Neel Upadhye is an award-winning writer, director, and transmedia storyteller with over 15 years of experience in the video game industry. After starting as an assistant editor, he rose to become the marketing creative director at Electronic Arts (EA), where he played pivotal roles in marketing and narrative development. His contributions included multiple internet-breaking shorts for Apex Legends and the production of Star Wars: The Old Republic and Squadrons - "Hunted," which won the Silver Pencil. 

Today, Neel runs a thriving consultancy, collaborating with major clients like Scopely and Giant Skull. Tune in to hear the behind-the-scenes on how he changed game marketing from transactional to compelling storytelling. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Challenges, Strategies, and Calculated Risks of Starting a Consultancy
• The Entrepreneurial Mindset
• Behind the Scenes: Creating the Star Wars Squadrons Short Film
• The Importance of Storytelling in Any Role
• Future of Transmedia and Career Advice

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Neel Upadhye on LinkedIn
• Apex Legends- Stories from the Outlands – “Voidwalker”

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful.

You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry. This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives and programmers to understand the why behind their needs.

Today we have Neel Upadhye with us. Neel is a writer, director, and transmedia storyteller with 15 years in the video game industry, and the former marketing creative director for Star Wars at Electronic Arts. Let's get started. Nailed it on your last name. 

Neel Upadhye: Well done. Well done.

Lizzie Mintus: Thanks. It's really the hardest part of podcasting. What you didn't mention is that you are doing your own consultancy and thriving. I would love to hear a little bit more about that. 

Neel Upadhye: Well, it's been such an exciting journey. It's just been about three, four months. I knew after my last job, where I'd been a VP of production at a startup that I wanted to get back to my roots, be creative again.

And the issue is that I have a lot of different interests, game development. I have a long background in marketing and it's very hard to find an opportunity that's going to use diverse skill sets like that. And so it ended up being that the opportunity that would is to work for myself and have different clients that need me for different things.

And so it's been a wild ride so far. Definitely been learning so much. And I think that's what I appreciate the most about this journey is that it's just really stretching my brain. I never thought of myself as a business person, but I've always valued making sure the work that I do is providing a business impact. And so it kind of makes sense to now make this transition and be able to help companies at a variety of different scales with different problems, but what I'm really niching into is in game narrative, for video games that are figuring out their story and how to execute it, and then marketing creative how to take that and then communicate that to the world. 

Lizzie Mintus: I feel like being T shaped is so helpful for being an entrepreneur because you're doing so many things all the time. So congrats. 

According to your LinkedIn, you have clients like Scopely and Giant Skull, which is Stig's new company and has the coolest website ever, by the way.

How did you land all of these dream clients? 

Neel Upadhye: Well, Stig was one of the first people that I called when I left Azer Gangs last year. He and I had been collaborating since 2014 when he was in early development on Jedi Fallen Order. I was helping him with some internal videos. Things to help communicate the vision of the game to new team members and things like that.

And then I was the creative director for marketing for Jedi Fallen Order through the announcement of Survivor. And in between those two games, because they were about four years apart launching, I actually did discuss joining his team on the narrative side as a writer at one point. The timing wasn't quite right.

I was in the middle of directing a Star Wars short with Industrial Light and Magic. And I really felt like, Hey, I'm on a particular path that I really need to see through, but, I swung back around. I gave him a call. I told him I was looking for my next adventure.

And Stig, he's a very methodical operator and he's incredibly good at story. And so even though he makes very story driven games, he usually doesn't get around to cracking the entire story for the game until much later in his development process. And so bringing on a narrative director wasn't really on his dev roadmap. He wasn't budgeting for that. And so we decided to just consult so I can get what he needs done at this scale and he can be more flexible.

And he almost encouraged me really to go out there and see who else needs me, but always give him the first right of refusal so we can get what he needs done. And that is what kicked me out of the nest, so to speak, of thinking I just need to find a job and then find a job to just find opportunities and find work that's interesting and take on some of that risk myself for potentially greater reward.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Entrepreneur journey. Can you talk a little bit about what it takes to get yourself up and running to do something like that from a logistical standpoint? Because I think a lot of listeners, it's in the back of a lot of people's minds, right? Someday I'm going to do my own thing. Someday I'm going to consult. I'm an expert at this. But I think the idea of actually executing takes a lot of courage and there are a lot of logistics along the way. So it'd be great to hear from you how you did it. 

