Image credit: Michal Konkol/Riot Games Flickr
UK casting duo Sam ‘Initialise’ Hapgood and Alex ‘Nymaera’ Hapgood quickly rose to prominence after starting their amateur casting journey in 2020, going from SQ1 to UKEL, NLC and more, to being part of the LEC broadcast today.
In this interview with Lee Jones, the brothers share their insight into how they got started through a niche fan-led broadcast, focused on improving their craft and finally casting in the LEC with their own father in the crowd. See the full livestreamed video above and highlights below.
You both set up the LJL Officially Unofficial with MaskedSwan to cover the Japanese league in English, with a podcast. Would you recommend up and coming casters to start their own unofficial broadcasts?
Initialise: My answer changes pretty much every three months because the scene changes quite rapidly, and is changing quite rapidly, as things like the NLC change its structure and everything else below that.
I will say if you’ve got the time and people to do it with, absolutely, you can give an unofficial broadcast a go. But be careful of the pitfalls that come into that. You do not want to be competing with a league that already has an English broadcast, that will get you in trouble. Do your due diligence in terms of making sure you’re not treading on toes.
But by all means, if you’ve got that, it’s a great way to get yourself on a consistent league, a consistent cast and be consisting of the same teams at a high level and build narratives for a split. You don’t necessarily get this in amateur leagues where they only play two or three games and then teams blow up and you have to come together again.
When setting up LJL Officially Unofficial, in late 2019 between the three of us we had a good little casting team. Ironically, I’m the non-analyst despite the analytical degree background. Then lockdown hit, and we decided to see how far we could push it – it turned out we could push it quite far!
The LFL Officially Unofficial moment last year when Detonation FocusMe became the first LJL team in history to qualify for the Worlds group stage
Nymaera: Back when I was at uni at Sheffield, I was in the gaming society for a few years. I was always talking about League on the socials and other players, when I was playing in the university league, NUEL. Then I took that mentality of talking about League, but putting a camera in front of me.
[On recommending others starting their own unofficial broadcasts] You’ve got to know what you’re getting into. Yeah, it’s a hell of a lot of work. We spent a year and a half doing it as three people with occasional guests, more guests coming in later on, and then eventually ended up expanding the team because it was just way too much. And honestly, even with a much larger team now, it is still too much work for us who now have effectively full-time jobs in the esports industry.
So if you are going to go into this and you want to make a broadcast of your own., it is a great experience. It teaches you holistically about esports and a broadcast in terms of the graphics you need and how to produce things, how to prepare for things, how to cast a long-running league, which there aren’t many things of; but it is thousands of unpaid, gruelling hours. Especially if you’re coming up from grassroots, you’re going to be sat there with three viewers some days, that’s what we were doing at the start. And yeah, you will get beyond that at some point, but you have to understand what you’re getting into.
Is it a good way to improve your craft? Absolutely. Oh yes, but it is one of the hardest.
“I dropped out of uni for casting, so to have that all come together, with the family support at the LEC, with Sam and dad there, and the crowd, it was like this crowning achievement. It was really special – one of those moments I will remember to the end of my days.”
Nymaera
What are your views on the lack of grassroots opportunities after many amateur LoL leagues were forced to close?
Nymaera: We had a week on the LEC where it was us two casting and Jamada on the desk. We had three UKEL grassroots casters on the LEC. That, to me, is mindblowing.
We’re getting to the point where the grassroots is just not present. And while there is the ability to co-stream, for a lot of games that’s in the minority. It is often not as well-run as some of those amateur broadcasts were as well, because the people who are running those co-streams aren’t actually looking to primarily do a broadcast.
They’re primarily there to promote the team and to do stuff with the team, and you’ll have someone like a community manager going, “oh, well, we’ll also do a cast.”
It’s kind of the secondary motivation at that point. So while I think some people have gained quite a lot from that point, right now we have gone from having fairly high profile (for the amateur scene) tournaments in terms of the UKEL and SQ1 to the point where that’s not really the case.
And you could see the outcry when these leagues were shut down. It was very painful for a lot of the people who had spent a long time with that. I remember the community for the UK was great, so much character, so many very explosive individuals, which you wanted to follow and many stories you wanted to follow from that point.
Initialise: This is a bad year to talk about it in some ways because a lot of the changes to the region happened this year.
