February 22, 2012 • 40 mins
What is Rooster Teeth Productions? What is machinima? How did Red vs. Blue get started? Listen in as Jonathan and Chris interview Burnie Burns, the pioneering founder of Rooster Teeth Productions.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tex Stuff from how stuff looks dot com. Hello again, everyone,
and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
and I'm an editor and how stuff works dot Com.
(00:22):
Sitting across from me, as usual is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
The man in black fled across the desert and the
gun Slinger followed. It's interesting that you would pick black
Well also, that kind of gives a suggestion of maybe
like a desert. And uh, we have a special guest
on today's episode who is from well calling us from Austin, Texas,
(00:48):
which is not just a desert, but that's what came
to mind, right. So, guys, this is a very special
episode of tech Stuff, something that we hope to do
more of in the future. We've got a special interview
lined up with this, the Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth Productions.
They are the company that make Red versus Blue. So
we've got the interview ready to go and we're going
to insert it right here. We've got Bernie Burns on
(01:12):
the line. Bernie is the founder of Rooster Teeth Productions,
the producers of the popular web series Red Versus Blue,
among other things. Bernie, how are you I'm doing find Jonathan,
how are you doing? I am I'm okay. Chris, how
are you doing great? Thanks for asking. You're welcome, Chris.
I don't want you to be left out. So Bernie,
(01:33):
I wanted to talk to you. Really, you're a pioneer
in web content, especially when it comes to web videos
and something beyond just the the one hit wonder web
videos that that we're sort of the the earmark of
internet video when it first started to take off, and
I kind of wanted to talk to you about how
you got into that and the development of Rooster Teeth
(01:56):
Productions over time and where you're at today. So to start,
you were actually involved in creating content for the web
before there was even a Rooster Teeth, right, that's right,
I mean really back before video was even really possible
on the Internet. Um, I mean you can download a
I think one of the first things video wise ever
downloaded from the net was the first episode of south
(02:19):
Park or what became south Park, and that was ten
minutes short that I think was eighty megs and it
was the size of a postage stamp on the screen.
But yeah, I started off writing for video game sites.
I started writing off for writing for what we're called
everything Nothing sites where they were sort of like blogs,
but there were more articles. You know, modern day equivalent
(02:41):
would be almost like Slate or The Escapist, where their
articles that are kind of thematic, but they could really
be about anything. So what led you into starting the
whole red versus Blue video phenomenon. Well, I was a
filmmaker and I live in Austin, Texas, and so in
(03:02):
college I built a non linear editor video captured device
that could catch her. Back then it was VHS tapes,
so we transfer film to VHS and then we would
capture the VHS and edited online. So then after making
a couple of movies with some friends in Austin, uh,
they moved out to l A to start their entertainment careers.
I stayed in Austin because I had a very good
(03:23):
tech job and I was always just trying to find
ways to make uh, you know, films or make short
little videos. And I had all this equipment laying around
and I thought, well, why don't I just take some
of these videos I'm producing and start putting them online.
Forget a way to do that, and so started encoding
them in quick time and dive x back then and
we'll just upload them to a site. And did a
(03:45):
few of those before I made the first episode of
Red Versus Blue and that immediately caught on. So for
for our listeners who may not be familiar with Red
Versus Blue, can you can you get sort of a
bird's eye view of what the series is and and uh,
you know the vehicle you use to create the series. Sure,
(04:06):
So what we do in a nutshell, uh, is we
use the video game Halo uh to produce short comedic
cartoons essentially, um, and we use the graphics engine that's
in Halo to do all of our animation. And probably
the best way to describe it for something for someone
who's never seen anything like it before, it's almost like
(04:26):
using the video game characters as virtual puppets. Um. You know,
we're not doing animation cell by cell or you know,
sitting down and plotting on all the character moves. We're
actually controlling them in real time. So it's a little
bit like animation, and it's a little bit like live
action shooting and that we do takes, we do rehearsals,
(04:47):
and the performance that you're seeing is actually a recorded
live performance by someone controlling the character in real time.
That's that's really a very clever way of creating films.
And of course we now call this mishinima, but back
then that term probably wasn't very much in use at
the time you guys were first getting into Red Versus Blue. Right, Yeah,
(05:07):
it's funny, we didn't know what it was called. We
didn't know this was the movement that people were doing
these kind of things. So we felt we were brilliant
and we had been invented this new technique of shooting,
and we were actually wondering what we're gonna call it.
And uh, we we got a phone call from Paul Marino,
who was the head of the Academy of Machinima Arts
and Scientists in New York, and you know, they said
(05:29):
they wanted us to come out and do a presentation
about Reversus Blue, and um, there was no award ceremony
that they we had been nominated for, and um, yeah,
that's how we first found out about the word mishinima. Yeah,
so and you said that you were it took off
almost immediately. Was that like from episode one you immediately
saw a real interest in this Or did it take
(05:50):
a few before it started looking like you really had
a hit on your hands. No, it was pretty immediate.
We put up the We put up the first episode
and end we along with it, we put up a
p s A which was just the characters looking into
the screen and talking and um, we were doing jokes
about it. It was so long ago as weapons of
(06:10):
mass destruction. Uh, this was back in two thousand and three,
very very timely at the time, was very very topical.
Um and uh. We were linked the first episode of
the series was linked on Fark and slash dot and
penny Arcade, and so it went from three thousand views
(06:31):
the first day that we put up the episode to
the next day we had about fifteen thousand views on it.
By the time we put out the second video. A
quarter of a million people showed up the day of
the first day to watch the second video. And but yeah,
by the end of the month, we were up to
about seven hundred and fifty thousand viewers a week within
(06:53):
within four weeks. That's that's it was. It was. It
was the biggest problem for us was figuring out how
to get it out there. Yeah, the bandwidth issues, Yeah,
I mean we were we were paying tons of money
to deliver it because I mean, I'm sure you remember
back in the day, people will get bannedidth bills when
they would put up, you know, things on servers and
then get a popular site. Um, And so we were
(07:15):
trying to figure out how to host what we're at
the time pretty massive files. I mean, these were, you know,
seventy megabyte files people were downloading in you know, two
thousand and to two thousand and three. It was it
was hard to figure out how to stir all that.
And YouTube didn't exist at the time, so we couldn't
just throw it up on YouTube and hope for the best,
you know. I have I have a question, um, about
what's your recording schedule look like? I mean, how many
(07:37):
of these How fast can you do one of these videos?
And and about how long does it take to uh,
you know, from beginning to end. When you're talking about
scripting and going through rehearsals and things like that, how
long does that take. Well, we're a lot faster than
we used to be. As soon as we've been doing
it for nine seasons that we're we're just going into
season ten right now. But if you look at like
a Pixar movie and the machinima, what we produced is
(07:59):
not on the fidelity of a Pixel movie. We do
more custom animation now. But um, the big thing about
Sinim is how efficient it is. So a Pixar movie
might take a team of three people the course of
three years. Um, we can produce five minutes a week
with about This is now just neglecting voice actors, who
(08:19):
you have to have a different actor for every character.
But we can produce five minutes a week with about
three people. Uh, and that will take us about you know,
thirty or forty hours to do that. So every year
we put out of a full feature on DVD, and
we can do that with perruption crew of anywhere between
you know, three to five people. Now, now that in
later seasons we've been adding more custom animation. Just because
(08:40):
of cinema got more popular, we found we had to
do more to stand out. And you know, like anything,
it's like if it stays the same, it'll it'll get stale.
