EPT
William "Chobra" Cho was once a regular fixture in StarCraft II, bringing class and energy to the stage as a tournament host. In 2015, Chobra decided to refocus his efforts, joining ESL as a producer.
At IEM Gyeonggi, I talked to Chobra about the uniqueness of StarCraft, the conundrum of hyping up "faceless Koreans," and terrible trophy ceremonies.
*This interview has been edited and condensed.
![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Waxangel/chobraiem.jpg)
Photo: Patrick Strack/IEM
Wax: What have you been up to? You were a regular part of our lives for a while, and we haven’t seen you that often lately.
Chobra: I think the last event I was at as a host/interviewer was DreamHack Austin. That was May of 2016. Since then—well even before that in 2016—I’ve been focusing more on production work. I’ve been slowly starting my full transition to a producer role at ESL America.
That’s always been the long term goal, I think, for me. I didn’t quite expect it to happen this soon. But there were just opportunities and timings that lined up. So that’s what I’ve been doing, partaking in multiple different projects, Intel Extreme Masters obviously being one of them. I kind of jumped into it this season, with a pretty brand new crew, to start seeing what we can do for the future of Intel Extreme Masters.
I’m really—how should I say it—I’m testing the waters as a producer to see what I am capable of. This was my first, warm-up year, I think, to figure out where I’m at, figure out what I need to learn, and where I need to go from there.
The reason I didn’t purposefully “retire” from hosting is not because I want it in my back pocket, but because... I’m more than happy to do it, it’s just that right now I think there’s more that I can do, especially at ESL, as a producer than a host.
You’re a producer for just IEM, or other brands, too?
So I produced Heroes of the Storm North America Regionals all year for ESL, and then I’m the producer for League of Legends at Intel Extreme Masters.
Just to clarify for the readers, what exactly does a producer do in esports?
It differs from field to field, but generally a producer’s role is to draft up the picture you’re going for. You’re helping set the theme, the tone, how you want to structure the entire show, whether it’s timings, whether it’s being part of all the design talks, etc. But you’re not the one actually executing those parts—you have the graphics team, on-air production teams, etc. that do the media. The producer is kind of responsible for making sure all these parts come together into one picture, instead of all being pretty, but separate smaller pictures.
You’ve been working a lot on team games. How’s it feel to be back in the middle of a StarCraft tournament?
It’s funny because I always kind of forget, when it’s been a while, what makes StarCraft specifically so different, other than the history of the game or the technicalities of the game itself. And I think—I was talking with a couple of my co-workers here—it’s the one versus one nature.
Even just watching that as a producer… something about it, I think, has a little bit more emotional pull for me. So it’s definitely good to be back, even if I’m not on stage, to be able to watch and to be directly caring about these players and their results.
What’s special about the 1v1 games?
I think 1v1 games, from a production perspective, it’s just easier to—well it’s not necessarily easier, I should say—the intensity is more apparent. It helps as a tool to tell the story better; the focus is just on one player or the other, A or B.
Whereas in a team game, you are going to have superstars on teams, that hard carry or that become legendary, but the attention is a little split. At the end of the day, I think what you’ll notice is still, no matter how much you talk about brands, their histories, and their awards, the real thing that fans like to discuss are the players, individually. I think it’s because we want to be indirectly competitive through them, vicariously through their competition, I think that’s where it comes from.
One of the most annoying things about team games is the shot where they’re all trying to lift the trophy at once, but they fail miserably. Everyone just looks terrible just trying to lift it together. How do you solve that?
Jeez. How DO you solve that? That’s a good question. I mean, obviously, I think a good answer is, if the trophy is big enough, it looks a little better depending on the tournament.
What a nice plug for the gigantic IEM World Championship trophy.
*laughs* I’m not gonna lie, that’s exactly what went through my head.
I think the trophy is fine, I think maybe the concept around the fact that it has to be a “lift” as a celebration, perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way. Because, you know, there’s trophies in other team competitions, too, and I think we’re in this rut where it’s always “they win, they do the handshake, they walk to the trophy, they’re gonna lift it, they’re gonna kiss it, we’re gonna do promo photos, we’re gonna do that 360 cam.” It’s all the same formula across different broadcasters.
