Creator / Rocket Jump

aka: Freddie Wong

"There is only one rule for content, and that is: 'What do you genuinely enjoy making?'"

— Freddie Wong

RocketJump is an online video production company created by American filmmakers Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch alongside Matt Arnold, Dez Dolly, and other YouTube creators.

In 2010, Wong and Laatsch decided they'd had enough of fixing the mistakes on sloppy direct-to-video movies. They thought, "We can do this!", and the FreddieW channel was born.

The work on this channel became known for its high-quality, low-budget, and fast-paced action scenes, guns, Video Game homages, guns, visual effects, guns, and a general Rule of Cool attitude. Did we mention guns?

In 2011 and 2012, this mix of quality, humor, video games, and action helped them grow to epic levels of popularity. They peaked at the sixth-most-subscribed spot on YouTube, and also held the "top filmmaking channel" spot. In 2012, they made their first feature-length web series, Video Game High School, which eventually ran for three seasons and concluded in 2014, with each season being assisted by fan crowdfunding.

On October 23, 2013, the FreddieW team entered "Phase Two" and rebranded itself as RocketJump. The old freddiew2 channel was renamed to BrandonJLa, and also has some old behind-the-scenes videos and tutorials. On April 14, 2014, RocketJump and Lionsgate announced a partnership.

Some high-profile members of RocketJump include:

• Freddie Wong, the namesake for the old "freddiew" name. For most of its existence, Freddie has been synonymous with his channel. He got some early fame as a professional Guitar Hero player.
• Brandon Laatsch. Based on behind-the-scenes videos, he did a lot of the early VFX with Freddie, and has done most of the 3D work. He's often been overshadowed by Freddie. As of early 2014, he left RocketJump to pursue his own video game development studio Stress Level Zero, focusing on VR development, and had created Hover Junkers, Duck Season, and Boneworks.
• Matt Arnold is probably best-known as a writer and director on Video Game High School.
• Dez Dolly, another co-founder of the company proper.
• Benji Dolly, best-known as Games Dean in Video Game High School and frequently appears on the Facerocker podcast.
• Clinton Jones is a frequent collaborator and is known to do some VFX work for them.
• Lauren Haroutunian, the "dean" of the RocketJump Film School.

Freddie and Brandon also went to UCLA with Sam Gorski and Niko Peuringer of Corridor Digital, and have been known to cameo in each others' projects (namely Video Game High School and Sync).

Please note, this page was migrated from the old "Freddie Wong" page. Examples may refer to just Freddie, and there might be some grammar hiccups. If you come across any mistakes, please fix them.

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Tropes:

• Actor Allusion: Along with the short's homage to Cowboys & Aliens, another allusion is Jon Favreau riding a flying truck that folds into a suitcase.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Duct Hunt.
• All Chinese People Know Kung-Fu: Discussed and invoked in Kung-Fooled.
• Ambiguous Syntax: In Huge Guns, the sign advertising a "HUGE GUN SALE!!" can be read one of two ways. Normally you'd assume that it's a huge sale of guns. In this case it's actually a sale of huge guns.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: At the end of Far Cry Vacation, when Freddie is reviewing his hotel invoice, immediately after the charges for all the bad guys he killed is a charge for a movie rental.
• Artistic License – Space: Played for laughs in Epic VFX Time where Freddie and Harley summons dozens of planets in the sky because it looks cool.
• Artistic License – Physics: Also played for laughs in Keep off the Grass, where Freddie and a park ranger grapple with each other, each moving higher up without falling, to the point where they're both hovering thousands of feet in the air... only to fall (ergo, literal suspension of disbelief). This is then taken up to eleven throughout the rest of the video. Accordingly falls under the Rule of Funny.
• Attention Deficit Creator Disorder
• Awesome, but Impractical: Gorilla Wayfare introduces transportation by barrel. They also introduce mine carts. Both lead to disastrous results.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Freddie and Shenae Grimes in Gun Size Matters.
• Berserk Button:
  • In Don't F With My Cream, two robbers knock over an ice cream parlor as Freddie is outside enjoying some ice cream^note As mentioned in the Behind the Scenes vid, Freddie is lactose intolerant, so he had to take some pills in order to be able to eat the stuff. He does nothing to stop them until one of them decides to knock over his ice cream for no reason. It does not end well for the robbers.
  • Things also don't end well for two guys whose fighting ends up destroying the work of the Sandcastle Sensei.
  • In Pedestrian Revenge, a would-be car thief learns that GTA-ing Freddie is a bad idea.
• Body Horror: "Every 90s Commercial Ever", in which the child protagonists of the commercial drink a juice called Liquid Slam and turn into a blob of what almost looks like mercury, letting them fly around at high speeds. But that's not where the trope comes in; instead, it's when the children come back violently and horrifically molded together and turned into a large mass of zombie body.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted pretty well, actually. Unless it's for laughs, like in Minecraft Massacre.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The end of Troll Massacre, in which Freddie and Ray William Johnson speculate that the trolls will be back — in fact, "they might even be watching this right now." Complete with an Aside Glance to the audience.
• Camera Abuse: Played for Laughs in Epic VFX Time.
  Harley: "Feels like you're there! More camera shake! MORE Camera shake! Too much camera shake!"
  Freddie: "This isn't Bourne Identity!^note Paul Greengrass and his distinctive camera shake didn't appear in The Bourne Identity since he didn't direct until Supremacy You ain't Matt Damon!"
• Cast the Expert: For Hitman, which takes place at a porn shoot, they got an actual porn star ^note Christie Stevens, to be exact to be in the video. Yep.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Lampshaded in the video description to Chrono Trigger: Short Action Scene: "The stairs and pallet are made of wood from the holly tree, the strongest material known to man. That should clear things up!"
  • Averted in Aimbot, in which Freddie shoots an enemy through a concrete pillar. However, it's not too hard to believe that said pillar would have provided adequate cover under normal conditions considering how Freddie was hacking at the time.
• Cliché Storm: Beach Justice In-Universe is meant to be this.
• Cool Car: Jon Favreau's truck, which flies and can shrink into a suitcase.
• Crossover: With Epic Meal Time, Smosh, Wong Fu Productions, and Ray William Johnson.
• Defied Trope: In Skyrim Badass, one of the mooks during Freddie's rampage tries to put an arrow in his knee as per the famous meme. Ain't happenin', pal.
• Development Hell: Brandon started a Kickstarter campaign for "The Birth of Man," a Minecraft movie, but they hit some legal snags when Mojang pointed out that it wasn't licensed.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Gun Size Matters. Three words: 360 No Scope.
• Dude, Not Funny!: The in-universe reaction in "Executive Command" by the Secretary of Defense to Freddie's antics.
• Epic Fail: Freddie's "backup" in "No Man Left Behind" tries to imitate some Gun Kata from Equilibrium, and somehow misses all thirty rounds at point-blank.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The ending of Cereal Killer is interactive, allowing the viewer to pick which cereal Freddie should eat. But because the milk was bad, both of them cause him to throw up.
• Fighting Game: Parodied with Every Fighting Game, Ever.
• Flipping the Bird: Freddie at the end of Real Life UFO Sighting! and The Prince in Man vs. Katamari.
• Flock of Wolves: The Gambit Pileup in Mexican Standoff gets so over-the-top that the villains actually stop existing: Freddie's character dresses up as Key's character so that the real Key can hypnotize Freddie to investigate Key disguised as Freddie.
• Gambit Pileup: Everyone is trying to pass themselves off as an amazing fighter in Kung-Fooled.
  • A Mexican Standoff leads to a very sticky situation involving a gun and a blueberry pie.
  Freddie: Slow down, guys. Alright, listen. Let's just take a moment to figure out who's double-crossing themselves while dressed as each other, okay?
• General Failure: General Johnson in Executive Command.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Harley Morenstein summons a "lesbian makeout scene in the sky!" No one can see it because of all the planets in the way.