Neel Upadhye: I started by just focusing on the work. I didn't even, at the beginning, even consider that I was starting to consult. I just thought, Hey, I'm going to take a couple gigs to expand my runway so that I can really find the right next full time job. And I would say that's really important. I made a very conscious choice to not worry about getting up on a website. I still don't have a website or worry about some, you know, boutique studio name.

Or even incorporating or any of those things, because I just wanted to focus on networking, doing the work and providing value. And as I started to do that, I simply just started letting people know that I was available. And I did this all through word of mouth. 

I also decided to start giving away everything I knew for free. And I hadn't been on social media for quite a while. I ditched Facebook and Twitter and all those things quite a while ago. And I decided that LinkedIn would be the platform that I would focus on just to share what I've learned over the years in the various opportunities I've had. And use that as my marketing funnel, as opposed to saying, Hey, I'm looking for work or anything like that. And so those are my two strategies. 

Just focus on finding one person who needs something, crushing it, and giving away everything I know for free, as LinkedIn content. And that is what led to these few opportunities. And then I decided strategically that when Stig was ready to talk, that's when I would also pair up my announcement with that. Because then I could kind of say, hello world, I'm already working as opposed to hello world, I need something from you. 

And so that's the approach I took. And then just recently, I've started getting clients that are very much outside of my network. And so now I'm starting to think about, okay, what is my risk tolerance? At some point, I probably do want that limited liability, need to go through the steps of forming an LLC and S corp and all of those types of things, but honestly, I'm trying to kick that ball down the road as much as I can so that the formality of running a business doesn't end up becoming the lion's share of my time, when the lion's share of my time should be doing work and setting up a pipeline for incoming work. And so that's been the number one thing right now, which means I'm operating a little riskily right now,, but it's fine. I've side hustled before. I produced an independent film, which was its own business, which I did completely as a DBA. And so that part wasn't too foreign to me. 

And I think that's working. That's kind of what I would say. If anyone's stepping out the door and trying to do this is, yeah, just give away what you know for free, do the work and, try not to make all the storefront of who you are, the main thing until you have to.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you could spend a lot of time, I think, initially getting the logistics done, which I think for most people that are creative is not what they want to do. 

Neel Upadhye: You know, I found it actually incredibly difficult to brand myself. For how much I do that for other people, it's been almost impossible to do it for myself to really even pick a niche and focus up and know how I want to say who I am. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Have a person for you. I'll send you. Well, so what's your lifestyle like? I think I had some misconceptions, probably the best word, about what it might be like to have my own business before I started it. I think I thought I would work a lot less than I do. But what's your experience? 

Neel Upadhye: I'm working a lot. But I was kind of prepared for that. I don't think I was prepared for how much interest I would get inbound. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That's awesome. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. So that's been great. What I'll say is that I'm a person whose faith is really important to them. I'm a Christian and one of the things that I also didn't expect, but a friend told me, Hey, I think you're going to really like this, is that you just become so aware of where money is coming from. And it makes you just so grateful for what God's providing, because when you just have a direct deposit paycheck, you stop thinking about it. 

And now all of a sudden, every time someone says yes, or wants a follow up or you actually get to put in an invoice and then it hits your bank account, there's this real gratitude and an understanding really having to acknowledge, wow, so much of this is out of my control. So much of it really is just out of your control. And so it keeps you humble and you're just always aware that it can dry up. And so, you know, you want to be that ant, not the grasshopper.

And so it's been a big mind shift change, in just how I think about my finances. And I think that it's also been a change for me in terms of weaning me off this addiction I had, I think, to titles and getting validation from titles. 

Lizzie Mintus: Tell me more about that. What an insightful comment. 

Neel Upadhye: Well, when I worked 14 years at one company. And so when you do a long run like that, promotions are one of the easiest ways to be able to track, do you feel like you're making progress in your career, in your life?

And now that I'm on the outside, titles literally don't matter. I'm not working at the company. No one would care what I call myself. No one even really cares how much they're paying me in terms of any respect they would confer to me. If anything, anyone that is paying a lot is probably going to be more annoyed and have an eye of Sauron on you to make sure they feel like they're getting what they paid for, right? 

And so ultimately, the only thing that matters is the value you're delivering. And that's the only thing that's going to get you respect, not the title you have when you walk in the room. And so that's been great. Again, it just focuses me on the work, just doing the work. And be a decent human being and maintain those relationships.

