Finally, after months of work, The Big House 5 Mini-Documentary by Last Stock Legends has been released.
If you were expecting a sweeping, epic overview of The Big House 5, rife with mugshots of our smash celebs and hype moments, you’re probably disappointed and more than a little confused. This article will hopefully soften some of your disappointment, as I’m going to explain why we did what we did, and what we’re hoping to accomplish with these pieces.
Right now, there’s a ton of amazing content coming out of the Smash scene, but very little going in. To put it another way, most of the high-quality content you see is branded and is being produced to fulfill a specific purpose. The most common example of this is stuff like the Mango series from Cloud 9 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syqQbSu5KQ4), or the TSM Leffen documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aNOBFe1k_Y). These productions are designed to get the maximum value out of their investments in smash players, and so they have to be geared towards people who are unfamiliar with the professional melee scene. This brings in new fans for the specific players as well as the scene overall. I’m not suggesting that it’s a bad approach — in fact, it’s a very good approach and follows many rules of storytelling that we flat-out ignored — but rather that it’s an approach that doesn’t offer much to the hardcore melee fans.
Admittedly, our approach alienates where these other approaches invite. Someone told me that the doc didn’t capture their experience of TBH5, and that it didn’t show what it was like to be able to wander around and meet Smash celebrities around every corner, or how it felt to be in the crowd cheering on during hype moments. And to them I say: good. All the people you know as “celebrities” are just people showing up to play video games with each other, the same way they have been for the past 5-10 years. Bumping into Chillindude wasn’t a noteworthy event a few years ago, outside of the fact that he’s a great dude to hang out with and bumping into him likely meant your day was about to become a bit more fun. Of course you’re gonna run into Westballz or Mew2King at a national. That’s the whole point of a national–all these people are there, ready to play each other. To me, this is not noteworthy and is not what I wanted to capture. You don’t need star power to have a good story.
Some have also suggested that the title was misleading, since it’s more of a documentary about Hbox and Lucky than it is “The Big House 5” in general. But what could we provide you that would be a better overview of TBH5 than simply watching through the full tournament yourself? We’re used to thinking of tournaments as the stories of their victors, but that means that thousands of stories aren’t being told. What’s it like to lose? What’s it like to struggle with your personal life while playing professionally? What does it even mean to be a “professional,” if our 2nd best player is afraid to make the leap into smashing for a living? Once you realize how important the setting is to answering these questions, you’ll see that just because we weren’t trying to capture a universal experience of TBH5 doesn’t mean we didn’t still endeavor to capture what makes it unique.
You might think that The Big House 5 was amazing because everyone got to have the same experience, but I submit that its greatness actually comes from the individuals. You see, Juggleguy’s skill at delegating and running a national allows players to feel comfortable enough that they can really be themselves at TBH in a way they can’t at other tournament series. His harsh and unforgiving approach to enforcing the rules paradoxically affords players a bit of freedom: they don’t have to worry about teams being moved to 2 AM at the last minute, or show up to find that their pools are running 3 hours behind. We chose to follow Lucky and Hungrybox because they historically play very well at TBH, and they were slated to meet in bracket. Both of them stressed to me that the reason they play so well at TBH is because of the reliability of Juggleguy’s planning. Unfortunately, Leffen’s visa issues caused the tournament to be re-seeded, which meant they wound up on opposite sides of the bracket instead.
My hope is that you, as our viewers, walk away from this eager to form your own unique memories at major tournaments. Yes, it’s exciting getting to watch Top 8, and we could’ve easily made a documentary that just strung together hype footage for 30 minutes and called it a day. It would’ve been much easier than what we did, in fact. Our goal was to show what it’s like to experience TBH as Lucky and Hbox (which includes their frustrations), not to turn them into heroes. We’re currently in post-production for Genesis 3, which will focus on NorCal’s experience as a region defending itself from international competition, and again will be told through the experiences of a few players rather than being a sweeping, grand overview of the whole event. We hope you enjoy it, and we’re so grateful for all the support you’ve shown us so far. We’ll have some great stuff for you real soon.
I loved the doc guys. Keep up the awesome work!
I loved the doc. However and I assume this was most likely a time issue I wish you could have gotten interviews for Hbox and Lucky post tournament. It seemed like the interviews were done on day 2. I thought it would have been a great insight to hear both players talk about their matches and mentality and certain moments of their most critical sets. Other than that I thought it was great, keep it up. 😀
Yeah, the interviews were conducted Friday night. We tried to get followup interviews, but time was indeed an issue. We wound up shooting followup interviews at G3, and they had some really great answers, but the files were corrupt and we didn’t want to wait until we could interview them again at the next big major.
+A lot of work went into this.
+More high production smash content is now available.
-The whole thing is just a series of clips and interviews, lacking an engaging narrative to string it together.
-That scene where Zero wins and Hbox walks away ominously down a long hallway felt like there was a spark of drama, but it ended up just being a long scene of Hbox walking to a small indoor market to buy a can of red bull. Anticlimactic, random, pointless. So many of the scenes in this doc are just like this.
-Lucky talks about how hard he tries to beat Westballz, you’re engaged in the scenes of their fight. Lucky looses, we never see how he deals with it. We just never see him again and get a stock image saying he finished 9th. There’s no closure, it makes everything before feel it lacked weight.
-Armada wins the tournament. Zero wins the tournament. No interviews with Zero or Armada. Hbox says his goal is just to keep up with Aramada and that he never lost a set since 2015–and never a follow up interview?
-Hbox kind of comes of as a flippant miscreant here. His early scenes show him dissmissing the players that struggle in Day 1 pools, the ominous walk away from Zero’s win (that ultimately led no where), his telling the camera about the time he told a player to “f— off”. Again, there’s an angle that could have been taken here to present him as a underdog or a villian/antihero. But it’s just interspread scenes among with other scenes of players giving sparsely related anecdotes.
Who do you root for? Who should the audience appreciate? What’s the story that you’re trying to tell? If the answer to all of these is “none. it’s just a piece for the hardcore fans.” It’s sort of like saying “Oh, you can only get/like this if you’re a hardcore fan. You have to be hardcore enough. Dude.” Sure.
Great job to LSL and this project.
For players who’ve been around a while it’s refreshing to see something that doesn’t paint a portrait of ‘celebrity smash’ but something that resonates with actual competitors.