All Writing Needs to Be Looked Into

We spoke to Max Field, entertainer and owner of studio SBN3, to find out more about the person behind the viral videos such as Taste Closed. His latest project, the ‘anti-visual novel’ Class of ’09 has received an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ review on Steam, and is currently being developed into an anime after a successful crowdfunder. Field started on YouTube before going on to hone his audience and craft to expand to other visual content mediums. Field has incorporated his online experiences into his work, always seeking to create something that’s original and unlike any other content you’d find on the internet.

Field started with the goal of making short sitcom format videos that were dubbed to the tune of Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lilly or Kung Pao! Enter the Fist. As his clips gained increasing popularity on Instagram and TikTok, he eventually took all of the humour and production value present in his early works and put it into a game. Ten years later and Field has an extensive body of online work, over 80,000 followers on YouTube and some exciting projects in the pipeline.

Here’s some snippets of our interview.

How do you write?

The screenplay comes first before any production I do. For short-form projects, what I do is usually some form of comedy. I’ll get on a call with one or two other joke writers and we’ll say just anything for like, 90 minutes. We’ll share a story and then I’ll write all those notes down. Then I have to go into the actual dialogue-on-paper process. And [then] I have a pool of ideas to take from as I’m doing that.

It’s a similar thing with doing a long form project. With a long form project – whether it’s a feature film, or it’s a game, like Class of ‘09 with multiple branching paths – I have to make a story map. So I make a map that has all of those little nodes, all those beats. I don’t write a single line of dialogue until that map is done. Then I have the framework. Then I go through and I know what dialogue and what things the characters can and cannot say, because now I know what’s going to happen in the future. So it’s a very mathematical process for how I organise and structure stories.

One side of the creativity is in planning out the plot and thinking, ‘Okay, what things do we show people? What things do we not show people to make sure that the ending is rewarding?’ And then the other part is, in between time; how do we make it entertaining? That’s the daily ‘growl’, what I call it. All of that happens not when I’m writing dialogue, all of that happens in the plot structure, and planning stage of that map. So it’s not like oh, he just wings it and figures it out and calls back to that. No, it’s all by design from the start.

Was part of the intention with Class of ‘09 to poke fun at the format?

No, no, it’s not to poke fun at the format. A lot of very strange Redditor men like getting mad at that. They’re like, ‘oh, they’re just making fun of visual novels they don’t like.’ It’s not that I like or don’t like visual novels. It’s that it was the anti-visual novel in the way that Seinfeld was the anti-sitcom. It’s the way that Letterman was the anti-talk show.

I’m not really worried about what other visual novels are doing. I’m just saying that no one has come to this genre with my energy and my background and my, you know, everything! And so that’s why it’s the anti-visual novel, because no other dude was going to make this game unless I did.

It’s all about real events, encounters and personalities. I had a very interesting upbringing, you know, where they talk to you about film and going to college for film because ‘you need to be a more well-rounded person’. What I realised as I got older (I mean, I’m 29 right now) but what I realised as I got a little older was, at the age of 23, I had probably seen more than most people in their lives.

I had police knock on my door, I’ve had FBI knock on my door – not for any crimes I was doing, I want to clarify that. You see toxic behaviour day after day; you see abusive parents, whether it’s your family, other families, anyone’s family, and back in 2007, no one said anything about that. But now, everybody says everything about this kind of stuff. It was interesting to me that, after turning 18, you see things happen to those who were just regular people from high school, as they are truly on their own – getting into drugs, homelessness and all that.

Class of ‘09 was real rap, in the way that in hip hop, none of what I’m saying is very shocking at all. But in the video game, Visual Novel World, it’s not like, they’re not bad people, but they are very much softer people in that realm – there’s a lot of therapy, you know, words like ‘gaslighting’ and ‘toxic’ and all these things. I’m not saying that those things aren’t real. I’m just saying, when you’re in a rougher environment, you’re not even thinking about sh*t like that. You’re not even in the same realm as that. But you’re just trying to find a way out.

How did you get the female perspective for the game?

Talk to women. I’m not gonna get the honest perspective on what a dude is like from just talking to him. Where you’re gonna get the honest perspective of another man is from a girl.
The mainline in Class of ‘09 was, what happens when the player gets the social opportunity [as a girl]? If you don’t have to actually deal with the social consequences of anything, you’re going to always pick the selfish option. You’re always going to do what’s best for you. And so [it shows] the conflict that women encounter every day – where they want to choose something for themselves, but whether it’s society, or whether it’s hormonal, or anything, they find themselves putting other people ahead of themselves.