So we had to kind of evolved the series while
it was in place. And so now we have a
much bigger team now. We have a team of about
twenty people that work on it, uh and they do
a lot of custom animations and really fun on action scenes,
(09:01):
fighting scenes, that kind of thing. So when you guys
were first exploring motion capture, UH, when did you guys
actually sit down and consciously make that decision? And was
that a huge challenge? Was it that or what? Was
it surprisingly easy compared to everything else he had been doing. Well,
we we made one higher that made it a lot easier,
(09:21):
and that was Monty Home. I'm a big consumer of
all things internet as well, so I'm always online, always
like looking at you know, online video. I just I
love it, and um, it's it's fun to spot people
who were doing cool new stuff. And montyme put up
a video where he custom animated master Chief from Halo
(09:43):
fighting Sammy's from Metroid and it was the models were
okay in a texture okay, but the animation was outrageously
sophisticated and the choreography of what he was doing. And
so we contacted him and we tried to work with
them for like two or three years before we we're
finally able to hire him. And that was in season eight,
and so we essentially built an animation pipeline. That's he's
(10:08):
the centerpiece of it. We built it around him, essentially. Cool. Well,
jumping back again back to the early days, about how
long did it did it take before you realize that
you actually had a viable company on your hands? I mean,
the show was a hit, but there's a big difference
between something that ends up getting really viral on the
internet and then turning that into something that can actually
(10:29):
sustain itself as a business. Did that happen right away
as well? Well? I mean it came in the sense
that we all of a sudden had these major expenses
for that's what a great way to start a business, right? Well,
if you know, if there's a massive expense side of this,
then they're they're they're theoretically should be some kind of
(10:50):
revenue help service that I mean, there's there's obviously demand
for this. So if you sit still, the demand will
generate bills. Uh, you have to a proactive figure a
way to generate some revenue from it. And you know,
I think there's a big opinion, uh that a common opinion.
I should say that if you make something on the
internet and you get a ton of views. Um, that
(11:12):
the ad companies just show up like the ad trucks
shows up in your driveway. It does. It doesn't work
that way. Getting advertisers for content is very hard and
it's always been hard. It was never it was never
easy to do it on the internet. UM. And there's
a lot of places that will abstract that for you now,
a lot of a lot of video services that will
do that for you. But it's a very difficult process,
(11:34):
and so we had to go through and figure out
a way to build a business model. UM. We actually
built one that was based not on advertising, and we
reran on that for five years. UM. We just did merchandise, UM,
premium memberships and DVD sales, and that's how we funded
the company for the first five years. We never we
never ran a single ad on anything, uh for the
first round of the show. Yeah. That actually brings me
(11:56):
to the question about the sponsorship, the premium membership that
you rant. I've been a fan of Red Versus Blue
since season one. I've been following it since season one,
and so I'm familiar with the idea of you became
a premium member and you would get access to certain
videos sometimes you get access early, sometimes you get exclusive access,
(12:17):
and also for the first few seasons. I remember you
would even get the DVD at the end of the
season when you are premium member. Yeah yeah, so, uh so,
clearly building a community was an important part of your
business model as well, right, and we built a community
site to that. We knew that eventually the popularity of
(12:37):
the show would wane, or at the very least that
people watching the show, you know, the individuals would you know,
say well, I can't watch something for you know, ten years. Um,
you know, people just naturally fall out, and so we
wanted to have something in place to hold people uh as,
like our portion of the internet, so that people would
always know where they can find us. And when we
(12:58):
put new things out, it would be great to be
able to show it to people, to get that initial
seed of a of a new project. And that's that
was probably one of the smartest things we did, was
making sure that we carved out our own portion of
the Internet. Yeah, it's it's still a very popular portal.
I mean, if people want to go and check out
the you have several different your l's that all lead
(13:19):
into this kind of uh hub really of all the
different products Rooster Teeth does because it's not just Red
Versus Blue. Although we'll get into that in a little bit.
I did have another question about the tone of Red
Versus Blue and the early seasons the Blood Gulch Chronicles
in particular, which is the first five seasons of Red
Versus Blue. Uh, it was it was almost exclusively comedic,
(13:41):
and then you began to experiment by inserting some more
dramatic elements into the storyline, sometimes with uh tertiary characters
who were not playing directly with your main cast. What time,
at what point did you decide to do that? Was
that something you had wanted to do from the beginning,
or as you were going, were you thinking, hey, you
know what, we could actually try something new here and
(14:02):
try and do almost like an action movie type script
parallel to the comedic stuff we're doing on this other side. Yeah,
So it was essentially when it first started, essentially, like
somebody described it as Stripes in Space, which I think
is a great way to describe it. It's just just
it's very lighthearted. It's a it's a military comedy which
which focuses on a lot of bureaucracy humor, which I
(14:25):
think crosses over a lot of industries, not just you know,
the military, but also business and school and everything else. UM.
I was always as a as a writer, I was
always writing though background threads so that the story could
stay consistent. If you base it in a universe, you know,
then it seems more honest. And I was doing all
(14:48):
of that. And when we got towards the end of
the fifth season, UM, I was talking with people about
stories in the background that we're going that audience members
had picked up on. But I had this whole fleshed out,
uh you know verse kind of behind the scenes, and
I was talking with somebody here about it and I
described it all, was writing on the on the white
board about all these things, and they said, maybe you
(15:08):
should show this to the audience, you know, I mean,
maybe you should, Maybe you should put this out there.
And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe we should.
It's it's it's interesting to us. And you know, our
philosophy here is, um, if we make things that we like,
we just have faith that there's enough people on the
internet that are like us that they'll like it too.
So yeah, it's just a natural evolution. Like I said,
(15:29):
it's you know, we started off the very first episode
of the very first season saying, all these guys do
we stand around and talk? That's what they were doing
last week. That's what we were doing five minutes from now,
and for five seasons. You know it's it works very
well standing around and talking, but you really do run
the risk of becoming stale. Five years on the internet
is is like a it's like a glacier, you know,
(15:49):
it's it's like an eon. It seems like, um, that's
the rise and fall of my Space. Yeah. Yeah, And
you know we talked about that to you, like the
when I was talking you earlier about the carving out
your own space on the internet. It's like a lot
of people today, you know, they don't do that. There's
a big opinion that the the web is dead and
that you should just go all in on Facebook or
(16:11):
all in on YouTube or what you know, whatever the
darling uh site of the moment happens to be. But
I mean, we've been doing this for so long. I
remember when if we just spent all of our time
building up our Facebook or assuming are MySpace friends in
two thousand three and two tho four, we would I
think you know, uh, you know we're dealing with rever
(16:31):
or something like that. You know, it's just it's it's
it's Twitter, Twitter follower accounts, and you know, Facebook like
seemed very important right now, but five years from now
they probably won't seem all than important. Yeah. The biggest
shifts that I see right now are really more platform shifts.
So it's more like the emphasis now is on mobile
as opposed to the desktop and laptop models, which that
(16:54):
makes more sense. I mean, that's an access thing, not
a not a you know, this is the particular website
that in vogue right now. Well, oh no, go ahead,
I'm sorry. No, it's crazy. It's crazy how much mobile
has taken off. I mean, it's just it's just insane. Yes, yeah,
we we talk about that all the time here at
how stuff works as well. I mean it's it's completely changed, uh,
(17:16):
the way that we create certain types of content. Because
there are some kinds that are perfect for the mobile
platform and that's just people love them. There are other
types that just don't quite fit as well. It's a
real challenge to try and find the balance there. Fortunately,
I think web video is one of those that it
(17:37):
transcends the platform you don't have. You don't have to
worry about that as much. UM. Let me ask you
also about some of the tricks you guys did working
within the confines of a video game universe and actually
within the actual physics engine of the video game itself. Uh.
Watching some of the behind the scenes stuff, I love
(17:59):
the idea that you has got really creative were the
ways you shot the series, especially early on, when there
weren't as many tools for you to use, tools that
I think have been built into games like Halo because
of the work you've done when they didn't exist back then.
You found really creative ways of getting around it. The
one I think of off the top of my head
is using a tank as a crane for crane shots, right.
(18:25):
I mean, that's just goes back to how it's a
lot like live action. It's like we wanted to get
a shot where we raised up, how do we do?
How do we do that? Um, there wasn't any ability
within the retail game to raise the camera above eye level.
