Hey all, I’m Colin Rodgers. I’m a writer with about a year of professional work, eight years of online published works, and almost fourteen years now of creative writing theory. I wrote for SMG4, a parody series created by Glitch Productions, an independent animation company based out of Australia. After leaving my thoughts at the door with my arc leftovers and writing credits three years back, watching the next few years of Glitch’s wins and mishaps left me wanting to share how my experience working for the company went.
In 2022, I had quit my job after a three-year incumbency, becoming the third highest seniority at it, having no opportunity to progress or get a raise in it, and hosting the most stress in day-to-day operations. I didn’t have any job prospects, was broke, and was living out of my sister’s apartment on the floor with a duffel bag and four boxes of memories to my name. I was initially hired to work for Glitch Productions after directly messaging Kevin Lerdwichagul, the CEO of the company, on LinkedIn and asking if he still needed a writer for SMG4. As I had no pro writing credits, he sent me a test script to see my skills, and then a second one after that. He then hired me on the spot and said my first day would be in August 2022.
Generally speaking, Glitch is an impressive company. Their goal is to make great indie animations, and they fulfilled that by making such eye candy as Meta Runner, Murder Drones, and The Amazing Digital Circus. On top of that, after mastering 3D animation, they’re now branching into 2D as well with Knights of Guinevere and GameOverse. Residence or race or gender doesn’t matter with the company, as long as you do well and work hard. Remote work was possible, and the means by which I worked for them. We had all manner of people from around the world working on various shows, from Canada, to the U.S., to Italy, to Australia of course. The showrunners and talent supporting their visions are still incredible, and their dedication to their craft is beyond impressive.
First coming onto the team, Kevin introduced me personally to the company in our first all-hands meeting. However, for the majority of my employment I only spoke with two others for any prolonged time outside of job stuff: Cube and James, the head coordinator and a voice actor/editor respectively. They were pretty chill, and Cube even defended me when I first started writing since fans attributed things they didn’t like to the new writer, me.
Working for Glitch, there was crippling isolation. Anyone who has worked the graveyard shift, the 11pm to 7am of security, janitorial, hotel, or similar will get what I mean. Pair this isolation with remote work social bubbles and eight or more hour days. Where I live, my day almost ended when Australia’s day began, so I had to shift my entire sleep schedule and availability in order to match those times, meaning I couldn’t socialize with anyone closer to home, or had to really restrict that time. Minimal interaction with friends and family, and everyone at Glitch was often busy with work, so I spent a lot of time alone.
Communication between departments left a lot to be desired. It used to be that I would write a script or part of one based on writer’s room talks, then I would send that to Kevin. After that, Kevin would talk with Luke, his brother, CCO, and director of the SMG4, who would then craft the episode with the editors. I would have to communicate changes for episodes through Cube, who would then tell it to Luke. I only ever had direct comms with Luke when writing for “Mario Does Things” (later rebranded to “SMG4 Crew”), because he had full creative control over the spinoff and I’d write directly under him.
I was given my first red flag about Glitch about three months into working for them, that I was “the longest-lasting new writer for SMG4.” Another red flag was that there was no “creation pipeline” for SMG4. The closest we had was a document describing how to upload files correctly for management to review. No documentation of what or what not to write, no guides for keeping in-line with company writing standards, no lorekeeping, no character bibles, no storyboard guides, there was nothing. The pipeline existed only in Kevin and Luke’s minds, which makes the pipeline well-guarded, but makes contractors’ jobs harder.
Going above and beyond for some scripts was not encouraged. When a scene or idea was too specific to find an external reference to how it should look, I would replicate my idea in Garry’s Mod or Source Film Maker for the editors to better grasp, essentially storyboarding some scenes for episodes. I had to do that for “Mario Bakes a Cake,” where I suggested we put a green disc in a cakepan to chroma key in a funny meme, as well as a few more for advertisement skits and Mario Does Things. Kevin told me it was a waste of time and asked me not to do it. From what I’ve heard, other writers like Starteas started doing actual storyboarding and made it a standard for the show until it ended.
