Viva La Dirt League - New Comedy Prize

Posted 21st June 2022

Viva La Dirt League describe themselves as a bunch of nerds who play games and makes comedy sketches about games. This comedy troop hailing from Auckland have a history with the Vista Foundation 48Hours and they have a hugely popular YouTube Channel currently at an impressive 3.88 million subscribers.

We asked them some questions about their pathway into digital content-making and why they want to give back to the filmmakers by sponsoring the new Viva La Dirt League comedy prize in 2022!

Viva La Dirt League is giving back to the 48Hours for the 20th year with a new comedy prize and 2k towards the grand prize winner. What has inspired your 2022 48Hours sponsorship?

We really feel that 48Hours is the place where we cut our teeth in terms of short film comedy filmmaking. And considering where we are today we wanted to give back to the New Zealand industry and help foster a new generation of filmmakers. Giving them the opportunity that we had to grow and develop.

Viva La Dirt League is operating on multiple social media platforms and has a growing following. How much do you think about the audience when making video content?

When making content for social media, thinking about the content and audience is one of the most important things you can do. You live and die by the algorithms and how the audience reacts to the video. If a video is well received within the first few hours of release, then it has a good chance of going viral and getting a lot more views. If it’s received poorly then it will get squashed by the algorithm and knowing what's popular, what people are talking about at the moment and what the audience are going to latch onto is incredibly important. Though on the flip side of that we definitely need to be making something that we enjoy making, and that makes us laugh too. So there has to be a balance.

Whose wild idea was ‘Viva La Dirt League’. How did it come about?

VLDL is the beautiful merging of our two loves of filmmaking and video games. Viva, as it is today really, came about by wanting to poke fun at the video game tropes that we were so used to seeing in the games we play.No one on the internet was really doing what we call ‘video game logic in real life so it seemed like a really good niche to settle ourselves into.

How would you describe your comedy style?

It's really simple, with both our video game content and our real-life situational content. It’s always ‘wow look at that thing - isn’t it crazy’

That could be ‘Wow look at how you need to eat cheese in video games to heal grievous wounds. Isn’t that crazy’ through to something like ‘Wow look at how arrogant retail customers can be when they arrive after closing time. Isn’t that crazy.'

Generally, though we try to find something really relatable and then dial it up to 11.

How do you come up with comedy skit ideas? Is it a collaboration, a melding of minds?

Generally, the ideas come from simple premises, looking at video games or looking at real life and putting our wild out there characters into those scenarios. We are wanting to explore the comedy around certain relatable video game tropes.

Have you got a favourite skit? (links too pls)

One of my all-time favourite skits is our funeral episode from Bored. We got to film in St Matthews in the City which is a beautiful location, and they were lovely enough to let us film there. It also features a lot of Auckland-based fans who came along to be friends and family attending the funeral. It’s shot beautifully and still gives me the giggles to this day.

What is your history with 48Hours, how has the competition influenced you as filmmakers?

48Hours is an amazing lesson on how to come up with a simple premise, and execute it quickly and easily. Over the years of successes and failures, it really taught us that for short form that coming up with a simple idea, executing it with a good guiding principle and making sure you have fun - shows up on screen and means you end up with a good product that everyone loves. It’s the same philosophy that we’ve taken into VLDL. We now basically make 3 48Hours films per week, every week and have done for the past 6 years.

Do you have a favourite 48Hours film?

Has to be one of our final entries into 48Hours - Charity Run. Such a fun simple little shoot. We even finished hours early and managed to have quite a relaxing weekend!

Viva La Dirt League is giving back to the 48Hours for the 20th year with a new comedy prize and 2k towards the Grand Prize winner. What has inspired your 2022 48Hours sponsorship?

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