. To begin with , it had a very rushed and constrained scheduled (about a week to film enough content for a three hours film), during which Doug Walker was in a yet another depressive mood and got very emotional on his scenes. Because of that, injuries went up rampant. Many contributors were forced to cover the costs of their own costuming and props, and in some cases, like with MarzGurl, the directives tried to directly force them to hand them to the company if they wanted compensation (she prefer to conserve it, at a personal loss). Oh, and the reason Walker was so emotional on his scenes? It was because he was using the film as a send-off of his Nostalgia Critic character, a thing he didn't bother to inform the other reviewers until he handed them the script mere days before the filming. Given that, at the time, the Nostalgia Critic was the main drawn to the site and the contributors were more or less unable/prohibited to built their audience elsewhere, they were comprehensively apprehensive. There was also an infight between Walker, Ellis, and Lewis Lovhaug on the scene of Nostalgia Chick being assimilated by Mechakara being written as a very long and very uncomfortable rape joke, with the latter two considering it distasteful and OOC respectively (in the final film the scene remains in a toned down form). The hostility only increased when Ed Glaser tried to point a blatant violation of basic filming and was disproportionately chew off in response, and whenever the contributors tried to point continuity errors or failure in the camera work, Rob Walkers only answered "Well, Plot Hole" (as in the McGuffin of the film). In top of the production being insanely troubled, the post-production was even more so, with the special effects insertion and edition taking more time than expected (mainly due to the contradictory specs and direction Phelous, the only one remaining to do them, kept receiving), and then the servers refusing to upload the files, having to show the episodes each two days instead of daily as originally announced. Retrospectively speaking, the mismanagement of this production marked the point of no return for the company, as most of the worse incidents denounced in the Not So Awesome document happened during this production or were consequence of those.
    • Because of all of the above troubles, for the fifth anniversary it was decided that they would instead do an Anthology project. The resultant effort was The Uncanny Valley, where the individual pieces had little production troubles by themselves. Behind the scenes, the directive demanded to the contributors to hand shorts with only "exposure" as the payment,; naturally, most of them refused, and the ones who complied were the British team, who at the time were the least popular of the site. In front of the public, the only problems were that some segments were uploaded sightly late, and the perception that Welshy's contribution, a mini-documentary called "The Dark Side of Internet" about Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things because of over-possessive fans trolling and stalking creators, was obviously inspired by his dealing with his Fan Dumb and the subsequent burnout he experienced, not helped by him leaving Internet for a while after its release. This anthology was the last site-wide anniversary special since then.
    • And then, when the site was beginning to do plans for another Massive Multiplayer Crossover in celebration of its 10th anniversary, the scandal known as the Channel Awesome Implosion happened, where former and then current contributors began to speak and compare stories on their mistreatment on hands of the directives of the company, culminating on the revelation that some directives and at least one contributor were guilty of sexual abuse and subsequently covered up. This was the last straw for most of the contributors, who jumped ship like peasants fleeing the Black Plague.
  • On a smaller scale, the big crossover review between The Nostalgia Critic, Spoony and Linkara for Alone in the Dark. To begin with, Doug Walker had lost his voice the day before Spoony and Linkara arrived in Chicago (hence the use of text-to-speech). Secondly, construction work was being done outside Doug's house, so they had to film the review in Doug's basement. In addition, they didn't decide which Uwe Boll movie to review until the day they started writing. Spoony gives the scoop here.
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