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Inside the making of Red vs Blue
Twelve years after its debut, RvB is still inventing new ways to stay ahead in machinima.
With 12 full seasons under the belt, and five mini-series too, comedy Halo machinima series Red vs Blue (RvB) is the longest running episodic web series of all time, and undeniably one of the funniest.
But when Red vs Blue first arrived in April 2003, it wasn’t exactly a guaranteed recipe for success. This was two and a half years before the launch of YouTube, so viewers had to download QuickTime or Windows Media Video files from the Rooster Teeth site to watch the show. But that they did, in their thousands and soon after, their millions.
“Matt (Hullum) and Burnie (Michael Burns – RvB’s creators) didn't think it would be this huge – they thought it'd be six episodes long,” admits current RvB writer and director Miles Luna. “We’re the internet joke that never died.”
Not only did RvB survive, the show flourished in a world where viral video didn’t yet exist. Within a year, RvB had a dedicated following in the six-digit range and today, parent company Rooster Teeth is a hive of animation production that works on five different shows simultaneously (You might have stumbled across the ludicrous escapades of the Achievement Hunter team during your internet travels – that’s them). Things have certainly changed over the last decade.
“It’s insane to see how much we’ve evolved since the first season,” says Luna. “The Blood Gulch Chronicles was the product of seven friends in a spare bedroom. Today we have a huge staff of animators, editors, light artists and sound artists working on every episode.
So, how did Red vs Blue reach this point, and how does the studio manage to keep pushing the boundaries of machinimation? Red Bull spoke exclusively to Luna as well as head of animation Gray Haddock to ask exactly that.
What have been the biggest changes for Red vs Blue in terms of the videos you can make now?
Luna: Now we do fight choreography and all sorts of stuff. It's been a gradual evolution: the first five seasons were made entirely in-game with Halo 1 and 2, with just a bunch of Xboxes, while from season six through eight, the story evolved somewhat and we introduced some new characters and villains and a little more drama into the storyline. Then in season eight we teamed up with Monty Oum to add fight animation to the show and visual gags that we wouldn't be able to accomplish using just an Xbox controller, and that grew and grew through seasons nine and ten, where we were able to do huge epic space battles and fights between super soldiers, and all sorts of insanity. We have a huge team of animators and I'd say half the season is being done in animation, which lets us do all sorts of crazy custom sets and scenes.
Red vs Blue
© Rooster Teeth Productions
It sounds like the series has taken a more TV-style formal approach complete with table reads and proper full-time writers.
Luna: When it comes to the animated sections, yes, because those take so long to produce. For example the first episode of season 13 took months to make – I mean, it's a giant space prison heist, so of course it's going to take a while. For that stuff we need to plan ahead, so it starts with an audio cut, then storyboards, then putting those storyboards into edit so we can create animatics, and we time out every shot down to the frame…but then there's the other half of the show that's still done in machinima. We have eight Xboxes hooked up together and a LOT of controllers and batteries. And our machinima leads, Josh Ornelas and Kyle Taylor, it's essentially two dudes who make the other half of the show, just essentially dressing up multiplayer maps, getting the right armour sets, colours and weapons. The beauty of machinima is, if it's a fully machinima animated episode, we can crank that out in under a week. And if we have an ad-lib or a last minute idea, because it's so easy to get with Halo 4's theatre mode, we can make that change right there on the spot. So there's almost two sides of production – a bit more rigid formality in terms of animation, but when it comes to machinima, there's practically unlimited freedom and the ability to change things on the fly, which is nice and refreshing. It also helps when we realise 'Oh, there's a plothole here, let's fix it'.
Haddock: Honestly, it’s been cool to see the production methodology evolve. We have to admit that we've had to buckle down and adopt a lot of true production methodologies in making the more detailed parts of the show. We've got a fantastic crew of a little over 25 people working on the show here, from technical directors managing the animation pipeline, to the animators to lighters, and visual effects team, and editing and so forth. So yeah, we're a real animation department now.
What tricks do you use in the game to get certain shots? Have there been any glitches in the games that have made filming easier?
Luna: Yeah, there are a ton of tricks. Every new Halo game brings with it new possibilities, and potentially new headaches that we have to learn and cut around and mess with.
Haddock: Microsoft and 343 Industries are going out of their way to be sensitive to Rooster Teeth's machinima needs, so with every game they put out, they'll reach out to Miles and company and ask how the last build went and what can they do to polish things up a bit.
Luna: Yeah, there's an actual green screen in Halo 4 – that's an absolute godsend. So yeah, tons of little tricks we've learned over the years, and it's a lot of dumb things. We know, for example, there's certain helmets – let's take Carolina's Rogue helmet from Halo 3, that was one of our favourite helmets to machinimate with as we knew it was one we could get the most emotion out of. It's really hard to draw emotion out of a faceless space marine with a visor, but because of the design of the visor, which kind of resembles like the eyes of Batman animated, or the ninja turtles – that triangular slant – if you film her from an angle looking down on her, with her head low, she can look really really angry, or if you tilt her head up, and get the camera below her, those angles then become sad eyes.
Red vs Blue
© Rooster Teeth Productions
Have you encountered any problems that aren't quite solvable with machinima/animation?
