INTERVIEW: Al and Woody from the Skid Factory

A little over four years and almost 40 million views ago, Alan Butler and Ben Wood flew the coup. They’d gained enough of an audience and plenty of confidence after running ‘The Skid Factory’ as part of the Mighty Car Mods brand, and started their own channel. 

Their production set up, their mantra towards building cars and their attitude towards the channel all remain largely unchanged: pragmatism before pretense. The results speak for themselves - over 260,000 subscribers and weekly videos that regularly hover around 100,000 views.

Al and Woody were kind enough to chat to us for half an hour, taking us back to where it all started and sharing some secrets around how they continue to grow the channel, the unforeseen dramas you deal with when filming project cars and how they keep the weekly videos on schedule.

PG: So, from the beginning. Where did it all start for The Skid Factory?

Al: It all started about six years ago. I used to be a guest on Mighty Car Mods as their technical guy that knows stuff! [laughs]. I was working at home by this stage, and one of the MCM guys said ‘Hey, you do cool stuff. You should film it.’

Woody was out of the trade by this stage, working at a bottle shop. He decided he was keen to do the filming so he did a crash course with the Mighty Car Mods guys.

Five years later we got better at it! It’s always a work in progress. I think we’re reasonable at it now. The hardest part is that you get to see what you actually look like, which can be hard at first, but you get over that once you realise that everyone else has always seen you that way.

PG: So what’s changed along the way - your presenting style, production hacks, etc.?

Woody: In the beginning, we were over-filming. We shot everything because we weren’t sure what we wanted - do the viewers know or care about 1UZ-FEs and the difference between the old and new ones? How specific do you get?

You can definitely see changes between our early videos and our latest. I’ve definitely changed as a producer.

A: I haven’t changed!

W: I do the majority of the production work on the episodes. Nowadays I try to shoot to edit, but there has been plenty of episodes where you don’t know what’s going to happen so you just have to shoot everything and sort it out later.

PG: Obviously project cars can run into obstacles - how thoroughly do you plan the builds to align with episodes, or do you just wing it?

A: They’re real projects so we plan them as best as possible, but you’re working it out as you go

W: That’s just building cars, though. Sometimes the parts you think will fit just don’t fit, for example

PG: How do you keep the momentum going through the build if things stuff up?

A: We just cross our fingers! If we’re really getting held up with things occasionally we’ll need to get a bit creative around how we buy ourselves some more time

W: In the history of the channel we’ve only ever missed one weekly upload, and that was in 2019 when we planned to have two weeks off anyway. Sometimes we’ll mix the car build content up with a workshop tour or event coverage - there’s usually a way to pull an episode together if the car we’re working on isn’t being compliant.

PG: Viewers will probably also be familiar with you revisiting builds. Is it important to show people that the cars continue to evolve once they’re done on the channel?

A: We like to use the cars now when they’re finished. We never used to do that because once the jobs done, I’m the kind of person that wants to move on to the next project

W: The other thing is, they’re not our cars! Even though most of them belong to mates, we’re not in control of people’s schedules and not everyone wants to get their car out for hours on a Sunday just to help us make content!

A: And sometimes the vehicles might be finished in terms of our work but the project isn’t done, for example they might not be roadworthy just yet

PG: That’s a good point, a lot of people might not know that the majority of the builds are owned by mates of yours

W: They’re usually mate’s cars, and a mixture of crazy ideas that they’ve had and brought to us, or things Al has persuaded them to do!

A: Because they’re not technically customers it allows us to set our own schedule. We can be a little more risky and more creative because we’re not bound by delivering anything to a deadline

PG: For those thinking about starting their own channel, what equipment did it take to kick off The Skid Factory?

W: Having Mighty Car Mods’ help from the beginning was a massive eye opener - I can’t begin to describe how much help they gave us. Marty and Blair have been doing YouTube for so long. They had a recipe as to what equipment you needed, so they set us up with a Canon 80D, two Sennheiser lapel mics, a RODE shotgun mic’ with some crazy homemade adaptor they’d rigged up, an LED light panel and a tripod.

Eventually we ended up buying some GoPro Hero 4s and now we’ve got the Hero 8s, and we’ve upgraded to the 90D, but what gear I use will depend on where I’m shooting.

Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered why Al always mounts his microphone on the brim of his hat it’s because his voice is so deep that it makes the microphones buzz when they’re mounted on his shirt!

PG: One thing people overlook is the hardware needed to edit and store all the raw footage. Talk us through the set up there.

W: I still have every bit of raw footage from day one! It’s all stored on a 32TB network hooked up to the Mac Mini that I edit on. Having all the footage to go back to is so important as we’ve started doing recaps on build series, so it helps to be able to have that library of content to look back on.

PG: And how has the shed itself changed over the years?

W: Again, it was Marty and Blair who helped us set up to film inside the shed. It used to echo quite a bit and we had fluro’ lights up, but recently we’ve hung LED low bay lights and had the shed all lined and insulated. 

Really, that was so that we could air condition it because it used to get hot filming in the shed in the Queensland heat, but the insulation helps with the noise, too.

PG: Do you ever get to the end of a project and have nothing ready to move on to?

A: That’s happened in the past! Now we’ve got plenty of stuff lined up, though. You could almost say we’ve got a few cars on the go, but not quite - they’re ready to go if need be. 

We’re getting better at the planning side of things, but it’s always hard to plan for the unforeseeable. I do sit down and plan a lot in my head but we’re starting to try and formalise that for Woody and my wife’s benefit! 

We’ll take a bit more time planning out the episodes of the build instead of winging it and having it drag on forever. People tend to lose interest if you go over five or six episodes.

PG: Do you guys read a lot in to the YouTube analytics, or are you pretty confident in your knowledge of the audience and their content needs?

W: You can read a bit from the watch times. I’ve tried to analyse it myself and change or experiment with the episode format to suit the analytics, but you end up chasing your tail. From the start, Mighty Car Mods said to us ‘Don’t read too much into it, and don’t make videos just for the sake of YouTube.’

There are episodes where I’ve spent days and days trying to perfect the quality of a specific episode, but the extra effort doesn’t always translate into video views. We’re confident in our content, and the style of the videos

PG: One thing YouTubers seem to find hardest is the commercial balance. How do you guys keep the channel financially viable, without ostracising your audience by doing blatant ads?

A: One thing we had to learn was how to deal with sponsors. There’s a lot of communication and managing expectations once money starts changing hands, so we basically only align ourselves with businesses that want to work with us. We’ve got a product and we can deliver commercially within that, but we’re not changing our formula. 

W: We’ve never really put the hard sell on the audience for any product because we know the audience won’t respond.

PG: Anything else you’d like to add?

A: We just want to say a huge thanks to the team at Summernats for involving us in their events. We have a lot of fun hanging out with like-minded people at the best car events in Australia

New episodes of Skid Factory go live on their YouTube channel every Wednesday (or earlier if you’re a Patreon subscriber). You can also support the boys by buying some of the merch’ in their online store.

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