I think we’re so focused on the OTHER parts of the broadcast, I think we’re like “this is okay, this is acceptable,” so I think a lot of us have just become complacent with it.
What are your thoughts on champagne?
Champagne. Whew, I’m kind of thankful I haven’t had to produce a show with Champagne. *laughs* I think it’s tough, it’s very tough. I don’t have any intentions to put Champagne into a ceremony myself, but if I have to, I’ll see what happens.
As someone who’s had to try and sell the faceless Korean as a host and interviewer, how is that now as a producer? Do you feel like you have more control, that you have more power to make these guys more interesting? Because honestly, they’re not always the most entertaining guys...
You have your hits and your misses for sure. I think I do have more power to influence that, but I think it doesn’t always show—it has a higher threshold. When it’s an interview, I just have to hit that one question and then I’m golden for that player for the weekend. It takes one question to set up a personality.
Whereas with production, it has to be from beginning to end. I have to have in mind: if this player wins, this is the story, this is their background. I kind of have to have that all laid out. And once you hit it, the impact is way bigger. But if I drop a step in the middle, and it doesn’t quite connect, I think the story gets lost in the noise of everything else.
That’s like a classic OGN technique. Let’s find the first thing that sticks and drive it into the ground. It’s “we’ve now forced this upon you, and this is your identity for life.” But they’re so good at it, I can’t even complain.
To be honest, I think OGN does it well, but I think it’s a common direction in broadcasting in general. Because at the end of the day, the broadcaster is the one telling the story, and I think…
I remember, there were a couple of instances in Heroes, depending on which media pieces I shot per season, I would see the impact of it in the community. In a sense, it was really fun, but in a sense, it was like “this is where I gotta make sure I plan way ahead,” because one pre-game interview, one feature about the team could change the brand for the team, and I can’t just toy with that. It has to have logic to it.
What can you really do, though, besides produce an extremely expensive feature? Obviously, the ones at BlizzCon were amazing, but those cost a ****ton of money. Ideally you want to do those, and you will do those for certain huge events, but what can you do at a smaller scale?
A good example I think, is something as simple as who you choose to show how often during a live broadcast. So if it’s a team game, if you’re showing player #3 constantly, call him Steve, when something is happening to the team, you’re building him up as the face of the team. But obviously you want to do it with good logic, in that you’ve seen Steve pop-off on stage before, super hyped-up, so that’s my guy. I think you have to build that connection.
Something else, people talk about it all the time, and I think it’s getting more use: stats. If you use them right to build the story, and you display them well graphically, it has a big influence.
For StarCraft, it is hard. In a way, there are too many small factors, so that when you isolate them they don’t mean too much on their own. In StarCraft, it’s definitely a hard one.
Let’s do a concrete example. Our champion, INnoVation, who’s going to Katowice. How are we going to make people hyped for INnoVation? How are we going to make people care about the most boring progamer in the history of—well, no, that might be Maru. Anyway.
So when I saw INnoVation this weekend, personally, the story I’m looking at is through my connections with him. I first met him back in WCS 2013 when he was killing it, and then he kind of dropped off. I saw him again at Gamescom, where he was kind of getting back into it, and everyone was going “oooh, is innovation coming back?” before he dropped off again.
I think, someone like INnoVation, someone that "stoic" to put it in a positive way; you really kind of have to paint the story rather than just tell it. He may not talk about it, but the journey must have meant something to him, because if it didn’t mean anything, I honestly don’t think he would ever improve again.
If you’re doing worse as a player—no matter how little emotion you show—if you don’t really care, then why would you improve, why would you practice? You’d be like “oh, I’ll just kind of fade out” or whatever. But clearly that’s not the mentality he has.
I think if you start painting that, and he starts seeing the effects of his own story being told by someone else, I think that can also start help him be a bit more expressive. I think he doesn’t know how to share some of those stories, I think.
How much do you feel that you’re at the mercy of the casters? Where you’re like “I can’t do anything about this, I gotta pray Tastosis hit a home-run here.”
