Red vs. Blue production

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This article describes the production of the machinima science fiction comedy series Red vs. Blue.

[edit] Writing

The process by which the show is written has changed as the show progressed. In the first season, Michael "Burnie" Burns would typically write an episode script on a Sunday afternoon before the episode was to be released on Friday. Scripts were written with minimal planning as the storyline grew beyond the 6 to 8 episodes originally expected. Church's death, as well as the revelation of Tex as a female character, both of which drove most of the season 1 plot, were conceived shortly before their respective episodes began production.

In January 2005, Michael Burns and Kathleen Zuelch were interviewed in an episode of The Screen Savers on G4. In response to a question regarding any drawbacks to using machinima techniques, Burns responded "There are drawbacks, like it's a very limited world".^[1] PC games often allow for the addition and integration of new game assets, such as new levels and textures; console games are much more limited in this respect.^[1] "But really what you end up doing is you end up writing around what's in that world, that limited world, yknow? It's kinda fun too, like and sometimes we sit around and we think 'what can we possibly do with stuff that's in the game?'".^[1] As an example, the skull from the Oddball multiplayer mode of Halo was used for the flashback scene in episode 10, in which Tex beats Private Jimmy to death with his own skull.^[1]

After the first season, the writing process changed significantly. Matt Hullum was added as a main writer in the next season, and plot events were planned much more in advance. Approximately 40 to 80 pages of rough plot and dialogue are now written out before production on a season begins. In describing the writing process, Burns has said that main plot points are assigned to occur at certain points in a season, and that they would begin writing each episode by asking how much they wanted to advance towards the next plot point.

Burns has said multiple times in DVD audio commentary and in public journal entries that he had minor issues writing towards large events in season 3, in terms of scheduling and pacing. The first problem was in compacting the plot from episode 39 to where the characters are sent into the future in episode 43, to mark the release of and the transfer of filming to Halo 2. The second issue involved the pacing of events leading up to those planned for the special 50th episode. The events initially envisioned for the episode were then deemed too many for a single episode, and were instead spread over episodes 50 to 52. In turn, this led to new hardships when events had to be compacted once more to meet the tradition of ending a season on its 19th episode, episode 57.

[edit] Audio

Dialogue for an entire episode is typically recorded over one or two days and cut together for filming the day after. Until midway through season 3, audio for the voice actors living in Texas had been recorded in a makeshift soundproof booth in Burns' guest room closet. Currently, however, audio is recorded in a small room in the Rooster Teeth offices in Buda, Texas. During season 1, dialogue for the voice actors living in Los Angeles, California — Joel Heyman, Kathleen Zuelch, and Matt Hullum — was recorded over the phone. Afterwards, a second recording studio was set up in Hullum's Los Angeles home. As Hullum moved back to Texas in season 3, Heyman and Zuelch now record their own dialogue. Jason Saldaña and Gustavo Sorola also recorded audio by phone while temporarily residing in New York State and Puerto Rico respectively.

For automatic weapons fired in the series after Episode 43, the assault rifle sound from the original Halo is used in place of the usual sounds. It is not known why this is done.

Initially, the first several episodes of the series proper did not include any music. In May 2003, Nico Audy-Rowland, the bandleader of Trocadero, was introduced to Red vs. Blue and enjoyed the series enough to submit a song about it to Burns, who liked the piece and promptly requested more music for Red vs. Blue.^[2] Episode 8, "Don't Ph34r The Reaper", was the first to include music. However, for the release of the season 1 DVD, music was retrofitted into earlier episodes, often during transitions.

Trocadero's "Blood Gulch Blues", whose last few measures are now heard during each episode's title sequence, is used as background music for the character introductions on the Red vs. Blue season DVDs. According to Trocadero's website, the song's lyrics are intended to highlight episode 2's joke about the Warthog and the notion that there is as much bickering and fighting within each team as there is conflict between the two sides. In fact, "Blood Gulch Blues" never mentions Red versus Blue.

It's red versus red
and blue versus blue
It's I against I
and me against you^[3]

[edit] Filming

Aside from a few scenes created using Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal, and Halo: Custom Edition for the PC, Red vs. Blue is filmed using a number of networked Xbox consoles. Within a multiplayer game session, the people controlling the avatars "puppet" their characters, moving them around, firing weapons, and performing other actions as dictated by the script, and in synchronization with the prerecorded dialogue. The camera is simply another player, whose first-person perspective is recorded raw to a computer.