I mean the entire first three seasons of the show,
you're seeing the entire show through another character's eyes that
never appeared on screen. It's it's literally a camera man, um,
(18:46):
and so we would walk him around in order to
set up shots and to meet the camera. And so
we thought, well, how can we do this? I thought,
why don't we just put him on the end of
the barrel of the tank and just slowly raised the
tank barrel up and sure enough, that allowed us to
get a crane shot with it. Likewise, we would put
people on the tops of banshees and fly them around
(19:06):
if we wanted to get a really high view of
the canyon or something like that. Yeah, we had to
be really creative. Um. In a later season. One of
the things we would also just employ like some of
the oldest tricks that there are in filmmaking. Um, we
had a character, a baby alien, so we need a
small alien. Well, you can't shrink a character in the game,
so we would just do forced perspective where we would
(19:28):
set the alien far back in the shot and because
there's no depth of field in the game, it's an
infinite focus. Um, we would just set up the scene
so that one character is really far away and they
just happen to look a lot smaller. And it worked perfectly.
I mean it it the illusion was great. It's you
know just like old things they used to do back
in the days when they would you know, shoot King
Kong and voyage the Moon. I imagine getting eyelines in
(19:51):
this series is a bit of a challenge. It definitely is.
I mean there's nothing in the game where it's like
everyone looks in the same direction, you know, And so
we're probably the best people in the world at playing
Halo in a very specific way. Like ever, if you
ever put us in a matchmaking game where all the
players on the team have to look in the same
(20:12):
direction or all run in the same line while looking
at their feet, we would we would kill at that.
So so yeah, we ever created Days of our Lives
game within Halo, you guys will rock it. Yes, we
would be the dramatic reaction team. Well, let's talk about
some of the other content that Rister Teeth produces. I mean,
(20:35):
Red versus Blue is probably what got you guys on
the map for most people, but you do a lot
of other, uh things as well, including some live action stuff.
When did you guys decide to start producing live action shorts? Well,
that's our that's our background is live action, and I
mean we start off like I made a feature film
in college. I was a computer science student, but I
(20:56):
wanted to learn how to uh make films because that's
from premedic computer science, and surprisingly not a lot of
stuff transferred. So I had a bunch of I have
like organic chemistry as a as an elective on my
transcript um, and so I had a bunch of hours
on campus where I was trying to kill time, and
I found the student run TV station down there, t STV,
and started meeting film students and wanting to get involved
(21:19):
in video editing in film production. But I did not
want to go and sit through um film classes. So
I thought, you know what, Robert Arriguez just made El
Mariachi at ut I went to the University of Texas.
He made elm act just a few years ago. There
was this idea that you could just make an independent
movie and set the world on fire. So I thought,
why don't I just make a feature film, uh, you know,
(21:41):
spend ten thousand dollars doing that as opposed to spending
it in a classroom, and then I'll probably know everything
I need to know about filmmaking by the time it's over. Well,
that took about eighteen months to get that done, you know,
we we actually did shoot a feature on film on
sixteen millimeter film. That was a long process, but uh yeah,
that's that's just how I got involved with it, and
I uh um, you know it was it was work
(22:02):
out pretty well. I mean, you know, I own a
production company and I don't have a degree in in
any kind of entertainment. I have a computer science degree
that just hangs on my wall and I never used basically. So,
uh so, who are the writers on your on your staff?
I know you write red versus blue? Right, Yes, that's right,
I write versus blue. Uh. And you know the actors
add a ton when they get in the booth. Uh.
(22:24):
All the actors know their characters so well now that
they you know, sometimes I just like have blanks that
they can fill in for ad libs, you know, where
they add a lot in as well. Uh. And then
we have a team of writers upstairs, um that work
on our shorts. And that's a it's a very collaborative effort. Um.
They have a whole team like a writing room where
they go in and pitch ideas and then they take
(22:44):
them away and then come back with scripts and trade
them off in new drafts. It's a it's a very
fun process. Cool well, and we're pretty familiar with the
writing process around here too, it's not not this similar,
although we of course write articles and not not not scripts.
But tell me about the Immersion series, which kind of
(23:05):
married this video game and and live action short thing
into an increasingly hilarious series of misadventures. Well, that was
kind of fun. That was had this idea that we
could take things from video games and test them in
real life. And I had the idea for a while
and eventually I said, you know what, I should make
(23:25):
one of these because someone else is going to do
this if we don't. And that's a big thing on
the internet. Man. It seems like by the time you
think of an idea, you should go look it up
because somebody's probably already done it, you know, and things
move that fast. And so this, this idea, this probably
gives you a good example of what the whole series
was about. When you play a Grand Theft auto game
(23:47):
or one of those open world urban environment games, when
you drive a car, you drive from a third person perspective.
Your your view of the car is behind the car,
and that's not the way you drive a car in
the real old, So we thought, okay, let's try that.
Let's set up a car in real life that is
a third person perspective. So we blacked out the windshield
safety first, UH and black out the entire cockpit, and
(24:11):
then suspended a camera on a rig behind the vehicle
and then ran that down to a monitor that was
on the dashboard of the car. So you're in the
car driving it through a course and you're looking at
the car from behind your viewers from behind the car.
And we shot that episode. He took us about six
hours to shoot the pilot um to the driving part
of it, and then we spent another four hours out
(24:32):
there afterwards because everyone in the crew want to drive
the car, which we said. We had a blast doing it.
It was great. It reminds me there was a guy
there was a It was more of an art project
than anything else, but there was a guy who built
an MMO suit that did sort of the same thing,
but it was just a It was just a person
in a in a suit where you have a helmet
that has a monitor built into it. There's a rig
(24:55):
that's UH worn like a backpack that suspends the camera
above and behind to of that that MMO view of
a character running around the world, so the only view
you had of yourself was as a third person, and
of course they added spikes on the helmet to give
it that authentic MMO feel. And apparently anyone who put
this on would first spend the first half hour struggling
(25:19):
to interact with the world in a way that wasn't
going to feel like it was going to kill them
because it was so weird to be have an out
of body experience like that, And then the next half
hour was spent stomping around and swinging your arms around
because you look like the incredible Hulk. So, yeah, walk
up to people and ask them for quests, right exactly, Yes, Yeah,
(25:39):
that was yeah. No, there there are people who are
still in therapy because of that art project. So we
did a funny one like that where we tested what
it would be like to be in a side scrolling
environment where we had a wireless rig that we can
send a video signal to to goggles that the person
would wear, and we shot them from a ninety three
angle directly from their side, and so we had like
(26:01):
a Mario course that these guys had to navigate while
only being able to see themselves from the side. So
what short straw that Gus and Jeff draw that they
have to be in all of these They drew the
academic short straw. They should have just been better in
school and they would have better career opportunities and they
wouldn't have to be subjected to all this terrible stuff.
(26:21):
We we got to the point where we were torturing them,
I think, I mean we we did this one thing
where we tested video game foods. You know, when you're
playing a video game and your character is hurt, if
he eats a steak, then he immediately feels better. I
don't know what they think the healing properties of food
are in video games. So we took them out. We
didn't tell them this. We took him on drink until
two in the morning and to celebrate something. It was
(26:42):
all a ruse. And then the next day we showed
up in the production crew at their house at five
in the morning. They just, I mean they literally just
gone to bed so they would woke up and they
were just miserable, and we just like fed him food
for about an hour and a half, big hams and
pizzas and strawberries. Everything you see in a game that
is supposed to cure you, and let's just it this way,
it did not cure them. Yes. To learn more, visit
(27:05):
rooster Teeth's website and you can watch all of these
or get the DVDs if you want to be able
to have them for posterity's sake. Uh. Well, let's also
talk there's another another project, Achievement Hunter, which is again
hosted by rooster Teeth, which is all about achievements on
Xbox three sixty games, although you guys also cover other
(27:26):
games occasionally as well. Right, yes, we cover it's the
achievement focus does seem to make it teams, although achievements
are bleeding into bobile games and Steam games as well. Um,
it does seem to think it's like a three sixty
uh site, but now they cover all different games, like
they've been covering a lot of the Star Wars Older
public MMO lately. But it's just it's a celebration of
(27:49):
video game culture, which which we love. We love online
culture and video game culture, and we're actually holding a
convention uh in Austin this year rt X, which is
the intersection of gaming and on like culture. But Achievement
Hunter has been a huge, huge success. Um, it's just
been It's something that you know, we kind of kicked
around for a while of you know, recording actual gameplay
(28:11):
from our footage from gameplay video games and then commenting
on it and uh we Jeff Ramsey, who plays Griffin
our Reverend Blue series, he ended up, he hit it
up the project and he's just been. Man, it's been
an enormous thing. We're about to hit uh one billion
total views on YouTube across all of our videos and achievement.
