Many of you have already seen and enjoyed the Street Fighter High videos but have you ever wondered how they came about? Well the guys over at Nerd Reactor aimed to find out when they interviewed the creators of the popular Street Fighter spoof. Here’s a portion of the interview with Jennifer Zhang (Producer, Juri), Hugh Jardon (Director), and Capcom’s Gerald Hom.
Nerd Reactor: How did the original project, Street Fighter High come about?
Jennifer: It’s a nutty story, I suppose. The project really ended up being a snapshot of the two things I was really passionate about around mid-January 2010. For the better part of 2009, I had studied under the late, great Blake Snyder, and was furiously writing and revising a couple scripts using his “Save the Cat!” method (which I would recommend to any writers out there who want to jump-start their productivity, by the way). And on periodic writing-binge breaks, I was pretty obsessively Googling for news and previews of Super Street Fighter IV, which in retrospect, I was maybe just a little too stoked about. No, I take that back. I was just the right amount of stoked about it.
So one night, I was trolling the internet for gameplay footage on a break, and for some unknown reason thought to myself, “I bet Juri was a total bitch in high school.” So that kind of touched off this exercise where I tried to fit Street Fighter characters into the archetypes of teen shows.
You know when you have one of those ideas for a script that’s SO ridiculous, if you don’t write it down immediately, you know you’re going to talk yourself out of it? So I momentarily threw aside my more serious projects and dashed “Street Fighter High” off in a white heat. I did have a moment during the process when I thought, “What the EFF am I doing?” since there’s that line between “too stupid to do” and “too stupid to NOT do.” And then I wrote the words “yoga schwing” and I knew I had crossed that line into the latter.
Once it was written, there was really no going back. I was taking an acting class at the time and was looking around and it just seemed I could cast the whole thing directly out of the school. And so that week, I sent the script to my friend Carolyn McAllister, who convinced me we had to start pulling the key players together and just do the damn thing. And luckily, there was a hard deadline; I knew that if we could time the release of the fan film to sync up with the height of the marketing blitz for the new game, we’d catch a lot of that runoff from people searching for SSFIV videos, while also doing our part to pay homage to the game. From there it was all systems go.
For the entire interview head over to Nerd Reator.
And if you haven’t seen Strett Fighter High already…
[Nerd Reacter via Street Fighter High and GoNintendo]
Authors bio is coming up shortly.