And so that's been awesome. It's not about the promotion anymore, you know? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's about what you're doing and sounds like right now, you're just doing the best work that you can, and it's working. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: It must be so, so gratifying. The goods feel so good when you're doing your own thing and it works. And like you said at first, right, you're not really sure where it's going to go or who's going to be interested, but congrats on taking the leap. Most people don't get there. It's scary. 

Neel Upadhye: And it would have been really different, I think, if I'd done it earlier in my career. So, once you've been in it for over a decade, you have these relationships. And as you know, it's such a small industry, people move everywhere. And so, so many of the people I'm working with are ex EA. That went somewhere else and went somewhere else.And so you can almost just follow the ex employees of your previous employers to get to people who know you, trust you and want to work with you again in whatever context. Harder to do when you're younger, I think. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So do you think that the timing made sense? Do you think that you would be as busy as you are? I know it's hard to say. It's very hypothetical, but if you would do this super early in your career, do you think it'd be the same? Are you happy that you worked at a big company and had those experiences so it could take you? 

Neel Upadhye: I think that this is the perfect timing for me. Spending 14 years and then switching to a startup, so I have experience from both sides to get to this point was really important because it built up my roster of people I've worked with that are now scattered throughout the entire industry. 

 That would have been very difficult to do in terms of having really strong, meaningful relationships from the word jump without that. It also gave me a nest egg because traditional jobs come with 401ks and all those types of things. So it also is able to Increase my risk tolerance. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Neel Upadhye: Because I started on something that was stable in the beginning. So those things are important and also allowed me to play with some really cool toys, right? I don't know how else I would have been able to touch Star Wars had I not been at a major company that could acquire that license otherwise. And the work I did there was such a proving ground for me in learning how to deal with a franchise of that magnitude, deal with a licensor that's got their own demands, really trying to learn how to do impactful original work when you will never own it.

You will never own Star Wars. And there's things you gotta adhere to. And that takes discipline as a creative to learn how to excel in a very, very tight box and know just how much to push on the edges. And so I'm grateful for the traditional corporate experience I had before coming out of it.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you share more about what it was like to work on Star Wars? You touched on it a little bit, but I'd love to hear more about putting your creative vision into such an existing IP, how you can make a difference. 

Neel Upadhye: Certainly. With something like Star Wars, I think the most important thing is to find a small little corner of the universe and then innovate in that. It's, I think in getting very, very specific, whether it's a certain player fantasy, a certain tiny niche of the timeline, a certain point of view, whatever it is, I think it's got to be very, very specific because by zooming in, it actually allows you to do more, be more playful. Because otherwise, the risk of collateral damage to knocking into other projects, which Story Group and all the others at Lucasfilm is designed to protect, that'll just lock you in if you try and go too wide, right? 

And so what it's helped me do is make a name for myself as someone who is going to focus on really intimate stories, really intimate character dramas against the backdrop of an epic world. So Star Wars becomes the big backdrop. And I'm going to focus on how I can bring two really interesting characters in front of the camera.

And that's how you get to tell something that's unique. And so I was very fortunate through my path at EA, which I can get into a little bit to go from doing the trailers and the marketing and the TV spots to then being able to help create new stories in the form of two short films that I wrote and directed, produced by Industrial Light and Magic for Star Wars. One for the game Star Wars Squadrons and then one for Star Wars, The Old Republic. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I want to hear about your transition and at first I want to hear so the Star Wars Battlefront reveal trailer was the number one viewed game trailer of 2016. How did you accomplish this? And can you share more for anyone that hasn't seen the trailer?

Neel Upadhye: Sure. So the trailer I'm talking about wasn't the reveal trailer, which was a cinematic trailer, directed by my really good friends and Dice. It was a cinematic piece. Roland Smedberg, who was at EA at the time, was the head of a group there that did a phenomenal job. But the gameplay revealed a trailer that was quite an operation.

It was a 40 person capture team, and we had three plus weeks of rehearsal running things like an action movie to go into then the final captures. And so what I mean by that is I'd written a script, and then we would load into the level. I had Michael Callahan as my capture director. We had an assistant capture director, one who was directing the hero gamer, who was basically the camera operator slash lead actor. And then, another capture director that was basically corralling all the extras. 

And we would choreograph a fight scene. Where do you go? What mark do you hit? What vehicle are you driving? When do you shoot? When do you look up? And we would run take after, take after take to get these perfect moments that felt super cinematic where we were being run purely in the game in a way that was really designed to show off everything that the game has to offer.