Hunter has been a huge part of that. That is incredible.
(28:32):
And I also should add the the successive Rooster Teeth
has been truly phenomenal and that your effects. You know,
you guys talk about how you have absorbed video game culture,
but you've also become part of it. I mean you
several people from Rooster Teeth have been featured in games
as voiceover talent and other things. Can you talk a
(28:54):
little bit about some of those, you know, we actually
are trying to go through and compile a list of
the places where Richarchiefs has been referenced. The Rivers and
Blue has been referenced, um just in most recently. Um,
there's a there's a reference in the World of Warcraft
expansion where there's a I forget the name of the thing,
but it's essentially like a parody of Blood Gulch And
(29:16):
there's a character in there that's based on griff um
Uh in there. And then we just did a like
a commentary, a bonus commentary for gun Stringer Twisted Pixel,
and then we always it's funny these we would end
up been achievements, references and achievements, Like there's a lot
of Red versus Blue referential achievements. Um, there's Wanting Gears
of War. Um, there's a dishwasher, Samurai dishwasher. They just
(29:39):
put out a new version of the game that has
the Caboose is achievable system as part of the game.
And what the coolest things ever is that we got
to be voices in Halo three. I mean that was
that was an honor to actually participate in the game
that we're obviously such a huge fans in. That's that's
pretty incredible. That's like a full circle right there. Well,
when we started Reversus Blue, mean, when you have your
(29:59):
you know, your initial meetings and you know you're talking about, well,
what's the coolest thing that can happen. I mean, we
thought the coolest thing that can happen, by far was
that we somehow get referenced in an actual Halo video
game or like some kind of east Rin because Bungee
had always pretty put east Eggs in their games. And
getting getting to play marines and contribute, you know, contribute
our voices to the game. That was just it was nuts. Yeah,
(30:21):
it's fantastic that, uh, that that turned out that way,
especially that Bungee ended up being such fans of your work,
because if they had gone another way, especially when we
see things like on tech stuff, we talked about a
lot of stuff like uh, intellectual property and patent wars
and about this sort of litigious side to a lot
of companies. Uh, it could have gone a totally different way.
(30:43):
It could have been that one episode went up and
then you've got a cease and desist and then no
more opportunity. So I'm so glad that this was a
case where a company said, no, they're they're adding benefit
to what we do. We enjoy their work, we want
to see them succeed. Well, I mean, I think that
would be what you're saying about the episode going up
and then it gets pulled out. I think a lot
of people say, that is the expectation of what would happen. Um,
(31:06):
And certainly that was in our minds as we were
doing it. And UM, you know, I can't speak for them,
you know, why they made the decisions they made, but
I mean, you know, Microsoft took a look at it
and said, you know, here's something that's innovative and creative.
Then let's see what happens, you know, And that's that
was the attitude they took, like, let's let's just go
forward and see where this goes. And I met with
(31:28):
them and told them, you know, here's the plans for
what I want to do with it. More importantly, here's
what we're not trying to do. Um, you know, we're
just trying to have some fun and do something and
we're huge fans of Halo, and um, you know, let's
see what happened turned into a three relationship and has
now turned into a tenny relationship. So I can't I
cannot say enough good things about the risk that Microsoft
(31:48):
took on us and how much that is meant to
our business because they have been very open and and
very cool, fantastic. Well, I I have just two more questions.
Here's the second to last one. This was one that
was suggested by a follower of mine on Twitter. Um,
how frequently are you mistaken as the guy who does
the voice for Caboose? All all, it's so insulting. It's uh, Yeah,
(32:15):
Caboose is easily our most popular character. And uh, you
know it's uh. Whenever we go to conventions, it's, oh,
here's Bernie. He plays the Uh. He's the writer and
director and created the show and plays the lead character.
Because I write it. Of course I make myself lead character,
and like, hey, that's great, where's Caboos? Yeah? And and
often it is like, it's not so much getting mistaken
(32:35):
for Caboose, it's the it's the raw disappointment that you
see in people's faces when they realize that you're not Caboose.
That's the problem when you have the gut check as
an artist, I um no, I I can sort of
identify it with that, because a couple of years ago,
not so much now, but a couple of years ago
I bore a passing resemblance to Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters.
(32:59):
I could see that now you say that, Yeah, I
can see that, So yeah, I have different glasses. Now.
The glasses apparently are what made it. But I had
two people within the span of a week make that
that comment to me. And Dragon Con, which some Rooster
Chief people have been to in the past. But Dragon
Con here in Atlanta was hosting several members of the
(33:20):
build team from MythBusters as guests, and so I thought, oh,
this will be fun. I'll go and buy a military beret,
I'll wear an Oxford shirt, and I'll just show up
as Jamie. I'm clearly I'm clearly not Jamie, but that's
gonna be my costume. And um. Then I discovered the
joy and and and heartbreak of revealing to people that
(33:41):
I was not actually Jamie from MythBusters and see that
moment of realization where they're their joy turned to disappointment.
I actually disappointed an entire battalion of the first Stormtrooper
Brigade that was you never want to piss off armed
people with no no. It is funny to watch them
(34:01):
all like deflate. At the same time, it kind of
made you feel like what it would have been like
to be on Coruscant when they revealed that the Death
Star had exploded. Yeah, guys. All right, you know we
had a good run. Um, so here's my last one.
Are there any other projects that you're working on that
you would like to talk about. We've talked about the
(34:22):
live action stuff and Red Versus Blue and r t X.
Is there anything specific you would like to to mention
to our listeners. Well, yeah, it's a crazy thing. Um,
it's it's it's pretty irreverent. Uh, it's a lot different
tone than this interview. Even but our podcast on that
that's on iTunes is the Rishi podcast has actually turned
into one of our biggest hits. Um, and I just
(34:45):
love making it. We just talked about we just get
on Mike and talked for an hour about you know,
what's going on, you know with video games, what's going
on with online culture, what's going on you know in
current events, and you know and our interpretation of it,
which is basically our misunderstanding of what of it all? Uh.
And it's just fun. It's just you know, working Rooster Teeth.
It's it's a bunch of friends working together and so um,
it's fun to get on there for an hour and
(35:07):
just jaw with your buddies and um, you know, we're
working on some ways to punch up the podcast and
maybe change the way we delivered a little bit um.
But we're really looking forward to this year to growing
the podcast and also bringing people out to Austin July
seventh and eighth for r t X, which is our
convention here. We're really excited about that. Fantastic And yes,
(35:27):
I am also a fan of your podcast. And I
should mention that both the Rooster Teeth podcast and tech
Stuff we're mentioned as the rewind best of two thousand
eleven on iTunes. Yeah, so we've got we've got that
in common going for us. Yeah. The the show that
you guys do is is incredibly hilarious, especially if you
(35:48):
can get one of the more clueless members of Rooster
Teeth on Mike's art or or you know, or just Joel.
If Joel's on there and and all you have to
do is say one thing and you realize that he's
gone off on a completely different tangent and he's really
angry about it for no apparent reason. For apparent reason,
now you can see why he played the voice of Caboose. Yes, well, well, Bernie,
(36:12):
this has been a great time. I'm it's it's been
a one of those things I've always wanted to do. I.
Like I said, I've been a fan of the show
from season one, and I'm glad we had this opportunity.
And we did do an episode on tech stuff about Mishinima.