I think it’ll be interesting to see whether there is more supported grassroots stuff, say, this time next year when the the new system is settled in for a bit longer. That will be more telling for me as to where the state of grassroots is.
Obviously right now with the system change up and particularly division three and lower being completely shifted around, the question is what will emerge in its place, will anything emerge in its place and to what extent? I’m hopeful that stuff will, but we’re still waiting for that which makes it a bit of a rough time for a lot of up-and-coming casters. Because the opportunities that were around, say, two years, aren’t here right now. But they might be again in another year, perhaps.
Should smaller regions’ narratives be better told on international broadcasts?
Nymaera: A hundred percent, yes. How far do I go on this? I don’t want this to come across as salty, but, particularly with league international events, I think that a lot of folks get away with not knowing about the teams that they’re casting because the audience also doesn’t know about them.
Now it is also your job to teach them about those teams [as minor region casters]. But, for instance, go back to MSI this year and the Vietnamese team, um, was a team called Saigon Buffalo. Now I can guarantee you that the thing which most people will remember about that team is Mark Ruffalo, Saigon Buffalo memes. That’s it.
There is a VCS English broadcast, which has worked incredibly hard for a number of years. They’re a fan-run broadcast in the same way that we do the LJL thing. They had a PowerPoint to send to the on-air casting team. And yeah, I have to say, I feel like a lot of people didn’t know about the team. Instead of them being the most creative drafting team, the experimental VCS team that knows how to draft just to crazily destroy their opponents, was known actually as just this meme team from Vietnam and that storyline then ends with them and you don’t get to carry that on.
I have felt it with Detonation FocusMe and the Japanese teams because they are teams which have rarely found success. I don’t ever want this to be the case in other regions as well where it feels like, because they’re destined to fail, you don’t put in the effort to actually tell their stories.
What was it like having your dad watching in the LEC crowd for your debut Initialise/Nymaera LEC cast together?
Initialise: We were hoping to get both mum and dad out there, but with a couple of weeks’ notice, our mum is a GP and just couldn’t get the time off, so dad came along. It was really, really special. It was basically that, “look dad, I’ve made it!” moment. Getting to commentate with my brother in the LEC studio with my brother was an absolute dream come true.
Nymaera: I was very emotional. Casting in a lot of ways has not just reshaped my life, but before I got into casting I was not in a great place. I was rock bottom before casting and it took a long time to get out of that. Part of how I did that was I found purpose and satisfaction in the level of craft I could put out – being good as a caster meant a lot to me, it gave me a lot of value. Very rare in life do you get that feeling where things come together and you feel vindicated. I dropped out of uni for casting, so to have that all come together, with the family support, with Sam and dad there, and the crowd, it was like this crowning achievement. It was really special – one of those moments I will remember to the end of my days.
“When setting up LJL Officially Unofficial in late 2019, between the three of us we had a good little casting team. Then lockdown hit, and we decided to see how far we could push it – it turned out we could push it quite far!”
Initialise
What are your thoughts on NLC’s chances at EU Masters, with X7 Esports and Dusty in the main event? (question asked ahead of EUM – both teams are now in the quarter finals)
Initialise: The upper ceiling of both teams is very, very high. They’ve got the hands, both teams are very, very good. I think X7 have slightly better hands, Dusty have slightly better synergy and a little bit more weirdness to them, which stands them in good stead when they can do things like interesting Soraka/Seraphine bot lanes. And then Kerberos has got things like Darius and Nasus to pull out which makes them quite interesting.
I think both are probably playoffs calibre. How far into playoffs is a bit variable. Because I actually do think there are a lot of very good teams and draws will matter, because you look at all of the LFL teams and you go, “yep, they’re all semi-finalist calibre”.
You look at a team like Heretics or Giants, they’ve got some talent to them.
Nymaera: I think in spring, NLC had better results than people give them credit for. We had both X7 and Bifrost get to quarter finals which was great, no other region managed to do that.
In this tournament, my expectations are a little more tentative due to the consistency of talent [across the board]. When you look at Dusty, they have their comfort picks. I feel like Dusty, if they’re on comfort, they can really punch above what people think their weight is right now, and I think they will crack a couple of heads. Hopefully we’ll be quite surprised by how well they do.
With X7, I want to see what happens if they drop a couple of games. The ceiling of this team is incredibly high. Let’s see how far they can go. And NLC is not a weak region.
Follow Initialise, Nymaera, Lee Jones and LJL Officially Unofficial on Twitter here
