Games - Red vs Blue production

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	Games - Red vs Blue production

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

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". 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. 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, only: "It's red versus red/ and blue versus blue/ It's I against I/ and me against you".

Filming

Aside from a few scenes created using Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal, and the PC version of Halo: Combat Evolved, Red vs Blue is filmed using a number of interconnected 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."

To create the illusion of talking, the puppeteers move their views up and down, which makes their on-screen avatars appear to move their heads in synchronization with the dialogue. In order to prevent characters in Halo from constantly appearing to aim their weapons at each other, the puppeteers point their views downwards to make their characters' arms and guns point straight down as well; however, a bug causes others to see the characters looking, more or less, straight ahead. Nevertheless, to the puppeteer, the view is still downward, and this makes it difficult for the puppeteers to see where they are going and to judge location.

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. The same effect can also be achieveved by disposing of all grenades and pressing the L-trigger.

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. 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.

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. With this, however, comes some irony: Though Rooster Teeth uses Marathon to show the past, the Marathon series is actually set further into the future (AD 2794) than is the Halo series (AD 2552).

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