Over the past few months, I’ve been introducing you to the Butler Branding team via our Meet the Team interview series. This month, however, you’re in for a special treat – as our Webmaster, David Cruz, decided he wanted to really spice things up for his interview.

Inspired by First We Feast’s Hot Ones, I’m proud to present the first (and possibly only) episode of Butler Branding’s Spicy Bois:

How We Decided to Spoof Hot Ones

Like any good office-based team, the Butler Branding crew shares a LOT of funny YouTube videos with each other. Guy on a Buffalo, the “hacking” scene from Swordfish, the Taylor Swift/Screaming Goat mash-up – we’ve seen and shared them all.

But semi-recently, the majority of us have become super invested in Hot Ones. I fell down the Hot Ones rabbit hole after watching their excellent Stone Cold Steve Austin interview, and I hesitate to tell you how many other episodes I’ve watched over the past few months. (Some of them were research for the video above – many of them were not.)

David is the one who introduced us all to Hot Ones, and he was the one who suggested that his Meet the Team interview take on the style of a Hot Ones episode. After thinking it over and discussing it with a few other members of our team (especially our videographers, Naaman and Aaron), I decided we could pull it off – though I knew there’d be a lot of prep work involved.

How We Prepped for Our Hot Ones Style Interview

I’m no stranger to creating spoofs, so I knew our Hot Ones interview would come together only if we did our research. A great spoof incorporates as many elements of its source material as it can, while deviating just slightly where appropriate or necessary. Stick too close to the source material, and your spoof isn’t a spoof; it’s a bad imitation. But deviate too far, and no one will understand the joke.

Which is why, for work, I spent the better part of half a day watching Hot Ones. I wasn’t watching just for enjoyment (though the Gordon Ramsay episode was choice). I was noting camera angles, watching the shots and transitions being used, studying Sean Evans’s tics and interview questions, and figuring out how we could best match Hot Ones’ staging within the Butler studio. I then used that research to prep our videographers (who had great ideas for how we could set everything up), start writing up interview questions, and coach David on what to expect day-of.

Basically, I was figuring out how we could build the best Butler Branding version of Hot Ones – including everything up to deciding what our sauce lineup would be. (That actually took David and I an hour or two to put together – we needed to work within what was available on Amazon, while also making sure we had a good range of spiciness.)

The Spicy Wings of Death Cometh

The day of the interview, Butler Branding closed down for about four hours, to film the first episode of Butler Branding’s Spicy Bois. Our team came together to prep our wings (bought from Chicken Shack, then rolled in each of our Amazon-acquired Hot Ones sauces), capture b-roll footage of our hot sauces, and then film, conduct, and/or watch David’s interview.

I imagine it’s obvious having watched the video above, but just in case you need to read it in print – we all had a blast filming this interview. I looked forward to the Spicy Bois filming for weeks, and David (and the rest of our team) did not disappoint. David’s answers were fantastic, our videographers did a great job capturing and editing the footage (it helped that Aaron is a Hot Ones super fan and thus knew exactly what we wanted), and I’m extremely pleased with the end result. Even despite the fact that there’s now footage of me asking interview questions while EXTREMELY SWEATY out there on the internet.

This is probably the most involved video production I’ve ever coordinated, and I hope you all think it turned out as well as I do. I also hope you enjoyed getting to really know David, whose initial idea made this all possible – and who is most definitely Butler Branding’s spiciest boy.