Haddock: Well, you'll occasionally hear the guys scream across the office when something's gone incredibly awry, so you know, they're going for some wild complicated shots these days, or shots that have characters and assets in it, and if a grenade goes off at just the wrong time, or someone accidentally backs off a cliff, we'll have to reset the whole scene back, which is always a treat.
The most difficult thing we had to do that we weren't able to do in machinima; Halo 4 has this weird quirk that every time you move you character, they raise their gun, even if you have your gun set to lowered or not. That kind of gets rid of any slow walking scenes because suddenly it looks like a character is going to shoot somebody. So we have a few scenes that are supposed to be a kind of touching moment by the lakeside, where a character slowly walks up to talk to the other one, and in machinima, it looks like someone's hanging out by the lake and someone is sneaking up behind them to shoot them in the back of the head. That's the one thing we could never get around with machinima.
What comes first: filming episodes or recording audio?
Haddock: Miles writes a script, and when possible, we do a table read, but it's such a wide collection of actors who have been members of the Rooster Teeth family for over a decade and are now scattered around the country, if not the world, so it's difficult to get everybody in – that happens maybe once a year. But everyone knows their parts well enough at this point, and with Miles' direction they can just hop in the booth and nail their performances.
Beyond that, Miles then works pretty closely with our camera and layout department where they work out all the shot lists and storyboards for everything; our editorial department takes those storyboards and the audio, and turns it into what we call an animatic, which is just a pre-visualisation of a particular episode, and then we have our animators and machinimator teams do their work with the characters to match the storyboards. We then render all of those shots out, and then our post-production team lays out all the sound effects and visual effects, and hopefully, by the end of that, we have an episode that works.
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Luna: Yeah, really though, the audio edit dictates the timing for the majority of the episode. Red vs Blue has always been handled like a radio program – so, audio first, and then the audio will dictate when our characters will bob their heads and move around in machinima, and of course, that dictates the animation side as well. When it comes down to getting specific timing, sometimes an animator might say, 'Hey, if we want to get this motion, I need like, 10 more frames', we talk it over, we go over it with edit, and say 'Yeah okay, give him those 10 frames', and it's the same with machinima.
Red vs Blue
© Rooster Teeth Productions
What kind of set up do you guys use to film the machinima? You mentioned it was a bunch of Xboxes hooked up together, has that changed?
Luna: Hah, our machinima station hasn't really changed… I'll tell you this though, we got controller holders in season 11, that was a huge upgrade. We've always just had about 20 something controllers sprawled out on the table, now we can put them underneath the table!
Really though, we have one director Xbox that is hooked up to our capture device and computer, and that is system linked to a Red team Xbox and a Blue team Xbox, and an Extras Xbox. Each Xbox has its own monitor. And then in season 11, we added an additional machinima station, so that same setup, duplicated on the other side of the desks, so that way, we can have two machinimators working on sometimes two entirely different episodes simultaneously without taking up all the Xboxes. But now that we're in season 13, which I said is now the finale to this giant war story, where we have this whole planet full of colonists and rebels going to war – that is a ton of Xbox controllers and characters and background actors.
We're at the point where we have more main characters than it is possible to have on one screen in Halo 4. It only allows up to 16 players in a game, and one of those is going to be your cameraman, so that leaves 15. I think we have around 20 lead characters right now, including our lieutenants and villains, and they're never really all in the same scene at the same time, but it's just crazy how much the cast has grown along with the scope of the show. But yeah, machinima: still a couple of dudes and a lot of Xbox controllers.
What's a typical day in the studio like?
Luna: Today I get to throw on a skin-tight mo-cap suit and do some motion capture with our guys.
Haddock: That's a great thing – Rooster Teeth, and RvB anyway, tends to use a lot of folks around the office to portray a character, so Miles is normally writing or directing the show, and he's playing one of the lead villains. I service the head of the animation department where we're producing a lot of other shows, but I've also played Miles' partner in crime in Red vs Blue for the last three years, so that's been great having some creative breaks. So in between all the other logistics work here in the department, you can just hop in the booth and pretend you're someone else for an hour. We also have our own mo-cap stage inside our sound stage, so we have the opportunity to throw on the dot suits and provide a lot of the physical animation that serves as the base for the other animators will use to turn that into the characters' performance. Any given character you seen animated on-screen, is a performance from anywhere between three and six people. So it's a team effort no matter what you're looking at on-screen.
Red vs Blue
© Rooster Teeth Productions
We’re coming into the middle of season 13 now, are you able to give us a few ideas into what to expect in the latter half?
Luna: If people have been blown away by what they’ve seen in the first half of Season 13, they have no idea what to expect for the second half.
Haddock: Ewoks.
Luna: Haha, not Ewoks, they can expect not Ewoks. What they can expect is some huge fights, some crazy action, some really stupid comedy and they can expect the stakes to be raised even higher than they've ever been raised before. I think by the time the season is over, if we can get a bunch of people sitting at their computers and say, 'damn, that was cool', we would have done our job.
How is Halo 5 going to affect the series?
Luna: Well, actually, I've had the pleasure of getting some one-on-one time with the game a few weeks ago, and I'm so excited about being able to machinimate in Halo 5 – they've done a lot of things with the game that are going to make a lot of machinimators happy.
Watch the second half of Red vs Blue: Season 13 on RoosterTeeth.com and catch up with all seasons on the Red vs. Blue YouTube channel here.
