Channel History

## TheCousinShow

Before 5-Star Films existed, Rylee Simpson and co-filmer Chandler Dunn who voices Dimitri Petrov in TCC, ran a different YouTube channel called "TheCousinShow" from April 2020 to October 2020. It was the first time Rylee ever dabbled into the machinima niche. TheCousinShow came to fruition due to Rylee and Chandler's habit of jokingly talking to each other in a fake Russian accent via Discord call when they were only 15, they were making fun of the famous characters from the game Grand Theft Auto IV known as Niko Bellic and Roman Bellic. After a while of this, Chandler named his accent persona "Dimitri" causing Rylee to later name his "Ivan."

Rylee and Chandler were frequent players of Grand Theft Auto Online, which later turned on a lightbulb in Rylee's head to tell a story with these characters using the open world of GTA Online. After discussion with Chandler they were both sold on the idea and started brainstorming the show as well as designing the characters, and picking out their cars. And less than a day later, the first episode of TheCousinShow showed it's face on the channel, the episode was called: "TCS Movie: Moving To Los Santos."

The show went on to air 28 episodes, and the show improved with each season, excitement was in the air to complete all 4 seasons of TheCousinShow. Until unfortunately the show would abruptly end in October of 2020 due to a private falling out between Chandler and Rylee, causing Rylee to later start a brand new channel in December of that year called 5-Star Films, where he would experiment with producing fully cinematic films using FiveM by himself.

## FASTLANE | Production Of Our First Movie

The production of FASTLANE started in December of 2020, before the 5-Star Films channel was made. FASTLANE was originally supposed to be uploaded on the YouTube channel called "Rhynlex," Rylee Simpson's personal channel. FASTLANE was filmed in a public FiveM racing server called: "Impulse99." It was a very popular server with many people on during the day, which in return made things very difficult. Rylee was puppeteering Dawson, and with the help of Lacey Bowen puppeteering Irene, and Ethan Simpson puppeteering Alvin, the release of FASTLANE was looking closer and closer, until things started becoming a little bumpy. Impulse99 had no scripthook permissions, meaning there was no means of controlling the time of day, the weather, etc. The crew had no way of controlling these things. Scene Director, a crucial mod that is used in 5-Star Films projects today, was not known about during this time. The crew had to work around online players of the server, who would sometimes barge in on a scene and try to sabotage parts of the movie, every scene was a race against the server's inner clock and weather.

Ideally in a racing server, you would not want to be swerving in and out of cars & people on the road, therefore the owners of the server turned down the pedestrian count, as well as the traffic, making the city in FASTLANE look like a ghost town. Throughout the 7 months that FASTLANE was in production, there were many issues they were faced with every step of the way. FASTLANE had no script, scenes and ideas were thought up on the spot. After a lot of heartache, struggle, and some goofs and laughs, FASTLANE was finally released on the channel on July 26, 2021. Initially, it was not received that well, due to it's poor graphics, voice quality, and more. The film did not hold up even for it's time, just due to Rylee's sheer lack of knowledge on creating machinimas. And after looking up other machinimas and comparing apples to apples, Rylee decided to start trying to improve upon future projects, trying to get better and better with each video and movie.