Oceans 11 Part 1

This could have been such an easy story to record if I had just said that we're planning the same heist from the movie. But that's not what we do on the Film Reroll. Of course, I had the team create a completely new heist from scratch, and they threw themselves into it, particularly Jon, who is a Moriarity-type character at heart. I gave them a list of over 50 criminal contacts between Danny and Rusty (skewed towards Rusty, since Danny's list is cold from his time in prison), with backstories and detailed skill sets and stats on how reliable and trustworthy each person is, how hard they are to find and recruit. From this enormous, scattered set of names, they had to assemble a team and try to create a workable heist.

I could have easily just done the heist from the movie, but no. That's not what the Film Reroll is about.

I am massively proud of the final result, but doing Oceans 11 this way is a terrible idea for our show. It's a phenomenal idea for a game. It's a ton of fun to play. And like I said, I think these episodes are great. But holy crap were they a ton of work.

See, in execution Oceans 11 is all about incredibly meticulous planning, and planning makes bad radio. In the movie, the planning happens off screen and is alluded to in montage, but that's not the format of our show. Of course I had known all this going in and had resigned myself that I was gonna do a ton of editing to cut the planning and logistics out and try to keep the finished product tight like the movie. I even made a montage in this one out of some of the planning, reminiscent of both the actual movie Oceans 11 and our trap-laying montage from Home Alone.

In all seriousness, Oceans 11 is an awesome movie to play through for us, as long as I and my crack team of editors knew in advance that this one was going to need a lot more work in the edit than usual. Big shoutouts to Christopher Lang and Kieran Gannon, who take turns as my regular editors. They had more to do than usual on these, and even after they were done I did way more than I usually do to tighten these episodes, and make the fun bits like the montage work. Cutting all the planning while still making the story make sense and have flow, was an enormous job, and these were looong recording sessions as we would often get bogged down for an hour in details before we had actually gotten to playing out the story. And I also couldn't have done it without a player like Jon Miller, who I knew would throw himself into it and do insane levels of detailed, cascading plans.

But having finished the Oceans 11 storyline now, I love these episodes and it was totally worth it.  I hope you enjoy it.