And that game was I think just so anticipated because it was the first game after EA signed the license. The Battlefront franchise had been dormant for so long since the pandemic had been shut down. And I think we nailed it. The entire team absolutely nailed it. Very long days. It was really like being on shoot.

And I'll paint a picture for you of what this looks like. You yell action, 40 people start running through the scene, half of them are Imperials, half of them are Rebels, you're blowing up AT ATs, you're flying speeders over the surface of Hoth. And then after y'all cut, there's someone that's almost got the power of the operator in the matrix that then types in a few commands at a central server computer. And everyone snaps back to their first position. Type in a few commands, everyone spawns into a secret level where they can reload. It's like Neo saying, guns, we need guns. And now you can reload all your grenades, everything, then hop back where you were, reset all the damage on the level and go again.

And so it really was like being on a giant action set where everyone gets a reset. And you can unexplode the set and go again. Mental. And if DICE hadn't given us that kind of control on the back end to be able to do these things, we could have never have done it and achieved anything close to the cinematic quality that we got out of a gameplay trailer.

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. And then tell me about the rest of your Star Wars time, and then we'll go back. I want to talk about your career and how you got there, but other Star Wars highlights, please. 

Neel Upadhye: Sure. Well, the Star Wars trailer, the Star Wars short film that I did for Squadrons, was an amazing experience. Definitely a career highlight for me. Squadrons was an interesting game. It was a niche game compared to the Jedi Fallen Order. It was a X Wing versus TIE fighter flight sim, and it had a much smaller marketing budget. And so the challenge was how do we get people hyped for this? And I proposed that we create a piece that isn't a trailer, which is like a promise for entertainment.

Let's just entertain people. Let's do a short film that reignites people's love for X Wings and TIE Fighters and gets them jazzed. And the pitch that I had for it was, this game takes place after the fall of the second Death Star. Vader's dead, Emperor's dead, Empire is now the underdog. So what if we took what you expect from an X Wing vs TIE Fighter story and inverted it, and made the Empire the underdog hero? 

And we got to experience what it feels like to be that TIE pilot that's got a rebel ace on your back. And then from there, I was inspired to keep inverting all the visual language as well. How can we shoot the X Wing with the kind of stark anonymity that you usually use to shoot TIE fighters? You never see the guy's eyes. The helmet is very, very stark. Close ups on the engine. Slight processing on those sounds, it almost makes it feel like it's the machine that's trying to kill you, like the semi truck in Steven Spielberg's Duel. Even the very first shot starts just like A New Hope with the Star Destroyer coming in over your head. And then the camera rotates 180 degrees and the Star Destroyer blows up, just showing that the Empire is losing. 

And so that pitch is what we got to take to Lucasfilm, to James Wan, the story group. And it passed their scrutiny and they were excited to move forward. And then there was this one itch, the script went to ILM and I think it was the president of ILM who looked at it and saw my name on it and said like, who's this guy?

I never heard of this guy. He can't direct this. And it was just a moment, it goes to show the power of just being a good person and maintaining good relationships. Because the games division at Lucasfilm went to bat for me and said, no, this guy knows what he's doing and vouched for me. And so I only heard about it after it was all resolved.

I got a call from Lucasfilm and they said, just so you know, this happened and it's all fine. You're directing. And then I got to meet John Knoll, who is the inventor of Photoshop, one of the founders of industrial light and magic, did visual effects on the original Star Wars, absolute legend. He was the original person who came up with the idea for the Rogue One movie, years and years ago. And he really gravitated towards this piece and he became our visual effects supervisor on it.

And so I was able to just lean on his intimate knowledge of Star Wars to know exactly which version of a Star Destroyer I was showing here, for the era it's in, exactly what the radio towers look like. Those types of details, which was just phenomenal. And then the pandemic hit. And so we ended up directing the entire thing remotely.

We had a mocap actor on a stage, me on a zoom robot to be able to talk to him. He's playing both parts, jumping into wooden cardboard, X wing cockpit sets on this mocap stage and jumping into a TIE fighter set on the mocap stage, all of which we've used to map to how the in-game cockpit looks, because that game had a diegetic cockpit. You could see the buttons that were being pressed and they did things, which was really cool. And it was a fast, fast production. I wrote the script in January, got it past all the stakeholders, including Lucasfilm, by March, went to production and it was done by August. And so it was incredibly lightning fast.