Uh oh, I guess that was one of our first episodes.
We're coming up on episode four hundred before too long,
so yeah, yeah, people are still listening. So this was
(36:36):
really and we we talked a lot about Red Versus
Blue in our Mishinima podcast, So this was really a
thrill for me. Thank you so much for joining us,
and we really do appreciate it. Guys, if you have
not checked out Rooster Teeth, I do recommend you go
and look at their stuff, watched some Red Versus Blue,
watch some of their live action and uh and really
pay attention because these guys have found a way before
(36:59):
almost anyone else did to make new media work in
a sustainable way and build a business out of it.
And that that to me, is probably the best story
out of all of this, is that not only do
you guys create great content, but you found a way
to make that, you know, pay for itself and and
to actually keep it going over time and not just
be Wow. That was incredible. I just wish they could
(37:20):
have found a way to make it work. Yeah, why
you make it sound so legitimate. I'm gonna record that
and play it back at dinner parties. All right, you
have my permission to do that. That's fine, especially if
you if you if you subscribe to text stuff, that
would that would help us out, because you know, every
listener counts it. All right, awesome, Thank you so much, Bernie,
Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Well, I hope you
(37:43):
enjoyed that interview. I think it went pretty well, don't you, Chris, Yes, definitely.
So we only have one little, uh little glitch in
the middle there that we could tell anyway. We'll be
able to tell more once this goes live. But I
wouldn't call your one question a glitch though, Chris, Well,
it's being a little hard in yourself. Well, you know,
I'm a perfectionist. What can I say? And uh, you know,
(38:03):
after having done that episode on Machinema a while back,
it was nice to have the perspective of somebody who's
really involved with it. Yeah, someone who's actually gone through
and done it. It was that was a real thrill
for me as well, just to hear about, you know,
experimenting with this new form of media. Yeah, that's also
(38:23):
very exciting. So guys, we're hoping we can do more
of these, right, Yeah, I was. I was really surprised.
I just want to say, I was really surprised by
how similar it was to live action in some respects um,
you know, of course they have to use tricks, or
had to use tricks, especially in the beginning, but I was,
I was surprised. Yeah, lining up shots and things like that. Yeah,
this stuff that you want to think about when you're
(38:44):
playing a video game, like, oh, yeah, we totally could
tell a story like this. Well, if you don't have
that that background where you know how to line up
shots and you know the importance of that kind of composition,
then you might make something that's amusing, but you're not
necessarily going to make something that's that's going to last
long time. But these guys had not just the writing talent,
but also the the technical talent to create a compelling
(39:08):
looking shot using let's be honest, very limited tools. I mean,
the video game is not designed to give you a
lot of flexibility. So hats off to them. And of
course now a lot of those tools have been built
into those video games so that you can have a
free floating camera that has no limitations, that you can
put it anywhere you want, which now you've got more
(39:30):
options than any any live action director would have without
the use of of c G. I. Yes, so it's
it's kind of again come full circle from the days
when you were pretty much limited to whatever your character
could see. So yeah, great time there. I'm so glad,
huge thanks to Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth doing that.
And guys, we want to do more interviews in the future,
(39:51):
so we're hoping that if you have someone or a
company you think that we should interview for tech Stuff
in the future, let us know. We uh, we can't
guarantee that we're going to be able to get everyone.
It all depends on their schedule in our schedule, but
we will try our best to to land some more
cool interviews in the near future. You can let us
know on Facebook or Twitter are handled. There is text
(40:13):
stuff hsw or shoot us an email. That address is
tech Stuff at Discovery dot com and Chris and I
will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow the house Stuff Works.
(40:34):
I Find app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tex Stuff from how stuff looks dot com. Hello again, everyone,
and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
and I'm an editor and how stuff works dot Com.
(00:22):
Sitting across from me, as usual is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
The man in black fled across the desert and the
gun Slinger followed. It's interesting that you would pick black
Well also, that kind of gives a suggestion of maybe
like a desert. And uh, we have a special guest
on today's episode who is from well calling us from Austin, Texas,
(00:48):
which is not just a desert, but that's what came
to mind, right. So, guys, this is a very special
episode of tech Stuff, something that we hope to do
more of in the future. We've got a special interview
lined up with this, the Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth Productions.
They are the company that make Red versus Blue. So
we've got the interview ready to go and we're going
to insert it right here. We've got Bernie Burns on
(01:12):
the line. Bernie is the founder of Rooster Teeth Productions,
the producers of the popular web series Red Versus Blue,
among other things. Bernie, how are you I'm doing find Jonathan,
how are you doing? I am I'm okay. Chris, how
are you doing great? Thanks for asking. You're welcome, Chris.
I don't want you to be left out. So Bernie,
(01:33):
I wanted to talk to you. Really, you're a pioneer
in web content, especially when it comes to web videos
and something beyond just the the one hit wonder web
videos that that we're sort of the the earmark of
internet video when it first started to take off, and
I kind of wanted to talk to you about how
you got into that and the development of Rooster Teeth
(01:56):
Productions over time and where you're at today. So to start,
you were actually involved in creating content for the web
before there was even a Rooster Teeth, right, that's right,
I mean really back before video was even really possible
on the Internet. Um, I mean you can download a
I think one of the first things video wise ever
downloaded from the net was the first episode of south
(02:19):
Park or what became south Park, and that was ten
minutes short that I think was eighty megs and it
was the size of a postage stamp on the screen.
But yeah, I started off writing for video game sites.
I started writing off for writing for what we're called
everything Nothing sites where they were sort of like blogs,
but there were more articles. You know, modern day equivalent
(02:41):
would be almost like Slate or The Escapist, where their
articles that are kind of thematic, but they could really
be about anything. So what led you into starting the
whole red versus Blue video phenomenon. Well, I was a
filmmaker and I live in Austin, Texas, and so in
(03:02):
college I built a non linear editor video captured device
that could catch her. Back then it was VHS tapes,
so we transfer film to VHS and then we would
capture the VHS and edited online. So then after making
a couple of movies with some friends in Austin, uh,
they moved out to l A to start their entertainment careers.
I stayed in Austin because I had a very good
(03:23):
tech job and I was always just trying to find
ways to make uh, you know, films or make short
little videos. And I had all this equipment laying around
and I thought, well, why don't I just take some
of these videos I'm producing and start putting them online.
Forget a way to do that, and so started encoding
them in quick time and dive x back then and
we'll just upload them to a site. And did a
(03:45):
few of those before I made the first episode of
Red Versus Blue and that immediately caught on. So for
for our listeners who may not be familiar with Red
Versus Blue, can you can you get sort of a
bird's eye view of what the series is and and uh,
you know the vehicle you use to create the series. Sure,
(04:06):
So what we do in a nutshell, uh, is we
use the video game Halo uh to produce short comedic
cartoons essentially, um, and we use the graphics engine that's
in Halo to do all of our animation. And probably
the best way to describe it for something for someone
who's never seen anything like it before, it's almost like
(04:26):
using the video game characters as virtual puppets. Um. You know,
we're not doing animation cell by cell or you know,
sitting down and plotting on all the character moves. We're
actually controlling them in real time. So it's a little
bit like animation, and it's a little bit like live
action shooting and that we do takes, we do rehearsals,
(04:47):
and the performance that you're seeing is actually a recorded
live performance by someone controlling the character in real time.
That's that's really a very clever way of creating films.
And of course we now call this mishinima, but back
then that term probably wasn't very much in use at
the time you guys were first getting into Red Versus Blue. Right, Yeah,
(05:07):
it's funny, we didn't know what it was called. We
didn't know this was the movement that people were doing
these kind of things. So we felt we were brilliant
and we had been invented this new technique of shooting,
and we were actually wondering what we're gonna call it.