• Gone Horribly Right: An Inconvenient Truth: The future has motion control video games. "Except it sucks!!"
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Swearing is pretty rare in any of Freddie Wong's videos. The few times it does occur, in Kung-Fooled and Epic VFX Time, it's bleeped out.
  • *Caw!*
• Groin Attack: But what happens when Superman is the one to give it?
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Exaggerated in Splinter Cell: Lightbulb Assassin. Justified if you've ever played Splinter Cell.
• Gun Fu: Freddie has a penchant for this in his action shorts, with the most prominent examples being Time Crisis with Andy Whitfield and Alarmageddon, though with rare exception, he primarily uses one gun.
• Guns Akimbo: Directly referenced and invoked in "Executive Command".
  • The "boss" from Time Crisis uses two submachine guns.
  • Freddie uses two AK-47s in Don't F With My Cream to blast the hell out of two robbers who, well...
• Gun Struggle: Whose gun is it anyway?
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Milk Man: World's Worst Superhero.
• The Hero Dies: Medal of Honor Cat, Flower Warfare, Duct Hunt, Halloween Massacre (sort of), The Golf War and Keep Off the Grass.
• Hollywood Hacking: All Freddie has to do to hack the computer in Bodycount (2011) is hold down the "X" key.
  • Rapid typing hacking was also his specialty in his cameo appearance on Chuck.
• Hollywood Silencer: Oddly both averted and played straight. The silenced gun makes a reasonably loud sound, but the guards are clearly the most idiotic guards alive.
  • "This is a sneaking mission where I infiltrated a Deaf Person's Warehouse."
  • Special focus is also given to removing a silencer so Freddie's gunshot will be heard in Claymores.
• I Know You Know I Know: In "Mexican Standoff", they get so many levels into this that they have to stop what they're doing and draw it all out on the ground with chalk to figure out who is on what side, and why. Exemplified by this gem, which isn't even half way into the video:
  Unnamed Agent: Oh, you knew all along? Well I knew all along that you knew all along.
  Freddie: Did you just get here, son? I knew you knew I knew all along, all along, all along.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: Played for Laughs in Flower Warfare - a wounded Freddie tries to tell his companion this, only to find that she barely stopped to see him fall.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Usually averted, as his bad guys' accuracy is about on par with Freddie's when they shoot. Key word being "when."
  • Sometimes it's justified by the short taking place within a video game.
  • In Far Cry Vacation, none of the mooks sent after Freddie can seem to hit worth a damn.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Knife Guyz manages this with knives.
• It Has Been an Honor: The vacation service attendant in "Far Cry Vacation" says this to her boss after he asks her to provide a bored Freddie with the "Far Cry vacation package". Sure enough, she's Freddie's first casualty.
• Jerkass: The Jedi A-Holes, who use lightsabers and the Force to do jerkass things For the Lulz.
  • Though their antics in the sequel (such as throwing a car with someone in it very far away, deflecting blaster bolts without a care about who those bolts hit, and giving lightsabers to two kids and cheering them on as they battle and taking bets until both of them die) may be the point where the two cross the line.
• Kill It with Fire: Used by the football player as a way to kill the very horrific, and bloodthirsty mishmash of the three now zombified protagonists. Subverted, in that it didn't even kill them.
• The Lancer: Brandon Laatsch, Freddie's co-director.
• Last of His Kind: The Last Cat On Earth
• Leap and Fire: Andy Whitfield does a textbook-perfect shoot-dodge early on in Time Crisis.
• Limited Wardrobe: A Real Life example. Matt has explained a few times in the Facerocker podcast that he loves the Video Game High School t-shirts from the Season 2 Kickstarter campaign; once his current one is dirty, he'll get a new one out of the package and put it on.
• Literal-Minded: Past!Freddie in An Inconvenient Truth. Future!Freddie tells Past!Freddie to buy Apple (the company) before going back to his own time. Past!Freddie buys an apple. The kind you eat.
• Lost Food Grievance: Don't F With My Cream.
• Me's a Crowd: Big Blue Ball Machine, Guitar Army, and Halloween Massacre.
• Mexican Standoff: The vid by the same name, which takes Gambit Pileup and I Know You Know I Know to ridiculous degrees.
• Mid-Battle Tea Break: On some videos, such as Whose Plane is it Anyway? and Mexican Standoff.
• Mind Screw: Big Blue Ball Machine.
  • Ditto for Mexican Standoff.
• Mood Whiplash: Home, Alone appears to be a goofy video about a kid and his traps to befuddle robbers. The last trap sets off a shotgun.
  • Keep Off the Grass starts off in comedic Looney Tunes style, and for the most part is pretty slapstick about its combat and humor, including a segment where Freddie and his opponent eat and go to sleep while still in free-fall, which soon turns into an epic final showdown that ends with Freddie's opponent hurling the frigging SUN at him. And then they both die and come back as ghosts, having reconciled as the damage they've done heals over time, including a new tree.
• Mooks
• More Dakka: Epic VFX Time
  Harley: Raining guns!
• Mundane Made Awesome: The Golf War
• No Name Given: Most of the characters Freddie plays, with the exception of Beach Justice where he is named Rick Fujimoto, and several others where his character is simply named Freddie
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The backstory of Beach Justice, which is meant to be a 90 minute Made-for-TV movie.
  Freddie: "Due to spontaneous hard drive combustion, only the last two minutes could be salvaged. We chose not to back up the original master drive, for some reason."