And that's the piece that eventually, after years and years of doing independent film on the side, going to film school, that I finally got an agent and a manager out of that experience. So it's weird how working in games and working in a traditional job at EA was one of the things that gave me a lot of liberty and opportunity in just my personal creative pursuits.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you navigate? I want to hear the story of getting into EA. You started out in film and you ended up in games. And I know we talked a little bit before the show about how you have such a unique career path. 

So can you share about like your early days, how you got into good jobs you did and how you worked your way up?

Neel Upadhye: Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I went to USC film school and when I was graduating, I had two opportunities in front of me. One was to go to a union post house. I'd be dubbing tapes in the back, one day they'd let me touch an Avid. And the other was to join EA as an assistant editor cutting marketing podcasts.

And I decided to go over that route because they were going to let me edit right away. And I felt like I'd be getting better at my craft every single day. Three years in, I thought I'd made a huge mistake. All my friends that were getting coffee for Seth MacFarlane were ending up in the writer's room.

And I thought, Oh no, I've gone into this weird, other career. Yeah. But as we know, over the next decade, video games just became more cinematic and immersive. And film and the video game industry really just merged and everyone's competing for the same entertainment dollar.

And so strangely as EA got the Star Wars license and I started to position myself and advocate for myself within the company to be on games that were more story driven, I started to just shape my way towards going from an assistant editor to a post suit to a creative director eventually on the marketing side. To eventually one day, having a sit down with the VP of content at EA and having a discussion with him about how I felt like our marketing was too transactional and we weren't doing enough storytelling in our marketing. We treated the game as entertainment and the marketing as this thing to sell the entertainment. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Neel Upadhye: And as game makers, we really measure DAU quite a bit because we know that the more days someone shows up, the more likely they are to buy something in the future to come back, right? So what can we do to extend people's DAU with the brand even when they don't have a controller in their hand. 

And so I wanted to do more transmedia storytelling and treat the entire, every touch point with the game or the brand as a part of the entertainment product. And that sounded good to him. His name was Charles Ka. And he said, yeah, go figure it out. There's no money. Sounds awesome

. And so that turned into nine months of me running around, knocking on the doors of all these studios within EA to try and find the right opportunity to make this transmedia thing happen while I was still taking care of Star Wars. And so talk to Plants vs Zombies. The Anthem game was coming out at the time, lots of things, it all fell flat.

And then one day I had a meeting with Respawn. They were about four months or so away from launching Apex Legends, which if you remember was a ghost launch. And I talked to them and said, look, this is a perfect opportunity. You have a game that's got heroes. We need emotional attachment to those heroes. There's no single player campaign. Marketing can be the single player. Let's do it. And I got a big no. 

Essentially what they said was that the game had a different headcanon in everyone's heads. There was no way for someone that wasn't in the building to do what I was trying to do while they were trying to ship this game. And so I said, okay, I'll just start working from this building then. 

And on Monday, just called their bluff, I just started driving across the city and started working from Respawn every day. They're still too busy to meet with me, but just bumping into them on the way to the bathroom all the time, I started to extract from their heads what they were passionate about. And eventually we were able to get the first short film for the character Wraith out the door. 

And that was the first, Stories from the Outlands, as we called it. The first long form story that was nine to 10 minutes long. And then we continued to do that for the subsequent heroes. And I wrote and directed six of those. And what we found is that a short film for Raath called Boy Walker, which I got to do in conjunction with this animation company in Poland called Laish, became the number one watched video on the channel. And the skin, the cosmetic skin that we made that mirrored a character in the short became the number one monetized skin in the game.

And then this happened again for the next short that we did too. And so that was a really amazing moment that showed what can happen when a cross functional team all executes together and you're keeping business needs in mind as a creative to be able to unlock the opportunities to even go do something cool like that. Cause this was all of course, a part of the pitch.

From the beginning we were talking about how we can have an event the day that this launches in the game. At first, the team was like, don't sign us up for anything. Make your short film take place on the freaking other side of the universe because you're going to write checks, we can't cash. You crash a ship in the middle of the map. Everyone's going to want to see that ship and we don't have time to make a crash ship, that kind of thing. 

But then as the story started to come together, the team got so excited that they went ahead and did that kind of stuff. And so, you have this secret lab in the film, all of a sudden there's a secret hatch and you can go in that lab in the game and find audio logs and recordings that fill in even more details around the short film.

And so all of a sudden, the marketing becomes a tee up for the game. The game tees up something that you see on Twitter as a teaser. Tees up the next short film. And all of a sudden you're just weaving in and out of the game. And it becomes this really powerful engagement mechanism. 