Longest-lasting writer, deterred innovation, no pipeline… I should’ve acted on these red flags sooner by quitting. However, Glitch was becoming a more prominent name in independent animation. I desperately wanted to get my own serial greenlit, which is now my web novel Lavender Chronicle. As Glitch needed a writer, I aimed to gain experience in the industry and work my way to running my own show over time. Kevin told me in the first few months that if I kept up my good work, I would be a showrunner in two to three years. That promise was enough to keep me invested. Unfortuntely, Kevin was not as invested in that idea. A month before I quit, he reneged on that promise and claimed he didn’t say anything like that to me.
When getting scripts approved, they needed to go through the quality assurance process, much like any other animation company or burger joint, to ensure the written word matches company values and intent. When working on the Mario Does Things episode “Mario Plays Educational Games Until he Gains 1 IQ,” Luke made me revise my entire script five times without clear reasons why. My final re-write had the script flow flawlessly between the games with high-level writing and very clever humour, matching what quality assurance notes I was given perfectly. Luke had stricken through every line I submitted and gave even more unclear feedback in response. I would later discover that Aaron Rogers, the other writer for Mario Does Things, had already written and edited together eight minutes of runtime on a single game. I was never informed of this, and Luke’s notes never said to condense my work to fit the remaining three minutes alotted while still covering the two other games, which was unfair to me and my efforts.
Speaking of, Aaron Rogers is a plagiarist. He’s a long-time writer for SMG4 and long-time friend of Luke’s, having been tied to SMG4 since the early days of Machinima. However, he has plagiarized from me multiple times during my tenancy at Glitch. When writing Mario Does Things, we would write mini-scripts for each character’s reaction with a gag to tie them together. I don’t know why he did it, but Aaron plagiarized one of my skits in “Mario Delves into Anti-Piracy Screens” and two in “Mario Reacts to Nintendo Movie Memes.” If the documents for these episodes still exist, it does have a trackable history of edits, so it can be proven at least. Technically, he also took credit for my last few episodes that I wasn’t credited for, including that “Mario Plays Educational Games Until he Gains 1 IQ.” He took several of my ideas and re-wrote them to better match his style.
I never brought this issue about Aaron forward because we had no HR, Aaron’s repore and history with the company would shed a bad light on me for speaking poorly about him, and we had deadlines to meet and I figured letting Aaron get away with it once or twice would serve the greater good. Now I recognize my inaction only sets a bad precedent for him to plagiarize more, that it’s okay because he wasn’t caught and reprimanded for it. I understand the scope of this problem too, that It’s one or two skits in the funny blue Mario internet show, I get that. That said, it’s hard, paid work that I put genuine effort into that I now can’t reference on my resume because his style is not mine and Glitch management will side with Aaron. The SMG4 series is not something I own, nor do I own the work I did on it, but I wrote for the show and deserve to be recognized for what I worked on as is the moral standard.
It’s also strange how Kevin’s ideas for the “IT’S GOTTA BE PERFECT” (IGBP) SMG4 short film overlap a lot with my Meme Lords Mini-Arc idea. I mean, I could say that I shared the initial idea in October 2022 during a writer’s room while Kevin was thinking of making an SMG4 movie, and sent a pitch directly to him in December 2022. I could say that IGBP didn’t start ideation until January 2023, and production in February 2023. I could say I was taken off the script writing team for the film and Kevin handled the entirety of the script. I could say it was an unusual decision, especially with how much extra he made me write for “War of the Fat Italians 2022” a few months prior. I could say my mini-arc featured an SMG4-focused character arc, strange creatures, and eldritch sauces with connections to memetic energy, and IGBP featured an SMG4-focused character arc, strange creatures, and eldritch sauces with connections to memetic energy… The TV Tropes page of SMG4’s “What Could’ve Happened” outlines a lot more of these parallels. All I can say is that there’s a lot of coincidences.
I feel terrible that there is no attribution to the people who made SMG4 a reality over the past decade. Kevin and Luke have taken and used content that doesn’t belong to them in order to profit, from Garry’s Mod maps, to models, mods, emulation engines, or effects that are open-source. No Source Film Maker (SFM) assets are credited either. None of the people modding in addons on Garry’s Mod or Source Film Maker have been repped for Glitch’s use of their creations, and while this accreditation is optional, it’s morally appropriate. I’ve seen Medi, another editor for the show, and Aaron also frequently use and steal assets and jokes from other people. They’re perfectly happy to take a Friday Night Funkin’ custom animation and use it for the show while giving no credit, or rework my skit referencing a Doobus Goobus video into just stealing the whole joke, but as soon as they’re caught, they absolve the blame and put it onto Luke to deal with. I honestly didn’t feel comfortable contributing to this abuse of convenience while working for them, and for everyone I did not credit while working under them, I am sorry.