I think that’s the difference. I think that’s why I enjoy production a lot. At the end of the day, the final, FINAL call, to be honest, it IS in the casters’ hands. I mean maybe if you have a really strict director/producer, you might get fired if you don’t follow the story. But in that moment, you have the say, you’re the person talking on camera, you’re the voice that’s being heard.
Once I switched, I learned a lot more about the importance of syncing with casters beforehand. And I do like to respect their opinions, because they’re the ones who are following their scene nonstop. You put it all together, saying [i]“alright, this is the core story I have for this tournament," take the pieces the casters set for a bunch of different players, and decide these are the spots we want to hit.
Sometimes they don’t deliver it the way I imagine so, but other times they kind of save your butt and come up with a golden nugget you would have never thought of.
What’s the biggest lesson you learned from working at OGN in the past?
The most important thing I learned at OGN was actually working and social life. Company life, and how to adapt. Because I used think, man I’m learning all this cool production stuff, but then, once I went to ESL, I realized that in those short two and a half years, I learned so much about how a company works.
Once you learn the Korean hierarchy, you’re f***ing set.
But that’s what it is. I kind of got really, really hardcore bootcamping. And then I came out, and I was like “okay, you’re gonna butt heads with certain people, this is how you get through it” and THAT is actually the biggest thing I learned from OGN.
So basically you’re saying Korea is the best at training people, not just in competition, but in production as well. Alright, let’s wrap up with some hype for Katowice.
Katowice, I’ll say this: I’ve been part of all the major world championships, I’ve been part of all the publisher tournaments, but the Katowice stages are still the most memorable.
And I think it’s the combination of everything. It’s not strictly that it’s 100% the best designed stage—it’s hard to say that.
It’s the stage that... as much as game specific fans might not feel the impact, there's a lot of history and people that built the tournament. Both times that I’ve hosted—the first time I got on the Katowice stage, it just floored me. If you're thinking about going, definitely check it out if you haven't before. But if you're not, I would hope that it even a little bit of that impact gets captured on camera.
You can follow Chobra, Intel Extreme Masters, and Wax on Twitter. Intel Extreme Masters Season XI will conclude in March of 2017 at the World Championship in Katowice, Poland.
At IEM Gyeonggi, I talked to Chobra about the uniqueness of StarCraft, the conundrum of hyping up "faceless Koreans," and terrible trophy ceremonies.
*This interview has been edited and condensed.
Photo: Patrick Strack/IEM
Wax: What have you been up to? You were a regular part of our lives for a while, and we haven’t seen you that often lately.
Chobra: I think the last event I was at as a host/interviewer was DreamHack Austin. That was May of 2016. Since then—well even before that in 2016—I’ve been focusing more on production work. I’ve been slowly starting my full transition to a producer role at ESL America.
That’s always been the long term goal, I think, for me. I didn’t quite expect it to happen this soon. But there were just opportunities and timings that lined up. So that’s what I’ve been doing, partaking in multiple different projects, Intel Extreme Masters obviously being one of them. I kind of jumped into it this season, with a pretty brand new crew, to start seeing what we can do for the future of Intel Extreme Masters.
I’m really—how should I say it—I’m testing the waters as a producer to see what I am capable of. This was my first, warm-up year, I think, to figure out where I’m at, figure out what I need to learn, and where I need to go from there.
The reason I didn’t purposefully “retire” from hosting is not because I want it in my back pocket, but because... I’m more than happy to do it, it’s just that right now I think there’s more that I can do, especially at ESL, as a producer than a host.
You’re a producer for just IEM, or other brands, too?
So I produced Heroes of the Storm North America Regionals all year for ESL, and then I’m the producer for League of Legends at Intel Extreme Masters.
Just to clarify for the readers, what exactly does a producer do in esports?
It differs from field to field, but generally a producer’s role is to draft up the picture you’re going for. You’re helping set the theme, the tone, how you want to structure the entire show, whether it’s timings, whether it’s being part of all the design talks, etc. But you’re not the one actually executing those parts—you have the graphics team, on-air production teams, etc. that do the media. The producer is kind of responsible for making sure all these parts come together into one picture, instead of all being pretty, but separate smaller pictures.
