Meet Trenton Hudson of RiOT Comedy in North Hollywood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Trenton Hudson.

Trenton, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
In October 2013 I was 23 years old living in San Diego, I had a great job as a financial advisor, and worked with great people at a company most people dream of working at – and I was miserable. I hated getting up to an alarm every day to go to meetings to appease others, I didn’t like the work I was doing, and I knew it wasn’t for me.

I knew I wanted to do something in entertainment, more specifically, comedy. I always loved drawing and when I was a kid, I used to draw on everything I had; my school folders, binders, even my homework sometimes. Cartoons were always a passion. I’d draw made-up characters and other characters I knew from shows on TV.

October 8, 2013 was the day the album “Crenshaw” by Nipsey Hussle came out. And that is the most inspirational album I’ve ever heard, only two albums ever had a real impact on my life and who I was, and that’s one of them. It was like a blueprint for me on how to do what I want to do on my own without selling my content or creative rights. I was bumping this album nonstop, so I was really feeling myself haha.

Later that month, I called my younger brother, Dylan, and told him I had some ideas floating around for a cartoon I wanted to make. His response, “Man, I’ve always wanted to make a cartoon!” Dylan is brilliant, and he’s a straight-up machine when it comes to work. He’s self-taught in everything we use on the computer to make our cartoons and music.

After we decided to start making cartoons that October, we taught ourselves how to animate and got two more of our brothers on board with making cartoons. We released our first project in June 2015, a pilot episode of a show we have called “The Lounge.” We rented out a movie theater in Columbia, Missouri and filled it up. We got a lot of great feedback on it, although looking back on it now, it’s completely unwatchable, just awful, haha.

After the release of the pilot, we went to YouTube, and added another one of our brothers to the writing room – yeah, there are five of us. We did two seasons of “The Lounge,” on YouTube and caught the eye of an assistant in the programming department at Comedy Central. We ended up working with them for two years doing short-form episodes for web.

More recently we’ve been producing content for our own channel, RiOT Comedy, where we’ll be debuting new shows later this year, alongside season two of “Real Ballers,” an animated show about the lives of pro basketball players off the court.

Has it been a smooth road?
This is something I think about from time to time, and to me, when you’re going through something it doesn’t feel like a struggle, it’s just something you’re going through, something that has to be done. We didn’t know how to animate – we taught ourselves. We didn’t know how to write – we put ourselves around people who did. We had a computer fry when we were in the early stages – we had to replace it and update it with our animation library. You see what I mean? There is always something unexpected popping up. There will always be challenges and obstacles, everywhere you look when you have any ambitious endeavor. But if it’s something you’re passionate about, it just seems like something else you have to do along the way to get to where you’re going.

That’s not to say this is easy, because it’s very difficult. Every part of it has been. The learning process has been difficult, on both the creative and business sides of it. After we finished the web series for Comedy Central, we bombed our pitch meeting for television, that was very difficult. But that also helped fuel the big vision for me which has always been to start my own network to run all of our original content that we create. And a lot of the struggles are like that; they make you better, or hungrier, or smarter, and they help you get to where it is you’re supposed to be. I wouldn’t say it’s been a smooth road, but if you just keep going long enough, you eventually don’t notice the bumps in the road, they just become part of the road itself.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I produce cartoons at RiOT Comedy. I actually do a little bit of everything, I animate, write, do voiceovers, and final edits on episodes. We’re most known for the show “Real Ballers,” an animated show about the lives of pro basketball players, which airs online. “The Lounge,” which was previously on Comedy Central, will also make its return later this year to RiOT Comedy. I don’t want to give anything away right now because we haven’t made any official announcement about our lineup, but we have some great shows coming later this year.

What I’m most proud of as a company is the work we’ve put in. We didn’t go to school for any of these things, not animation, not writing, not sound engineering, not editing, not business; we just jumped in. We taught ourselves to animate, to edit audio, to do the score, and edits. We didn’t have any connections that could help us get started with anything, we went out and made those connections, put in the hours, and the energy. We went from making content that was unwatchable, to TV quality in less than four years. And there is nobody I’d rather do this with than my brothers.

I think what sets us apart from others is that we’re willing to push the envelope a little more than others when it comes to comedy. There are a lot of people playing it really safe right now with what they will and won’t say and I think we at RiOT Comedy do a great job of pushing it right to the edge but without doing anything solely for shock value. All of our content fits into who the characters actually are, which makes it more authentic, and hilarious.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I think if you want to do something in entertainment, LA is the obvious place to be. There are a couple of other cities that are really great depending on what specifically you want to do, but LA is entertainment. I meet people every day that I can learn something from. There is always something to do, no matter what you want to do. If I want to go to a seminar related to my industry on a random Tuesday night, odds are, I can find one. I would absolutely recommend being here if you’re starting out.