When I was first hired, I was a month away from starting a new Bachelor’s Degree for Fine Arts. After two or three months with the company, Kevin tried coaxing me out of college frequently, saying things like “college is a waste of time,” and “why waste money on college when we could use you here and now?” He offered full-time work and enhanced pay (which was still less than 50% lower than what I should’ve been making according to minimum industry standards), even offering me a gracious advance to cover costs for moving out of college. I agreed to full-time in January 2023, quitting college to focus on work.
Within the first week of this arrangement, Kevin made a “status quo change” full of platitudes for the whole company. He had said something about Glitch entering a “new era” and that we had to “improve every show.” The changes he wanted were unclear and not constructively communicated, at least for the SMG4 side of the company. No new pipeline, scripts took longer to complete and were critiqued down to a fault, and the writers’ rooms had doubled in population with clear leaders of conversation and people not directly working on the show contributing. Kevin would copy whole three minute portions of gags from The Simpsons, then judge me and tell me I had to be more creative when I put in jokes he didn’t get. I suggested after SMG4 got his RV, we should have an episode where he and all his friends wholesomely trick it out like that bus in Disney’s Recess, with the villain being Crisp Rat who was hiding in the “haunted” toilet they installed. I was practically ignored, and Kevin went with the “Happy Little Road Trip” episode as suggested by Jasmine Yang, the VA Coach and COO, who only had dealings in SMG4 merch up to that point.
After writing the entire IGBP script alone, Kevin bragged to me about writing it while on a flight, linked me the script, and asked for feedback. It wasn’t very impressive and the content wasn’t very different from the norm of SMG4. It was written as almost a self-degradation fantasy, and I commented how he could better encapsulate some of those ideas and make them more nuanced. I also suggested SMG4 communicate some more rather than one-sidedly yell at the protags, that having a dialogue would make it far more interesting and better flesh out the motivations in the scene. I was candid, telling him what did and didn’t work and explained how to fix it. I wanted to see it perform well, but his response was essentially “remember that your focus is ideation and your own stuff.”
Since that critique, Kevin became much more antagonistic toward me. This could be from other pressures and stressors in his life, but a lot of this antagonism was specifically aimed at me. One time, I struggled to tell him about three-act story structure, a story structure I don’t use in my writing often (John Truby calls it flawed and mechanical, knowing how to implement one structure doesn’t value you as more or less of a storyteller), and he rudely asked how much experience I actually had. He also had questions about my history publishing content on my blog as well, as about five or six years of published research and stories hosted on another site were deleted because I impulsively deactivated my account. After criticizing him once, he made an effort to criticize my entire writing history. I gave pushback from time to time when he overstepped, but he would pressure me in other ways afterward.
Kevin would regularly ask for input from me in writer’s rooms, then shoot down my ideas under the guise of them “not being funny enough.” He would audibly sigh and single me out, then embarrass me in front of my work colleagues. However, he would not respond in this way to anyone else in the writer’s room who actively chose not to contribute. In the writer’s room for “My Roommate Mario,” Kevin didn’t have a joke for a scene and nobody else had one. He asked the room “Alright, do we have anything funny to add, or are we going to leave it to Colin?” The idea that I was the least desired result genuinely hurt. Over my last month working with them, Kevin would have frequent meetings with me to talk about how my writing is getting worse and that I needed professional workshops and to research how to be “funny,” gaslighting me into losing a lot of my confidence.
Kevin was also very dismissive about my work in general after that critique. For example, before I quit, Kevin questioned my writing skill, bringing up the episode “MARIO IS BALLIN'” with me in a meeting. The episode was originally my idea and Kevin used it as an example of what to learn from since it underperformed. I took a lot of pride in that episode since I took the lead in writing almost all of it. It was my idea to include the finale with Ghetto Baller Mode Luigi, alongside the action sequence. Kevin dismissed the episode as being a “boring Dragonball Z reference” and that my lack of skill led to the episode’s lack of success (in comparison to other SMG4 mainline videos). It’s not easy to make something like that final scene, with intense choreography and tension that all has to be synced with music. Chris, the most skilled editor and animator, did an amazing job crafting that scene.