You’ve been working a lot on team games. How’s it feel to be back in the middle of a StarCraft tournament?
It’s funny because I always kind of forget, when it’s been a while, what makes StarCraft specifically so different, other than the history of the game or the technicalities of the game itself. And I think—I was talking with a couple of my co-workers here—it’s the one versus one nature.
Even just watching that as a producer… something about it, I think, has a little bit more emotional pull for me. So it’s definitely good to be back, even if I’m not on stage, to be able to watch and to be directly caring about these players and their results.
What’s special about the 1v1 games?
I think 1v1 games, from a production perspective, it’s just easier to—well it’s not necessarily easier, I should say—the intensity is more apparent. It helps as a tool to tell the story better; the focus is just on one player or the other, A or B.
Whereas in a team game, you are going to have superstars on teams, that hard carry or that become legendary, but the attention is a little split. At the end of the day, I think what you’ll notice is still, no matter how much you talk about brands, their histories, and their awards, the real thing that fans like to discuss are the players, individually. I think it’s because we want to be indirectly competitive through them, vicariously through their competition, I think that’s where it comes from.
One of the most annoying things about team games is the shot where they’re all trying to lift the trophy at once, but they fail miserably. Everyone just looks terrible just trying to lift it together. How do you solve that?
Jeez. How DO you solve that? That’s a good question. I mean, obviously, I think a good answer is, if the trophy is big enough, it looks a little better depending on the tournament.
What a nice plug for the gigantic IEM World Championship trophy.
*laughs* I’m not gonna lie, that’s exactly what went through my head.
I think the trophy is fine, I think maybe the concept around the fact that it has to be a “lift” as a celebration, perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way. Because, you know, there’s trophies in other team competitions, too, and I think we’re in this rut where it’s always “they win, they do the handshake, they walk to the trophy, they’re gonna lift it, they’re gonna kiss it, we’re gonna do promo photos, we’re gonna do that 360 cam.” It’s all the same formula across different broadcasters.
I think we’re so focused on the OTHER parts of the broadcast, I think we’re like “this is okay, this is acceptable,” so I think a lot of us have just become complacent with it.
What are your thoughts on champagne?
Champagne. Whew, I’m kind of thankful I haven’t had to produce a show with Champagne. *laughs* I think it’s tough, it’s very tough. I don’t have any intentions to put Champagne into a ceremony myself, but if I have to, I’ll see what happens.
As someone who’s had to try and sell the faceless Korean as a host and interviewer, how is that now as a producer? Do you feel like you have more control, that you have more power to make these guys more interesting? Because honestly, they’re not always the most entertaining guys...
You have your hits and your misses for sure. I think I do have more power to influence that, but I think it doesn’t always show—it has a higher threshold. When it’s an interview, I just have to hit that one question and then I’m golden for that player for the weekend. It takes one question to set up a personality.
Whereas with production, it has to be from beginning to end. I have to have in mind: if this player wins, this is the story, this is their background. I kind of have to have that all laid out. And once you hit it, the impact is way bigger. But if I drop a step in the middle, and it doesn’t quite connect, I think the story gets lost in the noise of everything else.
That’s like a classic OGN technique. Let’s find the first thing that sticks and drive it into the ground. It’s “we’ve now forced this upon you, and this is your identity for life.” But they’re so good at it, I can’t even complain.
To be honest, I think OGN does it well, but I think it’s a common direction in broadcasting in general. Because at the end of the day, the broadcaster is the one telling the story, and I think…
I remember, there were a couple of instances in Heroes, depending on which media pieces I shot per season, I would see the impact of it in the community. In a sense, it was really fun, but in a sense, it was like “this is where I gotta make sure I plan way ahead,” because one pre-game interview, one feature about the team could change the brand for the team, and I can’t just toy with that. It has to have logic to it.
What can you really do, though, besides produce an extremely expensive feature? Obviously, the ones at BlizzCon were amazing, but those cost a ****ton of money. Ideally you want to do those, and you will do those for certain huge events, but what can you do at a smaller scale?