And that was the beginning of this little department just called narrative that I got to start running and got the funding to do within EA. It took me to doing a foundational narrative work for Battlefield 2042. Then Criterion raised their hands and said, Hey, we need some help. And I became the lead writer for the single player campaign on Need for Speed. And by that point, I was essentially a dev at EA, just on loan from marketing with marketing paying my paycheck. 

Eventually, for a lot of personal reasons in my life, I felt a need to make a change. I'm a foster father. I had these two foster daughters that had just left my home. And I think a part of my grieving process was like just needing to change something up. You know, I couldn't just keep the rest of my life the same and have this whole. And so I started looking for a challenge and that's when the opportunity to go to Azure games, came up. And so at that point I was like, yeah, I've got bit by the dev bug and I want to see where this takes me.

Lizzie Mintus: Good for you. So many people get caught up and like, I was doing this, I was making this, my title was this at the big company. So I'm glad you took the chance. 

And so just to get this right, Respawn told you no. Then you said that you were just gonna go, you just informed them that, or maybe didn't inform them and then you drove to their office. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Got information from them and started it that way. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. I mean, Respawn is a EA studio, so I just decided to show up and start working from there so I could steal their time in informal meetings. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, on the way to the bathroom. I can just imagine someone hurrying, like really hurrying in between their meetings. But wait! 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah, exactly. And it was tough because the Apex team is really different from the Jedi team and Stig's team at Respawn that I had a relationship with already. Because Stig's team was pretty top down. Stig is the game director. He really knows what type of game he wants to make. He's a very collaborative individual, but he directs the direction of the game. 

 The Apex team at the time was insanely democratic to a fault. Everyone got an opinion and there wasn't a single decision maker on most things. And so that meant corralling a lot of people and having to really get this giant snowball of momentum going. And a few people in marketing were really behind me and I think they did some shadow puppeting in the background really, really grateful to Arturo Castro and Jason Torfin who were there at the time. And they really helped me navigate the landmines relationships that needed to go through that.

But man, that project, it gets my heart rate up. It literally almost killed me. We were pulling off nine minutes of animation at a completely preposterous budget. And as a result, there were a lot of visual bugs and a lot of production value concerns, despite everyone's best efforts on the vendor side and our side and everything. And I had to fly out to Poland and just do everything I possibly could to try and fix these things and get the quality concerns resolved. 

And this was after Dusty, who is the COO of Respawn, kind of implying after seeing a near final cut that, eh, it's, I don't know. It's okay. And kind of implying we should kill it. If we were smart, we would cut our losses. And so, I remember this one moment where I just felt like there's nothing else I can do. We've hit render. I've given every note. I've been up for 39 hours and there's nothing else to do. 

And we screened it from Poland to LA and they said, it's good enough. We're going to ship it. And I passed out. I've never slept in the entirety of an international flight before. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Neel Upadhye: And I landed, we released it on the internet, became the number one video on the channel, up to like 9 million views or something. And Dusty, to his credit, actually caught me and he said, Hey, you were right. And I'll think twice before I say something like that again. That was really great. But I still start heaving when I think about just how close that came to not happening and then my entire career trajectory could have been completely different. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, there's these little butterfly moments that change things. So what did you do to fix it? You went to Poland. Can you elaborate a little bit more on whatever you're allowed to say about what the issues were and how you figured out what was good enough to ship? That's always so many people's questions. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah, ultimately we needed to do what the game couldn't do, and that was emotional talkie talk dialogue scenes. There was no way that our action scenes were going to live up to the type of adrenaline that the game could deliver. And so with the time remaining and almost the impossible budget that we were working with, what I tried to do was just triage, continuous triage. Morning triage, meeting, afternoon triage, meeting, QC, list the bugs, triage the bugs in real time. And that couldn't have been done at that point, with the remote situation. We would have lost too much time. And so that's what I really did. 

And there were a lot of people who cared very much on the vendor side. And it really wasn't their fault. I don't think it ever makes a difference, like you have to be so careful about what you green light. Just because someone tells you, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll lower our expectations based on what we're going to give you to produce something, they haven't really and respond as perfectionists, as am I. And so it was kind of an untenable situation.

So at the end of the day, it really just became about directing every dollar and every second that we had left to the moments that could make the biggest emotional impact. And do what the piece was meant to do. Just compliment the game, not try and beat the game at its own game. All about the dialogue and emotional moments. Let the action scenes be what they are. 