In the interview on The Screen Savers, Michael Burns described the use of machinima techniques to film the show thus "It's like normal animation but instead of, y'know, sitting down, drawing everything by hand, we just use controllers."^[1]

In scenes using the original Halo, a bug was exploited that made it so that by holding a pistol, and looking down the character would appear to be holding the pistol down but looking up, as if more relaxed. The glitch did however make vertical movement limited or else return the character's appearance to normal, and thus the characters would have to estimate movements, since they were always looking down.

A Red vs Blue scene filmed using Halo 2.

Bungie Studios eliminated this bug in Halo 2, so that the on-screen characters now appear to look up or down correctly. However, Bungie also implemented a new feature to make it possible for Rooster Teeth and others to achieve the same effect as the original bug. In Halo 2, pressing down on the D-Pad of the Xbox controller makes the player character appear to hold his or her weapon in a neutral position, without aiming it at anyone, while looking straight ahead. This also allowed them to move the heads up and down to achieve a more dynamic appearance for some scenes.

In footage made using Halo, a weapon aiming reticle appears in the center of the screen. This reticle appears because, as with most machinima, the "camera" is simply another weapon-wielding player, whose perspective is recorded. The exception to this is a couple shots that were achieved by killing the camera player's avatar. Footage made using Halo: Custom Edition allowed for a player to act as a free roaming camera, and thus contained no reticule. In Halo 2, a bug in the Oddball multiplayer mode allows the player to drop all weapons, causing the weapon reticle to disappear. This bug has been used in all Halo 2 footage from episode 46 onwards.

To gain unique angles in the series, Rooster Teeth first used a tank in the game to emulate crane shots by standing the cameraman on the turret while it was raised. Later, they found it more practical to stand the cameraman on other characters in the game, a technique they refer to as a totem pole.^{[citation needed]} This trick has also been used for other purposes. Such as standing Donut on two characters to create the illusion that he could jump higher than is possible in the game.^[4]

For scenes which include the flag (CTF), only two colours could be used (Sarge's and early Donut's red, and Caboose's blue) as CTF is a team game and only red and blue colours could be used. So making a 'standard-issue' red for the early Donut could include him in the early flag scene, and makng Caboose blue could also include him in the scene. When the flag is amongst different coloured characters, we only see it with a red or blue character with other characters acting like it's there, when it really isn't.

Another problem that came up during filming was with the Blue Team's deceased leader, Church. Church appears as a ghost for portions of the show, and he needed to appear transparent to the viewer. To achieve this, all scenes with ghost-Church had to be filmed twice, once with Church in them and once without him.

As the series title suggests, the videos are mostly filmed on the Halo map Blood Gulch (and its Halo 2 counterpart, Coagulation), although later episodes have increasingly been filmed on other maps. The Apple Macintosh games Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal have also been used for a few scenes. Halo 2 is typically used for events that occur chronologically in the distant future, and the Marathon series for those that occur in the distant past; this has the effect of making the graphical quality of the series an indication of time's progression throughout the story.

[edit] Post-production

An example of post-production editing in Red vs Blue. Normally, Halo prevents players with different armor colors from boarding the same vehicle.

Adobe Premiere Pro is used to edit the audio and video together, add the titles, and create some of the special effects not normally possible on the console or in the games used. An example occurs in one scene of episode 6, in which both Grif and Simmons board the Warthog. As players with different armor colors (and hence on different teams as far as the game is concerned) cannot use the same vehicle in Halo, a split-screen effect is used to combine two separate shots of players boarding the vehicle. Adobe After Effects is also used, typically by Hullum, to create animated props not found in the regular game engine. Examples of these extra props include tombstones in episode 20 and ornaments, presents, and lights in the Christmas 2004 video.

As the camera player's view has a head-up display (HUD), black bars are added in post-production to hide the top and bottom portions, which would otherwise contain in-game information irrelevant to Red vs. Blue. This also gives a letterbox effect. Most machinima is made with computer games, which often have HUDs that can be easily disabled in one way or another. On the other hand, console games, such as Halo and Halo 2, are often more limited in this respect.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Red vs Blue official site
• The Unofficial Red vs Blue Resource Site