Kevin’s consistent beratement, caused by his inability to articulate what he wanted from me, led to me becoming more and more exhausted and even afraid to work, knowing re-writing my next script repeatedly would be the inevitable conclusion. This is what makes having no tangible pipeline so dangerous: the standard for your work has no reference point and episode quality varies based on the whims of the one who makes the final decisions.
My weakest area is in comedy, but I thrive in dramatic, emotional, and spectacle writing, and I have a penchant for action. I was not hired for my talents, nor did Kevin attempt to have me use them at any point. That said, I believe that I improved a lot. While Kevin told me my writing was declining in quality after coming on full-time, friends and family saw my work and thought I was outgrowing my position instead. While I think my comedy skills are still not phenomenal, I review some of my work and compare it to older episodes and see what they mean.
I would spend so much time researching memes and figuring out when they’d be popular to beat the upload-delay of SMG4 episodes. “The Griddy” dance from Fortnite would be popular in two weeks’ time and it would have a long shelf-life, so I wanted to use it for a gag in “MAR10 Day.” When I suggested using it in an episode, Kevin told me (paraphrased) “I’ve never heard of the Griddy, and Luke and Jasmine have no idea either. Come up with something better.” I was off by a week of my estimate, but the meme was popular. I kid you not, Kevin started following the trend a few episodes later, but could’ve been leading the trend if he had trusted me.
I worked a lot to make up for the shortcomings Kevin gaslit me into believing. I spent about 16 hours a day working on myself and my scripts, rewriting many times before submission. Even then, I would have to rewrite more after Kevin’s QA notes. I was originally paid per page, not including rewrites, and, after going full-time, I was paid a fixed amount bi-weekly (still about 25% less than I should’ve been based on minimum industry standards), still not accounting for rewrites. My quality of health deteriorated rapidly, to the point I was having panic attacks daily and I was sedentary for most of my waking hours. I had no time to cook, exercise, socialize with family and friends, or engage with media I loved between the theory, practice, and the fear of disappointing co-workers, management, fans, and myself with low-quality content.
I didn’t technically quit my job, as the company tried to coerce me into signing an illegal contract. Doing so invalidated my contract, recognized as such by Glitch management. Kevin bullied me to the breaking point and wanted me to work more hours for less pay, in addition to continued toxic working conditions. This predatory action by an employer is called “constructive dismissal,” in which someone forces inopportune or toxic work expectations on, or otherwise intimidates, an actual or perceived underperforming employee in order to coerce them into quitting. This tactic makes the decision to leave the company the employee’s and not management’s. By the Fair Work Act, constructive dismissal is illegal in both Canada (my home) and Australia (Glitch’s HQ) as they breach the worker’s rights and denies them rights to severance and compensation.
In simpler terms, Kevin wanted to fire me but didn’t want me to be paid fairly, so he tried forcing me to resign instead.
But that’s not the end of the worst. In addition to the illegal practice of constructive dismissal, Glitch also siphoned a portion of each of my paychecks in order to cover transfer and exchange rate fees, a practice Jasmine normalized despite it being absent from the contract. These fees should ALWAYS be covered by the employer when it comes to remote work, and yet I lost $80 AUD off each paycheck, translating to about $110 CAD each paycheck. In simpler terms, they stole hundreds of dollars from me to cover their business expenses. Over my time spent with them, Glitch had siphoned over $1700 CAD from my paychecks.
I’m not really looking for an apology or anything from Kevin, or Aaron, or Glitch as a whole. I have seen his apology letter on Twitter to all the staff he’s wronged at the height of Celeste’s termination and I genuinely do not trust a word of it. Kevin wrote that letter only after getting doxxed by an extremist fan when all former staff came forward about his management, which gave the sentiment that he wrote the apology for placating fans and not for the affected staff. I used to want to take revenge on the guy, but I don’t really care about how I was treated by them anymore. Living well is the best revenge, and I’m doing great right now. I think I just feel righteous indignation, and that nobody else should be unfairly treated or bullied or screwed over by such awful management.