And uh, we we got a phone call from Paul Marino,
who was the head of the Academy of Machinima Arts
and Scientists in New York, and you know, they said
(05:29):
they wanted us to come out and do a presentation
about Reversus Blue, and um, there was no award ceremony
that they we had been nominated for, and um, yeah,
that's how we first found out about the word mishinima. Yeah,
so and you said that you were it took off
almost immediately. Was that like from episode one you immediately
saw a real interest in this Or did it take
(05:50):
a few before it started looking like you really had
a hit on your hands. No, it was pretty immediate.
We put up the We put up the first episode
and end we along with it, we put up a
p s A which was just the characters looking into
the screen and talking and um, we were doing jokes
about it. It was so long ago as weapons of
(06:10):
mass destruction. Uh, this was back in two thousand and three,
very very timely at the time, was very very topical.
Um and uh. We were linked the first episode of
the series was linked on Fark and slash dot and
penny Arcade, and so it went from three thousand views
(06:31):
the first day that we put up the episode to
the next day we had about fifteen thousand views on it.
By the time we put out the second video. A
quarter of a million people showed up the day of
the first day to watch the second video. And but yeah,
by the end of the month, we were up to
about seven hundred and fifty thousand viewers a week within
(06:53):
within four weeks. That's that's it was. It was. It
was the biggest problem for us was figuring out how
to get it out there. Yeah, the bandwidth issues, Yeah,
I mean we were we were paying tons of money
to deliver it because I mean, I'm sure you remember
back in the day, people will get bannedidth bills when
they would put up, you know, things on servers and
then get a popular site. Um, And so we were
(07:15):
trying to figure out how to host what we're at
the time pretty massive files. I mean, these were, you know,
seventy megabyte files people were downloading in you know, two
thousand and to two thousand and three. It was it
was hard to figure out how to stir all that.
And YouTube didn't exist at the time, so we couldn't
just throw it up on YouTube and hope for the best,
you know. I have I have a question, um, about
what's your recording schedule look like? I mean, how many
(07:37):
of these How fast can you do one of these videos?
And and about how long does it take to uh,
you know, from beginning to end. When you're talking about
scripting and going through rehearsals and things like that, how
long does that take. Well, we're a lot faster than
we used to be. As soon as we've been doing
it for nine seasons that we're we're just going into
season ten right now. But if you look at like
a Pixar movie and the machinima, what we produced is
(07:59):
not on the fidelity of a Pixel movie. We do
more custom animation now. But um, the big thing about
Sinim is how efficient it is. So a Pixar movie
might take a team of three people the course of
three years. Um, we can produce five minutes a week
with about This is now just neglecting voice actors, who
(08:19):
you have to have a different actor for every character.
But we can produce five minutes a week with about
three people. Uh, and that will take us about you know,
thirty or forty hours to do that. So every year
we put out of a full feature on DVD, and
we can do that with perruption crew of anywhere between
you know, three to five people. Now, now that in
later seasons we've been adding more custom animation. Just because
(08:40):
of cinema got more popular, we found we had to
do more to stand out. And you know, like anything,
it's like if it stays the same, it'll it'll get stale.
So we had to kind of evolved the series while
it was in place. And so now we have a
much bigger team now. We have a team of about
twenty people that work on it, uh and they do
a lot of custom animations and really fun on action scenes,
(09:01):
fighting scenes, that kind of thing. So when you guys
were first exploring motion capture, UH, when did you guys
actually sit down and consciously make that decision? And was
that a huge challenge? Was it that or what? Was
it surprisingly easy compared to everything else he had been doing. Well,
we we made one higher that made it a lot easier,
(09:21):
and that was Monty Home. I'm a big consumer of
all things internet as well, so I'm always online, always
like looking at you know, online video. I just I
love it, and um, it's it's fun to spot people
who were doing cool new stuff. And montyme put up
a video where he custom animated master Chief from Halo
(09:43):
fighting Sammy's from Metroid and it was the models were
okay in a texture okay, but the animation was outrageously
sophisticated and the choreography of what he was doing. And
so we contacted him and we tried to work with
them for like two or three years before we we're
finally able to hire him. And that was in season eight,
and so we essentially built an animation pipeline. That's he's
(10:08):
the centerpiece of it. We built it around him, essentially. Cool. Well,
jumping back again back to the early days, about how
long did it did it take before you realize that
you actually had a viable company on your hands? I mean,
the show was a hit, but there's a big difference
between something that ends up getting really viral on the
internet and then turning that into something that can actually
(10:29):
sustain itself as a business. Did that happen right away
as well? Well? I mean it came in the sense
that we all of a sudden had these major expenses
for that's what a great way to start a business, right? Well,
if you know, if there's a massive expense side of this,
then they're they're they're theoretically should be some kind of
(10:50):
revenue help service that I mean, there's there's obviously demand
for this. So if you sit still, the demand will
generate bills. Uh, you have to a proactive figure a
way to generate some revenue from it. And you know,
I think there's a big opinion, uh that a common opinion.
I should say that if you make something on the
internet and you get a ton of views. Um, that
(11:12):
the ad companies just show up like the ad trucks
shows up in your driveway. It does. It doesn't work
that way. Getting advertisers for content is very hard and
it's always been hard. It was never it was never
easy to do it on the internet. UM. And there's
a lot of places that will abstract that for you now,
a lot of a lot of video services that will
do that for you. But it's a very difficult process,
(11:34):
and so we had to go through and figure out
a way to build a business model. UM. We actually
built one that was based not on advertising, and we
reran on that for five years. UM. We just did merchandise, UM,
premium memberships and DVD sales, and that's how we funded
the company for the first five years. We never we
never ran a single ad on anything, uh for the
first round of the show. Yeah. That actually brings me
(11:56):
to the question about the sponsorship, the premium membership that
you rant. I've been a fan of Red Versus Blue
since season one. I've been following it since season one,
and so I'm familiar with the idea of you became
a premium member and you would get access to certain
videos sometimes you get access early, sometimes you get exclusive access,
(12:17):
and also for the first few seasons. I remember you
would even get the DVD at the end of the
season when you are premium member. Yeah yeah, so, uh so,
clearly building a community was an important part of your
business model as well, right, and we built a community
site to that. We knew that eventually the popularity of
(12:37):
the show would wane, or at the very least that
people watching the show, you know, the individuals would you know,
say well, I can't watch something for you know, ten years. Um,
you know, people just naturally fall out, and so we
wanted to have something in place to hold people uh as,
like our portion of the internet, so that people would
always know where they can find us. And when we
(12:58):
put new things out, it would be great to be
able to show it to people, to get that initial
seed of a of a new project. And that's that
was probably one of the smartest things we did, was
making sure that we carved out our own portion of
the Internet. Yeah, it's it's still a very popular portal.
I mean, if people want to go and check out
the you have several different your l's that all lead
(13:19):
into this kind of uh hub really of all the
different products Rooster Teeth does because it's not just Red
Versus Blue. Although we'll get into that in a little bit.
I did have another question about the tone of Red
Versus Blue and the early seasons the Blood Gulch Chronicles
in particular, which is the first five seasons of Red
Versus Blue. Uh, it was it was almost exclusively comedic,
(13:41):
and then you began to experiment by inserting some more
dramatic elements into the storyline, sometimes with uh tertiary characters
who were not playing directly with your main cast. What time,
at what point did you decide to do that? Was
that something you had wanted to do from the beginning,
or as you were going, were you thinking, hey, you
know what, we could actually try something new here and
(14:02):
try and do almost like an action movie type script
parallel to the comedic stuff we're doing on this other side. Yeah,
So it was essentially when it first started, essentially, like
somebody described it as Stripes in Space, which I think
is a great way to describe it. It's just just
it's very lighthearted. It's a it's a military comedy which
which focuses on a lot of bureaucracy humor, which I
(14:25):
think crosses over a lot of industries, not just you know,
the military, but also business and school and everything else. UM.
I was always as a as a writer, I was
always writing though background threads so that the story could
stay consistent. If you base it in a universe, you know,
then it seems more honest. And I was doing all
(14:48):
of that. And when we got towards the end of
the fifth season, UM, I was talking with people about
stories in the background that we're going that audience members
had picked up on. But I had this whole fleshed out,
uh you know verse kind of behind the scenes, and
I was talking with somebody here about it and I
described it all, was writing on the on the white
board about all these things, and they said, maybe you
(15:08):
should show this to the audience, you know, I mean,
maybe you should, Maybe you should put this out there.