Lizzie Mintus: I love so many of the most successful things that have that life or death moment that you never hear about people are like, oh it came out. This is great. We love it. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. Yeah 

Lizzie Mintus: Turns out you're up for 35 hours before. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah, it sucked. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, but that was worth it. I know you think it's really important to be a good storyteller no matter what your job is Tell me more about that 

Neel Upadhye: Well, I think human beings were natural born storytellers. And just telling the story of my career, right? You're able to connect with my hopes and my ambitions and what's gone wrong. And in that same way, I think that whether you're in marketing and you recognize that your customer really is the hero of their own story, not you. And so how is what you're putting out there going to fit into the narrative that they want to write about themselves, right?

That's so powerful. And in just the same way, the games have to recognize that, especially story driven games, the main character is actually the player. Because the player makes the decisions, the characters don't. And so, how are you, in that context, going to try and create as little friction between what the avatar is feeling and what the player is feeling. Because when that gap grows, that's when you get bumped out. The character's freaking out and super emotional, but there's nothing that's been done to get the player in that state to have that same emotional affinity for the situation, then they're going to get bumped out. And so it's just, I think, continuously projecting into who your audience is.

I think that's key to telling a story because we change how we tell stories based on who we're talking to, don't we? And so, if ultimately what we're selling is the self actualization or an opportunity for the self actualization of someone else, through the product they buy or the game they play in the world they get to go to, then knowing how are you going to change how you tell the story based on who you're talking to is kind of a vital skill to have.

Lizzie Mintus: And if any of our listeners want to improve their storytelling capabilities and understanding what are some actionable steps they could take? 

Neel Upadhye: Hmm. Well, I love Judith Weston's book, Directing Actors. I think that's a great book that gets into the things that actors have to do and the types of methods that they have for active listening, that is so important for step to knowing your audience is going to be to listen to them.I think that type of craft, which also, again, talks about improv, talks about, how do you go quote unquote off script? All these things are really strangely applicable to other areas and other arts. So I'd recommend that book.

Writing, it's storytelling that requires permission from no one else and $0. And so whether it's writing a blog or sharing what you know, or being the person that's going to do your internal company milestone updates or whatever it is, how can you do that? How can you make that work? 

When I was a producer, that was a constant thing I was trying to crack. I've got some really important information to communicate. I know the open rate on this email is gonna be junk. So, how am I gonna write the hook, and so the most important things get across. Or, I do something that's slightly entertaining. Or, whatever it is that's gonna make people get through it. Or am I going to go where they are? Am I going to post these on the homepage of Jira or whatever software everyone's going to log into every day? Is it going to be on the masthead of the homepage for notion or something like that? So you're using channels to your advantage. You're using tight, concise communication and writing to your advantage. When to call a meeting, when to not call a meeting. 

And so I wasn't in a narrative job at all, but my job was to make sure everyone understood the story that we're trying to tell together and understanding as a people leader that everyone is looking for their own improvement. They're trying to work through all the interpersonal issues and helping to untangle those webs. And everyone's got a story and you got to get to the truth behind them.

I'd probably say that's the biggest thing you can do, is. finding any way that you can to communicate to someone in a way that it can be heard by them. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It seems like that's really useful for just about any job as well. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Any job where you're interacting with people. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Most jobs. And maybe also getting your own story straight too, because you get asked about yourself all the time. What do you say? 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. And it's interesting. I actually found interviewing to be kind of hard after being in jobs and then going to another job where I was kind of recruited. I found myself really interviewing for a job for the first time in almost 15, 16 years late last year. And it was way tougher than I thought it would be. 

Lizzie Mintus: Because you have such a variety of skills, right? And it was hard to figure out how to explain those. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. It was hard to communicate what it is I'm looking for. And I think that started to be a sign for me. 

Lizzie Mintus: You have to get that. I mean, to anyone listening who's in a job search, I personally think it's your responsibility to figure that out. And maybe if you can't figure it out, you should start your own business. But if anyone asks you what you're looking for, and you're like, Oh, I don't know a job or remote job. It's like dating, right?

I always make this analogy. If you're on a date with someone, they're like, What are you looking for? Oh, I just want to get married. I just want a warm body. Like, that's not attractive, right? So I feel like the more detailed you can be, the better. But it's hard when you've done your own thing and you've done so many different things. And a lot of times the jobs are so focused and singular, but the startup appreciates that you're T shaped. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah, that's true. 