• Ocular Gushers: Used hilariously in the end of Gun Size Matters.
• One-Man Army: Freddie usually fulfills this on a daily basis, but Executive Command invokes this, but here Freddie is an Idiot Hero who gleefully commits war crimes.
  Secretary of Defense: Where's the rest of his team?
  General Johnson: Sir, he is the team.
• One Bullet Left: Beach Justice.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Inverted in Duct Hunt. A mook gets shot twice in the foot and drops dead.
• Parody: Freddie's Power Hour to Kanye West's famous "Power" video. In his words, "Kanye West's vision through the lens of party dudes."
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The two Freddies in Worst Wifi Password Ever are afraid that "fourwordsalluppercase" is too easy a password. It does turn out to be the worst password ever, but for a different reason altogether.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: In-Universe.
  • Exactly what Freddie does in Bodycount (2011), skipping through the entire Opening Monologue so just he can get to shooting bad guys.
  • He does the same thing in Skyrim Badass, stabbing any person who dares to ask him for help.
• Pink Mist: Commonly seen in the death of Mooks. Freddie has written on his blog that the mist is made from taping red chalk being clapped into the air.
• Pin-Pulling Teeth: Jimmy Wong pulls this off in Light Warfare.
• Pluto Is Expendable: In Epic VFX Time.
• Production Posse: RocketJump is become this for Freddie Wong and his associates.
• Promoted Fanboy: Worked with Jon Favreau, Kevin Pollak, and Andy Whitfield, filmed on the set of Iron Man, guest starred on an episode of Chuck, and has made commercials for McDonald's, Samsung, Battlefield, and Army of Two.
  • He's also promoted several fanboys himself, such when two of the kids from Kids React got a part in Jedi A-Holes.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Raise your hand, how many of you thought Freddie faked having his hands on fire? Yup, the fire's real.
• Reference Overdosed: Freddie LOVES video games, so expect so see many video game nods.
  • Duct Hunt references Duck Hunt, of course, but the ending also parodies Metal Gear Solid's Game Over scream.
  • As Freddie dies in Flower Warfare, he witnesses a double rainbow...
  • Thanksception, obviously.
  • Subverted in Chrono Trigger: Short Action Scene, which has absolutely nothing to do with Chrono Trigger.
  • Skyrim Badass is one big one to the epic fifth Elder Scrolls game. Freddie even defies the old "arrow to the knee" meme by catching said arrow.
• Rocket Jump: The creation of The Rocket Jump. It's also the name of his website.
• Rule of Cool: The entire point of Epic VFX Time.
  • Also a frequent staple of their work.
• Scary Black Man: Invoked in Kung-Fooled.
• Sequel: Whose Gun is it, Anyway? is followed by Whose Plane is it, Anyway?
  • Milk Man: World's Worst Superhero is followed by Milkman 2: Spoiled Crème.
• Scully Box: In Epic VFX Time, Freddie stops Harley before they get started and grabs a box to stand on. Absolutely no effort is made to hide it or even keep it out of the frame.
• Serious Business: Pretty much everything, but Tie Fighters takes the cake for Freddie and Jimmy Kimmel fighting over how to tie a tie.
• Slasher Smile: Freddie at the end of Halloween Massacre.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: They fall very much on silliness side, even with all the gunfire, blood, and explosions.
  • Especially because of all the gunfire, blood, and explosions.
• Sophisticated as Hell: General Johnson is fond of these. "Sir, with all due respect, shut your mouth." "That's because you're a noob, sir."
• Stealth-Based Mission: Subverted in Bodycount (2011).
  This is a stealth mission, leave no survivors.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Defied in Ping Pong Masters, where Clint does an internal monolog about the Chaos Dragon Mob and misses the ball.
• Time Stop: Done in both Chrono Trigger: Short Action Scene and Time Freeze Shootout.
• Training Montage: Seen in Fight of the Century as Freddie trains for a boxing match against... a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot?
  • Another training montage happens in Skyrim's Back, including several instances of trying to bat an arrow out of the air with a sword, and getting them in his knees on the first major tries. But when he actually goes to get the new Skyrim, he gets arrested for blowing up his wedding.
• Trigger-Happy: YES.
• Trolls: After receiving many awful comments from them, Freddie and Ray William Johnson go after a bunch of these with a hammer and a shotgun in Troll Massacre. The spammers are even dressed as trolls.
• Unflinching Walk: Freddie does this in Skyrim's Back, backlit by an explosion. This gets him arrested in the end because he did this at what was supposed to be his own wedding.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Freddie does one for laughs in Bodycount (2011).
• Waterfall Puke: The end of Cereal Killer.
  • This is also Milkman's superpower.
• Wham Line: In Mexican Standoff:
  Cop: Just another wild night, in Wizard City.
• World of Pun: Time Crisis and Duct Hunt have jokes of the Asian variety.
  Time Crisis, Score Screen: Agent Whitfield, Asian Wong
  Duct Hunt, Game Over Screen: Freddie, what's Wong? Freddie? Freddie!
• William Telling: With a .50 caliber sniping of a watermelon off Freddie's head! No, not really.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz:
  • "Knife Guyz".
  • "Sir, as of 0140 this morning, Operation: EXPLOSION CANNONZ, that's "cannons" with a "Z", is a go."
• Yaoi Fangirl:
  • Liz in Fan Friction, who mostly wants to use the story she and Allie are writing as an excuse to pair up Sherlock Holmes and Dracula.
  • Taken up to eleven in the end when they bring in Allie's brother and throw Jon Snow, The Tenth Doctor and Loki into the mix.

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