And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe we should.
It's it's it's interesting to us. And you know, our
philosophy here is, um, if we make things that we like,
we just have faith that there's enough people on the
internet that are like us that they'll like it too.
So yeah, it's just a natural evolution. Like I said,
(15:29):
it's you know, we started off the very first episode
of the very first season saying, all these guys do
we stand around and talk? That's what they were doing
last week. That's what we were doing five minutes from now,
and for five seasons. You know it's it works very
well standing around and talking, but you really do run
the risk of becoming stale. Five years on the internet
is is like a it's like a glacier, you know,
(15:49):
it's it's like an eon. It seems like, um, that's
the rise and fall of my Space. Yeah. Yeah, And
you know we talked about that to you, like the
when I was talking you earlier about the carving out
your own space on the internet. It's like a lot
of people today, you know, they don't do that. There's
a big opinion that the the web is dead and
that you should just go all in on Facebook or
(16:11):
all in on YouTube or what you know, whatever the
darling uh site of the moment happens to be. But
I mean, we've been doing this for so long. I
remember when if we just spent all of our time
building up our Facebook or assuming are MySpace friends in
two thousand three and two tho four, we would I
think you know, uh, you know we're dealing with rever
(16:31):
or something like that. You know, it's just it's it's
it's Twitter, Twitter follower accounts, and you know, Facebook like
seemed very important right now, but five years from now
they probably won't seem all than important. Yeah. The biggest
shifts that I see right now are really more platform shifts.
So it's more like the emphasis now is on mobile
as opposed to the desktop and laptop models, which that
(16:54):
makes more sense. I mean, that's an access thing, not
a not a you know, this is the particular website
that in vogue right now. Well, oh no, go ahead,
I'm sorry. No, it's crazy. It's crazy how much mobile
has taken off. I mean, it's just it's just insane. Yes, yeah,
we we talk about that all the time here at
how stuff works as well. I mean it's it's completely changed, uh,
(17:16):
the way that we create certain types of content. Because
there are some kinds that are perfect for the mobile
platform and that's just people love them. There are other
types that just don't quite fit as well. It's a
real challenge to try and find the balance there. Fortunately,
I think web video is one of those that it
(17:37):
transcends the platform you don't have. You don't have to
worry about that as much. UM. Let me ask you
also about some of the tricks you guys did working
within the confines of a video game universe and actually
within the actual physics engine of the video game itself. Uh.
Watching some of the behind the scenes stuff, I love
(17:59):
the idea that you has got really creative were the
ways you shot the series, especially early on, when there
weren't as many tools for you to use, tools that
I think have been built into games like Halo because
of the work you've done when they didn't exist back then.
You found really creative ways of getting around it. The
one I think of off the top of my head
is using a tank as a crane for crane shots, right.
(18:25):
I mean, that's just goes back to how it's a
lot like live action. It's like we wanted to get
a shot where we raised up, how do we do?
How do we do that? Um, there wasn't any ability
within the retail game to raise the camera above eye level.
I mean the entire first three seasons of the show,
you're seeing the entire show through another character's eyes that
never appeared on screen. It's it's literally a camera man, um,
(18:46):
and so we would walk him around in order to
set up shots and to meet the camera. And so
we thought, well, how can we do this? I thought,
why don't we just put him on the end of
the barrel of the tank and just slowly raised the
tank barrel up and sure enough, that allowed us to
get a crane shot with it. Likewise, we would put
people on the tops of banshees and fly them around
(19:06):
if we wanted to get a really high view of
the canyon or something like that. Yeah, we had to
be really creative. Um. In a later season. One of
the things we would also just employ like some of
the oldest tricks that there are in filmmaking. Um, we
had a character, a baby alien, so we need a
small alien. Well, you can't shrink a character in the game,
so we would just do forced perspective where we would
(19:28):
set the alien far back in the shot and because
there's no depth of field in the game, it's an
infinite focus. Um, we would just set up the scene
so that one character is really far away and they
just happen to look a lot smaller. And it worked perfectly.
I mean it it the illusion was great. It's you
know just like old things they used to do back
in the days when they would you know, shoot King
Kong and voyage the Moon. I imagine getting eyelines in
(19:51):
this series is a bit of a challenge. It definitely is.
I mean there's nothing in the game where it's like
everyone looks in the same direction, you know, And so
we're probably the best people in the world at playing
Halo in a very specific way. Like ever, if you
ever put us in a matchmaking game where all the
players on the team have to look in the same
(20:12):
direction or all run in the same line while looking
at their feet, we would we would kill at that.
So so yeah, we ever created Days of our Lives
game within Halo, you guys will rock it. Yes, we
would be the dramatic reaction team. Well, let's talk about
some of the other content that Rister Teeth produces. I mean,
(20:35):
Red versus Blue is probably what got you guys on
the map for most people, but you do a lot
of other, uh things as well, including some live action stuff.
When did you guys decide to start producing live action shorts? Well,
that's our that's our background is live action, and I
mean we start off like I made a feature film
in college. I was a computer science student, but I
(20:56):
wanted to learn how to uh make films because that's
from premedic computer science, and surprisingly not a lot of
stuff transferred. So I had a bunch of I have
like organic chemistry as a as an elective on my
transcript um, and so I had a bunch of hours
on campus where I was trying to kill time, and
I found the student run TV station down there, t STV,
and started meeting film students and wanting to get involved
(21:19):
in video editing in film production. But I did not
want to go and sit through um film classes. So
I thought, you know what, Robert Arriguez just made El
Mariachi at ut I went to the University of Texas.
He made elm act just a few years ago. There
was this idea that you could just make an independent
movie and set the world on fire. So I thought,
why don't I just make a feature film, uh, you know,
(21:41):
spend ten thousand dollars doing that as opposed to spending
it in a classroom, and then I'll probably know everything
I need to know about filmmaking by the time it's over. Well,
that took about eighteen months to get that done, you know,
we we actually did shoot a feature on film on
sixteen millimeter film. That was a long process, but uh yeah,
that's that's just how I got involved with it, and
I uh um, you know it was it was work
(22:02):
out pretty well. I mean, you know, I own a
production company and I don't have a degree in in
any kind of entertainment. I have a computer science degree
that just hangs on my wall and I never used basically. So,
uh so, who are the writers on your on your staff?
I know you write red versus blue? Right, Yes, that's right,
I write versus blue. Uh. And you know the actors
add a ton when they get in the booth. Uh.
(22:24):
All the actors know their characters so well now that
they you know, sometimes I just like have blanks that
they can fill in for ad libs, you know, where
they add a lot in as well. Uh. And then
we have a team of writers upstairs, um that work
on our shorts. And that's a it's a very collaborative effort. Um.
They have a whole team like a writing room where
they go in and pitch ideas and then they take
(22:44):
them away and then come back with scripts and trade
them off in new drafts. It's a it's a very
fun process. Cool well, and we're pretty familiar with the
writing process around here too, it's not not this similar,
although we of course write articles and not not not scripts.
But tell me about the Immersion series, which kind of
(23:05):
married this video game and and live action short thing
into an increasingly hilarious series of misadventures. Well, that was
kind of fun. That was had this idea that we
could take things from video games and test them in
real life. And I had the idea for a while
and eventually I said, you know what, I should make
(23:25):
one of these because someone else is going to do
this if we don't. And that's a big thing on
the internet. Man. It seems like by the time you
think of an idea, you should go look it up
because somebody's probably already done it, you know, and things
move that fast. And so this, this idea, this probably
gives you a good example of what the whole series
was about. When you play a Grand Theft auto game
(23:47):
or one of those open world urban environment games, when
you drive a car, you drive from a third person perspective.
Your your view of the car is behind the car,
and that's not the way you drive a car in
the real old, So we thought, okay, let's try that.