A good example I think, is something as simple as who you choose to show how often during a live broadcast. So if it’s a team game, if you’re showing player #3 constantly, call him Steve, when something is happening to the team, you’re building him up as the face of the team. But obviously you want to do it with good logic, in that you’ve seen Steve pop-off on stage before, super hyped-up, so that’s my guy. I think you have to build that connection.
Something else, people talk about it all the time, and I think it’s getting more use: stats. If you use them right to build the story, and you display them well graphically, it has a big influence.
For StarCraft, it is hard. In a way, there are too many small factors, so that when you isolate them they don’t mean too much on their own. In StarCraft, it’s definitely a hard one.
Let’s do a concrete example. Our champion, INnoVation, who’s going to Katowice. How are we going to make people hyped for INnoVation? How are we going to make people care about the most boring progamer in the history of—well, no, that might be Maru. Anyway.
So when I saw INnoVation this weekend, personally, the story I’m looking at is through my connections with him. I first met him back in WCS 2013 when he was killing it, and then he kind of dropped off. I saw him again at Gamescom, where he was kind of getting back into it, and everyone was going “oooh, is innovation coming back?” before he dropped off again.
I think, someone like INnoVation, someone that "stoic" to put it in a positive way; you really kind of have to paint the story rather than just tell it. He may not talk about it, but the journey must have meant something to him, because if it didn’t mean anything, I honestly don’t think he would ever improve again.
If you’re doing worse as a player—no matter how little emotion you show—if you don’t really care, then why would you improve, why would you practice? You’d be like “oh, I’ll just kind of fade out” or whatever. But clearly that’s not the mentality he has.
I think if you start painting that, and he starts seeing the effects of his own story being told by someone else, I think that can also start help him be a bit more expressive. I think he doesn’t know how to share some of those stories, I think.
How much do you feel that you’re at the mercy of the casters? Where you’re like “I can’t do anything about this, I gotta pray Tastosis hit a home-run here.”
I think that’s the difference. I think that’s why I enjoy production a lot. At the end of the day, the final, FINAL call, to be honest, it IS in the casters’ hands. I mean maybe if you have a really strict director/producer, you might get fired if you don’t follow the story. But in that moment, you have the say, you’re the person talking on camera, you’re the voice that’s being heard.
Once I switched, I learned a lot more about the importance of syncing with casters beforehand. And I do like to respect their opinions, because they’re the ones who are following their scene nonstop. You put it all together, saying [i]“alright, this is the core story I have for this tournament," take the pieces the casters set for a bunch of different players, and decide these are the spots we want to hit.
Sometimes they don’t deliver it the way I imagine so, but other times they kind of save your butt and come up with a golden nugget you would have never thought of.
What’s the biggest lesson you learned from working at OGN in the past?
The most important thing I learned at OGN was actually working and social life. Company life, and how to adapt. Because I used think, man I’m learning all this cool production stuff, but then, once I went to ESL, I realized that in those short two and a half years, I learned so much about how a company works.
Once you learn the Korean hierarchy, you’re f***ing set.
But that’s what it is. I kind of got really, really hardcore bootcamping. And then I came out, and I was like “okay, you’re gonna butt heads with certain people, this is how you get through it” and THAT is actually the biggest thing I learned from OGN.
So basically you’re saying Korea is the best at training people, not just in competition, but in production as well. Alright, let’s wrap up with some hype for Katowice.
Katowice, I’ll say this: I’ve been part of all the major world championships, I’ve been part of all the publisher tournaments, but the Katowice stages are still the most memorable.
And I think it’s the combination of everything. It’s not strictly that it’s 100% the best designed stage—it’s hard to say that.
It’s the stage that... as much as game specific fans might not feel the impact, there's a lot of history and people that built the tournament. Both times that I’ve hosted—the first time I got on the Katowice stage, it just floored me. If you're thinking about going, definitely check it out if you haven't before. But if you're not, I would hope that it even a little bit of that impact gets captured on camera.
You can follow Chobra, Intel Extreme Masters, and Wax on Twitter. Intel Extreme Masters Season XI will conclude in March of 2017 at the World Championship in Katowice, Poland.
