After CCA, I made possibly one of the biggest moves I ever had with regards to Fandom Is Awesome (and I get the feeling there may be bigger moves in the future, its all hush-hush, but I’m working on a few big things); I asked if any cosplayers or business owners would be willing to be interviewed by me for an article on them and/or their company, and I got loads of responses.
As expected, most of those responses came from cosplayers and business owners in the local geek/gamer community; and while I have yet to actually write an article on cosplay, it is something I hold close to my heart; but I was also hoping for responses from content creators.
And I got a few of those too.

But there was one that I didn’t get a response from, one that I only really got to actually meet with at rAge. And that ‘one’ technically isn’t a ‘one’, there are quite a few of them; a group of content creators, all working together under one banner:

Evo Media.

On the 14thof November, I sat down for a much-anticipated interview with someone who I got to know at rAge 2018, someone I got to know even better at the Creators Ball (a charity event held at The Nexus in Johannesburg); I sat down with ShushieBushie.

Evo Media (originally called Evolution) started as a solo-project, run by Fabio ‘Artdepartment’ Viveiros in late-2017, with an intent to focus on esports; Walker-Jay ‘ShushieBushie’ Rossouw joined in March of 2018, with the job of managing the female CS:GO team – a team which they sadly never landed, so Shushie being Shushie, he had a few ideas as to what they could do.
Shushie’s idea involved focusing on the media side of things, along with the improvement of esports as a whole within South Africa.

When approaching sponsors they met with hitec sure, an umbrella corporation with its fingers in a lot of different pies (none of which involve zombies, don’t worry), hitec sure has a particular focus on media and the internet, with some of their companies specialising in virtual security while others are more focused on creating and providing infrastructure for internet usage.
The big boss (not that one) over at hitec sure liked their idea so much that they said yes almost instantly.

What this gives them the power to do is work in the fields they wanted to; media, content creation, esports and tournament organisation. Evo Media isn’t alone though, they have a sister company, also run by Shushie and Artdepartment, called Evo Esports; technically they’re an umbrella company working under a far larger umbrella company.

Shushie pointed out that many people had told them not to work in an umbrella corporation like hitec sure, apparently these corporations enforce limitations on the smaller companies they own and fund, but Shushie has thus far found the situation favourable, if anything; claiming that having funding from an umbrella corporation means they can also borrow man-power from time to time, among other things.
When planning Evo, Shushie figured their plans would only come to fruition in three to five years, because they hadn’t banked on landing such a large sponsorship and becoming an actual company right off the bat; but hitec sure has taken those long-term plans and reigned them into a single year.

 

Now, being that I was interviewing ShushieBushie, my original intent was to write an article about him, then turn my attention to individual members of the Evo team, after which I would write my article on Evo itself; so I may have to come back and rewrite this article at some point; but I’d learned so much about Evo Media and Evo Esports that day that I figured I had to jam two articles into one, so here comes the part about Shushie himself.

If we do a quick time warp, we’ll learn that Shushie played his last game of competitive Dota when he was fifteen, having started when he was thirteen; he played for a high-ranked team, but sadly had to leave due to intra-team politics.
Shushie then figured he would go it alone for a bit and it was at this point that he wanted a logo; but he didn’t want to pay someone for it, he wanted to design it himself. Over time, he started designing logos for other players.
This is when his passion for content creation decided to make itself known. What intrigued him most about content creation was that there was no formula to how it was done; everyone had their own style, not just in how they edit or design things, but in how they play around with those ideas, how two people could be given the exact same project and tools and yield completely different results.

Things started off simply enough, random recordings, designing logos; and when I say random recordings, I do mean random. I’m pretty sure every content creator goes through that phase, where they just put out whatever random content and ideas come to mind whenever they come to mind (there is a reason you can’t find any of my blog posts from prior to November 2014, and its not because I wasn’t blogging before then, I’ll tell you that much).

Through creating completely random content, Shushie came to discover what it was he was good at, which direction he wanted to take and how he was going to do it.
In his mind, “Artists started at stick-figures. Then add more and more details, and later on we get these masterpieces.”

Shushie started video editing when he finished school, starting with the basics, he would just snip parts off of videos using an app on his phone; but he wanted to study Tourism, and so that was what he did.
“Worst mistake of my life” – ShushieBushie, 2018

After six months in Tourism, he dropped out and went into IT, being that it was something which came to him naturally; and while doing that, he looked into and studied content creation in his free time. In his third year of IT, he decided to go into streaming, feeling that it took a level of production, a particular style and personality to get it right.

“It gets annoying when you have zero viewers, or you have, like, twenty viewers but no ones talking, all of them are lurking. It gets, like, ‘why am I doing this?’, but you have to remember that live streaming, you have to keep up the positivity and keep on playing the games, because that is what people are there to see and that is what you are there to do.” – ShushieBushie, 2018

One of Shushie’s dreams has always been to either work in or own a media production house; and that is what Evo Media has become, they started as a small media company, but through lots of hard work they have become a production house, regularly creating content for other companies.
But Evo Media isn’t just for esports, or for the people who work there, the plan is to set up studios and create sets for all manner of local content creators to make use of.

Me: “Now that your five-year plan has been cut down to one year, where are you guys gonna go? What is the plan? I know you can’t tell me everything but what is the rough direction, what are we aiming for?”

Shushie: “Super Saiyan 20.”

 

Here is a quick rundown of the team and what each of their roles are (along with social media links):

  • Fabio ‘Artdepartment’ Viveiros – co-owner; Twitter, Instagram.
  • Walker-Jay ‘ShushieBushie’ Rossouw – co-owner; Twitter, Instagram.
  • Carly ‘LittleTwaddler’ Twaddle – photographer and interviewer; Twitter, Instagram.
  • Vincent ‘Psyche’ Nel – interviewer and content creator; Twitter, Instagram.
  • Kégyne Oliver Saunders – social media manager.
  • Christian ‘Drone’ Jansen – content creator, video editor, cameraman; Twitter.
  • Collin ‘Plague’ Teske – content creator, tech guru.
  • Victoria ‘Octoberstar’ Leao – photographer and videographer; Instagram; she also livestreams on her own on Twitch and has her own YouTube channel.
  • Jayson ‘Trinoc’ van Kerckhoven – content creator, host, interviewer and photographer; Twitter, Instagram; Trinoc also does his own gaming livestreams on Twitch.

Last but certainly not least: