After season one was complete, the team behind Video Game High School created an exhaustive breakdown of their costs and used that number to set their goal for a Kickstarter to fund season two. For those who are interested, almost every cent spent was accounted for in an in-depth infographic. *The sets under construction. "*VGHS has certainly captured everyone's attention and admiration," says Jonathan Paula, a YouTube celebrity. "I'm most impressed with the standard of quality they were able to achieve, on a (by Hollywood standards) relatively meager budget, all through the funding and support of their own fan base. Achieving a highly professional, and polished feature length production on par with with of the best action and effects you'd see on prime time TV. I only hope season two improves on the accomplishments of the first. These projects hopefully indicate to the rest of old media that YouTube is more than a viable option for high-quality, long form content and it can thrive here as well." The team at Rocket Jump got creative with backer rewards creating faux student IDs, school pennants, and class T-shirts. For $250, supporters can have their photo and name included in a VGHS yearbook that doubles as a “making of” book. No detail was left undesigned in the VGHS universe. The production designers even created logos for rival school’s teams. The big lesson from season one was that location shots were expensive. The creators redesigned the stories for season two so that more of the action could take place on sets which were designed using CAD software. The production designers even made sure that small elements like the headsets players wear were emblazoned with the VGHS logo. School posters, user interface elements, and even player guides were created to make the series feel like a Hollywood production and not a half-hearted web show.

Video Game High School(VGHS) is a popular web video series set in the not-so-distant future where videogames are the national pastime. In this world, the most gifted players matriculate to VGHS and face the usual coming-of-age dramas in an environment that is equal parts Hogwarts, Halo and The Hunger Games.

The initial season of VGHS premiered on the web in May 2012 and was a tremendous success. It drew sponsorships from Sony and Monster Energy Drinks and has had a huge impact outside of YouTube. It's even available on Netflix, where it has a four-star rating based on 90,073 votes. Season two just became the most funded film project on Kickstarter with over $742,000 in backing and is aiming to raise the level of quality even higher.

A teen drama mixed with first-person shooters may not appeal to everyone, but VGHS has undeniably set the bar for online production design. The series is widely held up by YouTube professionals as the new "design" gold standard.

On YouTube, getting a a dog to ride a skateboard is a huge effort, but Rocket Jump Studios, the team behind VGHS, have designed an entire world for their characters to inhabit. They have designed costumes and props, developed game-themed special effects, built enormous sets inside YouTube's cavernous recording studio, and even designed a faux school seal down to a Latin motto.

Wired Design contacted VGHS co-creator Freddie Wong, a semi-pro gamer and a web celebrity with the eighth most popular YouTube channel, to learn about the challenges and opportunities that come with designing a feature length story meant for a tiny screen.

Wired Design: VGHS has a distinct design style — how did you develop it?

Freddie Wong: Design ends up showing up in unexpected ways when it comes to making online videos — everything from visual branding to physical production design. For Video Game High School, we're very fortunate to have an awesome production designer (Rachel Myers) who understands the aesthetic we're going for and is instrumental in creating a unified look throughout the series. We are also fortunate to have an awesome relationship with the guys at The Danger Brain, who we work very closely with when it comes to creating the graphical visuals in the world of VGHS — a world which is chock full of fun opportunities to imagine what an alternate reality dominated by pro gaming might look like.

Wired Design: What has been the most challenging aspect of designing sets and props on such low budget?

Wong: A lot of the challenge comes from making absolutely sure you're getting the most bang for your buck as possible. Rachel might have a cool idea for a carpet or flooring pattern, but if we realize that we're shooting that scene in such a way that you really aren't seeing the floor, we need to make a decision to spend that money elsewhere. It can result in a set that looks fantastic through the lens of the camera but a bit weird to someone who sees all the angles. Film gives us the luxury of deciding where the viewpoint of the audience is, and by knowing that, we can very effectively design around what is actually seen on camera.

For season two, we're working closely with YouTube to shoot at their new stage spaces in Los Angeles. Shooting on location and dressing locations in Los Angeles is shockingly expensive, especially when you're talking about webseries-level budgets, so the opportunity to build our sets in YouTube's space gives us a lot more room in our budget in being able to create the world of VGHS properly.

Wired Design: If there were a YouTube Academy Awards, who would the nominees for best production design be?

Wong: YouTube's a funny place because so many creators fall into their aesthetics out of necessity and the visuals are driven out of an urge to create. You get a lot of interesting examples of interesting design choices that have roots in practicality as well as an artistic sentiment. On the other hand, you have more produced shows that actually are able to hire on production designers. In that latter category, the Geek and Sundry folks do a nice job setting up an aesthetic for each of their shows. In the former, mrchicity13 has the greatest fridge of all time.

Wired Design: Why no mascot costume as a Kickstarter backer reward?

Wong: We had some funny Kickstarter rewards — the mascot thing did come up, but the joke is Video Game High School's mascot is the video game, so I can't imagine subjecting someone to a costume that is literally a generic video game! We're super excited about the yearbook reward at $250 — I used to be an editor on my high school yearbook, so the prospect of using typical yearbook design and layouts to showcase behind the scenes set photos and everything makes me giddy.

Wired Design: How did the design of season two differ from season one?

Wong: Season one was all about us figuring out what this universe looks like and doing the legwork to establish all that. With that out of the way, we're focusing much more heavily on characters and sideplots. We're changing our format around too — we're shooting six TV-length 20-25 minute episodes, which allows us to get in all the side characters and B and C plots that we were simply unable to do in season one with a 10 minute episode structure.

Wired Design: What are you most excited about for the project's future?

Wong: Thanks to Netflix and Hulu, people are getting more and more used to consuming longer stretches of content on their televisions or computer screens. This starts to open the door for us to do, as we are in season two, longer episodes — something that would've been unheard of just a couple years ago. It's been incredibly gratifying to throw ourselves at a longer form project and to concentrate on the kinds of things that we don't focus on in our usual two to three minute shorts that we have been doing on the FreddieW channel up until now, and season three will let us take the arc that we're building and finish it in a satisfying way. As web video and independent production grows online, we're hoping to be at the front of that development and hopefully influence the shape that it will take.

All Photos: Rocket Jump Studios