Speaking of getting screwed over, Celeste’s termination was a tragedy. Celeste Notley-Smith, former cornerstone VA of Glitch Productions and voice of Tari in their first official serial “Meta Runner,” was treated like nothing and forgotten about by Glitch management. Knowing Celeste has still not been told the real reason why she was let go (at least as far as is public knowledge) is upsetting. Glitch Productions keeps getting accolades, support, and adoration, but one of the voices that gave Glitch their start was thrown away so easily. They’ve set a terrible precedent with their staff, as Celeste, myself, and Robyn Barry-Cotter (spoke out on behalf of several anonymous former staff when Celeste came forward) will attest, where if Glitch is done with you, it’s over. A lot of people have forgotten about what happened 3 years ago, but I remember how unfairly Celeste was treated, learning from social media that she’d been fired. I may not know her personally, but I will always remember Celeste as one of the most important people in Glitch’s history.
Kevin, didn’t stop his unfair working conditions with any of those folks who came forward on GlassDoor. He didn’t stop with the anonymous folks Robyn bravely spoke on behalf of. He didn’t stop with me. He didn’t stop with Celeste.
I don’t like to think that Glitch Productions is a beacon of independent animation. Glitch has great animation quality, that much is true, but we should be celebrating all walks of indie content, not just ones that can hit 10 million views with a pilot. If Glitch’s intent is to give independent creatives a voice and expand their influence, why the standardization of themes? It doesn’t feel like Glitch is fairly taking on new projects when their last male protagonist debuted in 2011, or when the stories the company and its showrunners tell are only inspired by the internet zeitgeist, or when the last non-American creative who ran a pilot was from back in 2019 with Meta Runner. Glitch isn’t even taking on local talent for showrunners, only popular internet peeps, so how can they be a beacon of indie animation when they are outsourcing a majority of their IPs to the U.S. and not representing a more genuine pool of creatives? No room for Chris Shwafer’s “Jumpcut!” or RebelTaxi’s “Loki IRL,” or Paul Georghiou’s “Day Job,” or Crazy Boris Productions’ “Dungeon Dynamite,” or MachoBoy’s “Anna-Logue.”
I want to make it clear that there are a lot of amazing people who work for the Glitch Productions. It’s amazing to see people getting a chance to create their serial with Glitch and its resources. My experiences and feelings for a minority of the company’s staff shouldn’t depreciate these creatives’ ideas and value to the art forms of animation and storytelling.
After seeing a new indie pilot from Glitch every few months, I can’t escape it anywhere I go on the internet. That pervasiveness reminds me of everything. I kept debating whether I would harm people’s enjoyment of Glitch’s animations, or if I should just keep it all bottled up so I don’t instigate anything online. My current friends insisted I share my experience, and their input means a lot to me. I used to be scared to speak up since Glitch Productions is a company that’s popular and has influence, but I keep forgetting that it’s just a company. Plus, now that SMG4 has ended, I feel like I can talk a bit more about my history with the brothers Lerdwichagul and their company. I’ve received specific permissions from Kevin on what I can or can’t share online about the show before leaving the company. I appreciate being given the chance to work at Glitch and learn how amazing it is to touch the hearts of other people with stories, but I’m disappointed that I’m filled with more negative memories of working there than positive ones.
I think I’ve said all I wanted to say. I don’t want this to be used as someone’s fuel for talking shit about Glitch. I originally didn’t want to make this a big long post, but the more I remembered, the more I added. I tried to keep the facts as straight as I could, because I would definitely love to embellish some of these things more and talk about some really messy stuff, like management leaking a personal NSFW playlist to me accidentally. There’s other staff I could talk about and other events to discuss, but it’s nitpicky at best. If Kevin has become a lot more accountable and fair with his staff, I will be hard-pressed to believe it, but that’s the best result. I know if another Glitch employee/contractor comes forward, there won’t be any backlash. There’ll be a bunch of people clamoring for moral brownie points on social media, who will then forget about everything in one to two months’ time. The unfairly-treated staff will have their life upended and will look work while the internet turns them into a temporary marytr. If the fans get too rowdy, Glitch will do another blanket apology and everyone suddenly stops caring because it means they don’t have to hate the company that their hyperfixations come from. I mean, nine or ten staff came forward and we got a half-hearted letter and a promise we can’t track the progress of. The number will keep going “only up” and nothing will happen. All I know, is that I don’t want someone else to feel how I felt for wanting to pursue their dreams.
Anyway, yeah. That was my experience with Glitch Productions. Thanks for reading. I’m not gonna be interested in talking about this for a while, so take discourse to social media or something, I have enough Glitch stuff on my website already.