Lizzie Mintus: Things are harder. Although, obviously, you did so many things within a big company. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah, and I switched jobs within the startup too. I came in with something that was a little bit more of a hybrid role. I wanted to lean more into the development side, but was offering my marketing experience. I felt like that's what I kind of needed to provide as a plus up. Eventually I moved into a purely production role on the dev side. And that was a lesson too. 

That was a job that I would have never applied for and probably not taken, was I not already at the company with the sense of, Hey, whatever we need to do to ship the product, no one else's. Raising their hand and the CEO is asking so nicely, you know? And man, I don't know that I would go back into that kind of seat again. 

I'm really glad I did it. Again, it kept my brain plastic. I went and got scrum certified and did all these things and I think I did well in the things that are adjacent to what I'm most passionate about, which is leading teams of people and communicating a vision and refining it, setting scope and executing. But in terms of, I don't know what book it was at this point, but I read somewhere that you should be passionate about the business outcome that your job is tied to.

And the dollars and cents and scope efficiency that I was going to be measured by as a producer are not the things that get me the most excited. It's the definition of the product, the storytelling within that product, the connection with the audience, and inspiring teams that gets me the most excited. And so it did check all the boxes and I kind of lost the narrative honestly, a little bit on that one. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, but I'm sure, I mean, it brought you to where you are today in the end. Good to self reflect and evaluate. All right. There are some jobs you can do, but yeah, maybe not the right job.

I have one last question. Tell me about the future of transmedia films made stories and games. It's such a hot subject right now. . 

Well, 

Neel Upadhye: I wish we were talking just a few days from now. I'm chatting with some people at WME that are specifically now agents in the video game space. This is a new thing. This has not been a thing for a while, so it'll be curious to see what perspective they have on where things are going and why they're deploying resources in this direction. I think the future is probably an expansion of this space and a further blurring of the lines.

I don't know that any particular medium is going to go away. There's been people who have run the death knell of theaters for a long time. Then people run the death knell of the box product. And people rung the death knell of single player games. And it's never been the case. And so do I think that there's going to be metaverse experiences, probably an evolution of Fortnite, if there is a metaverse, it's Fortnite. I certainly think that's the case. That's true. And more and more companies that are trying to push the live service model will continue to see their organic channels as. Another funnel and opportunity for engagement. And there will probably be more people looking for the types of skill sets I've organically kind of snowballed together.

And so if you're on the marketing side, I think it's a great time to understand how to work in a virtual space. Whether that's stagecraft, like what ILM has, or working within unreal virtual cameras, understanding mocap workflows. And if you're on the games side, I think it's a great time to break down the walls between your team and the marketing team, which is somehow profoundly difficult. 

Lizzie Mintus: I've had marketers on and they say the same thing, and had a community manager on and she said how really everybody should be involved from the get go because you can't just have the devs create something, marketing create something else and then community management is dealing with the cleanup. 

Neel Upadhye: You really have to know how you want to take this thing out to the world before you start building it, I think. It can just be the CEO, but someone has to really be thinking about how this product is going to show up. How would I talk about this product at the end of the road? One really useful exercise that me and the creative director at Azure did at the inception of the product was write a review of the game as if it was already out. And so pretend to be journalists, play our own game, what are the things that have popped out to this player enough to write about it? And what are the experiences that they've had as they played it? 

And that was a really great, like refining document, to say like, what are we actually putting out there? How do we want people to talk about this actually? And what are the four instances and four examples that a reviewer is going to call out to support these statements about the types of, you know, fun or fantasy that they had. And that was a great exercise in projecting forward to make sure that what you're doing is actually viable and it's going to connect.

Lizzie Mintus: It's good to do for your life too. I did that exercise, 10 years from now, where will you be? What will your life look like? Kind of the same things. What will you have done? And it makes you think. I think anything like that is good. 

Neel Upadhye: And then you let go of the outcomes, right? Because none of that is ultimately, the outcomes are on your hands, but the effort certainly is.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you can kind of reverse engineer it. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Talking to Neel Upadhyay. Tell me again. 

Neel Upadhye: Upadhyay. 

Lizzie Mintus: Upadhyay. 

Neel Upadhye: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Creative director and consultant, Neel, where can people go? I know you don't have a website, but where can they go to learn more about what you're doing and hire you to work for them? 

Neel Upadhye: Please find me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. I'd be happy to chat. 

Lizzie Mintus: Great. Thank you so much. 

Neel Upadhye: Thank you. This was great. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.