But yeah, you got to keep talking to people. You got to talk to average, everyday people. The big thing that I see in the entertainment industry – where they screw up – is they just keep talking to other people with media studies degrees and keep talking to other people working in the business. That ends up being their only friend network. People who work in entertainment have different priorities and move differently than just regular people who work at a bar, or who work in retail. You get to take that raw honesty, and you get to talk to those people. And that’s what gets the reality into games like Class of ‘09.

Why did you choose an anime aesthetic?

Part of it has to do with marketing, another part of it has to do with just general quality.

So mid-2010s, the Western parody visual novel explodes all over the internet – Hatoful Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club, all these games. But there were also, you know, a lot of really annoying ones by people who don’t write jokes. They just wanted to be like: ’Oh, haha, visual novels are dumb, let’s show how dumb they are.’ But I didn’t care for that – I just wanted to tell a story with Class of ‘09. A lot of those works had – which I struggled really hard with – an entirely Western art style as they attempt to not conform to the format of a visual novel. And so that’s why I wanted one, so it wouldn’t immediately be written off as ‘Oh, this is a parody’. Another thing is that, in anime, there’s such a massive discipline with how characters are drawn and anatomy and all that… And it makes the production value higher when you do that style. And me personally, I’ve always disliked Western artists finding anime to be easy, and then they draw it and they entirely f*ck it up.

It’s also very marketable. People love the pretty, you know, cel-shaded anime girl with all the blending and painting and the dynamic angles. On Facebook and Instagram, like any posts with just an anime girl – no story – that’ll just get like 100,000 likes. But no one has really done a thing where those anime girls act like real women. No one has ever done that. So it added to the subversion of it – to make it look like anime and entirely Western mouthpieces.

You describe your work as a digital cinema variety show? Mostly comedy? So are there any particular themes that you aim to explore through humour?

Everything! Think of a painter versus a comedian. If a painter has feelings about something, they’ll paint a picture. If a comedian has feelings about something, they’ll tell jokes about it. It’s just another tool. Comedy is just another tool for telling a story. It’s another tool for making a story more interesting. It’s a tool for distracting. If I have a setup and then I throw a big joke in there, the viewer remembers the setup, but they’re not actively thinking about it anymore. And so, that pay off later in the screenplay becomes more rewarding because it wasn’t in the presence of their mind, because now they’re distracted by all the other silly stuff going on.

All these different things have to come together to create chaos. And you do that and you subvert, you get people jumping from one thing to the next, through comedy, through what’s funny.

Why did you stick with digital and being online despite it being so stigmatised?

The goal from day one [was] how do I take this extremely online stuff – and a lot of it is weird stuff – and how do I put it out for an audience of regular people. And that’s the thing with a lot of my YouTube following. It’s just regular guys who happen to watch [and] like one YouTube channel. Like, you know, it’s guys who are just there for you.

Nowadays, as soon as it becomes a meme online, it’s a meme in the real world. That’s just kind of how that goes. So, I think that everything kind of worked out. And by being ahead of the curve, and by always, sort of, not trying to change anything too much, but at the same time remembering, ‘Okay, how would a normal audience perceive this? How would some random guy who’s twenty-five years old, look at this and laugh at it or, or enjoy it?’ And so I’ve always had that in my mind. Even when I first started. How do I make this ubiquitous and not just esoteric and weird, and so only fifty people can understand it. It was about making something that borrows and uses stuff from the underground of the humour-world that I came from, and how do I make this more palatable to a wider audience?

It was a ten-year process to do that.

What’s next for you?

I’d say all writing needs to be looked into. Our Kickstarter for another-656 minute anime got funded. We raised that in 30 hours, so an anime is what’s next. If I could just have the funding and get a TV deal for the anime I would never make another visual novel again.

But the issue is that when you’re posting to YouTube there’s not a lot of money in YouTube because of that ‘minutes watch’ thing I mentioned earlier. So yeah, it’s tricky but that’s film and film is my medium. That’s where I do the best.

I’m exploring other types of games right now in development. I can’t say what those are for various contractual reasons, but I’m exploring other things. The things I am exploring will blow people’s minds – they will not see it coming. I guarantee that.

A lot of times in this business you kind of have a couple years plan. You don’t have a ten-year plan, you have like a couple years plan in entertainment, where you play it by ear. Put it this way, if this game flopped, if the second Class of ‘09 game flopped, I don’t know what I would have done, man…

Some of these answers and questions have been edited for clarity.