Let's set up a car in real life that is
a third person perspective. So we blacked out the windshield
safety first, UH and black out the entire cockpit, and
(24:11):
then suspended a camera on a rig behind the vehicle
and then ran that down to a monitor that was
on the dashboard of the car. So you're in the
car driving it through a course and you're looking at
the car from behind your viewers from behind the car.
And we shot that episode. He took us about six
hours to shoot the pilot um to the driving part
of it, and then we spent another four hours out
(24:32):
there afterwards because everyone in the crew want to drive
the car, which we said. We had a blast doing it.
It was great. It reminds me there was a guy
there was a It was more of an art project
than anything else, but there was a guy who built
an MMO suit that did sort of the same thing,
but it was just a It was just a person
in a in a suit where you have a helmet
that has a monitor built into it. There's a rig
(24:55):
that's UH worn like a backpack that suspends the camera
above and behind to of that that MMO view of
a character running around the world, so the only view
you had of yourself was as a third person, and
of course they added spikes on the helmet to give
it that authentic MMO feel. And apparently anyone who put
this on would first spend the first half hour struggling
(25:19):
to interact with the world in a way that wasn't
going to feel like it was going to kill them
because it was so weird to be have an out
of body experience like that, And then the next half
hour was spent stomping around and swinging your arms around
because you look like the incredible Hulk. So, yeah, walk
up to people and ask them for quests, right exactly, Yes, Yeah,
(25:39):
that was yeah. No, there there are people who are
still in therapy because of that art project. So we
did a funny one like that where we tested what
it would be like to be in a side scrolling
environment where we had a wireless rig that we can
send a video signal to to goggles that the person
would wear, and we shot them from a ninety three
angle directly from their side, and so we had like
(26:01):
a Mario course that these guys had to navigate while
only being able to see themselves from the side. So
what short straw that Gus and Jeff draw that they
have to be in all of these They drew the
academic short straw. They should have just been better in
school and they would have better career opportunities and they
wouldn't have to be subjected to all this terrible stuff.
(26:21):
We we got to the point where we were torturing them,
I think, I mean we we did this one thing
where we tested video game foods. You know, when you're
playing a video game and your character is hurt, if
he eats a steak, then he immediately feels better. I
don't know what they think the healing properties of food
are in video games. So we took them out. We
didn't tell them this. We took him on drink until
two in the morning and to celebrate something. It was
(26:42):
all a ruse. And then the next day we showed
up in the production crew at their house at five
in the morning. They just, I mean they literally just
gone to bed so they would woke up and they
were just miserable, and we just like fed him food
for about an hour and a half, big hams and
pizzas and strawberries. Everything you see in a game that
is supposed to cure you, and let's just it this way,
it did not cure them. Yes. To learn more, visit
(27:05):
rooster Teeth's website and you can watch all of these
or get the DVDs if you want to be able
to have them for posterity's sake. Uh. Well, let's also
talk there's another another project, Achievement Hunter, which is again
hosted by rooster Teeth, which is all about achievements on
Xbox three sixty games, although you guys also cover other
(27:26):
games occasionally as well. Right, yes, we cover it's the
achievement focus does seem to make it teams, although achievements
are bleeding into bobile games and Steam games as well. Um,
it does seem to think it's like a three sixty
uh site, but now they cover all different games, like
they've been covering a lot of the Star Wars Older
public MMO lately. But it's just it's a celebration of
(27:49):
video game culture, which which we love. We love online
culture and video game culture, and we're actually holding a
convention uh in Austin this year rt X, which is
the intersection of gaming and on like culture. But Achievement
Hunter has been a huge, huge success. Um, it's just
been It's something that you know, we kind of kicked
around for a while of you know, recording actual gameplay
(28:11):
from our footage from gameplay video games and then commenting
on it and uh we Jeff Ramsey, who plays Griffin
our Reverend Blue series, he ended up, he hit it
up the project and he's just been. Man, it's been
an enormous thing. We're about to hit uh one billion
total views on YouTube across all of our videos and achievement.
Hunter has been a huge part of that. That is incredible.
(28:32):
And I also should add the the successive Rooster Teeth
has been truly phenomenal and that your effects. You know,
you guys talk about how you have absorbed video game culture,
but you've also become part of it. I mean you
several people from Rooster Teeth have been featured in games
as voiceover talent and other things. Can you talk a
(28:54):
little bit about some of those, you know, we actually
are trying to go through and compile a list of
the places where Richarchiefs has been referenced. The Rivers and
Blue has been referenced, um just in most recently. Um,
there's a there's a reference in the World of Warcraft
expansion where there's a I forget the name of the thing,
but it's essentially like a parody of Blood Gulch And
(29:16):
there's a character in there that's based on griff um
Uh in there. And then we just did a like
a commentary, a bonus commentary for gun Stringer Twisted Pixel,
and then we always it's funny these we would end
up been achievements, references and achievements, Like there's a lot
of Red versus Blue referential achievements. Um, there's Wanting Gears
of War. Um, there's a dishwasher, Samurai dishwasher. They just
(29:39):
put out a new version of the game that has
the Caboose is achievable system as part of the game.
And what the coolest things ever is that we got
to be voices in Halo three. I mean that was
that was an honor to actually participate in the game
that we're obviously such a huge fans in. That's that's
pretty incredible. That's like a full circle right there. Well,
when we started Reversus Blue, mean, when you have your
(29:59):
you know, your initial meetings and you know you're talking about, well,
what's the coolest thing that can happen. I mean, we
thought the coolest thing that can happen, by far was
that we somehow get referenced in an actual Halo video
game or like some kind of east Rin because Bungee
had always pretty put east Eggs in their games. And
getting getting to play marines and contribute, you know, contribute
our voices to the game. That was just it was nuts. Yeah,
(30:21):
it's fantastic that, uh, that that turned out that way,
especially that Bungee ended up being such fans of your work,
because if they had gone another way, especially when we
see things like on tech stuff, we talked about a
lot of stuff like uh, intellectual property and patent wars
and about this sort of litigious side to a lot
of companies. Uh, it could have gone a totally different way.
(30:43):
It could have been that one episode went up and
then you've got a cease and desist and then no
more opportunity. So I'm so glad that this was a
case where a company said, no, they're they're adding benefit
to what we do. We enjoy their work, we want
to see them succeed. Well, I mean, I think that
would be what you're saying about the episode going up
and then it gets pulled out. I think a lot
of people say, that is the expectation of what would happen. Um,
(31:06):
And certainly that was in our minds as we were
doing it. And UM, you know, I can't speak for them,
you know, why they made the decisions they made, but
I mean, you know, Microsoft took a look at it
and said, you know, here's something that's innovative and creative.
Then let's see what happens, you know, And that's that
was the attitude they took, like, let's let's just go
forward and see where this goes. And I met with
(31:28):
them and told them, you know, here's the plans for
what I want to do with it. More importantly, here's
what we're not trying to do. Um, you know, we're
just trying to have some fun and do something and
we're huge fans of Halo, and um, you know, let's
see what happened turned into a three relationship and has
now turned into a tenny relationship. So I can't I
cannot say enough good things about the risk that Microsoft
(31:48):
took on us and how much that is meant to
our business because they have been very open and and
very cool, fantastic. Well, I I have just two more questions.
Here's the second to last one. This was one that
was suggested by a follower of mine on Twitter. Um,
how frequently are you mistaken as the guy who does
the voice for Caboose? All all, it's so insulting. It's uh, Yeah,
(32:15):
Caboose is easily our most popular character. And uh, you
know it's uh. Whenever we go to conventions, it's, oh,
here's Bernie. He plays the Uh. He's the writer and
director and created the show and plays the lead character.
Because I write it. Of course I make myself lead character,
and like, hey, that's great, where's Caboos? Yeah? And and
often it is like, it's not so much getting mistaken
(32:35):
for Caboose, it's the it's the raw disappointment that you
see in people's faces when they realize that you're not Caboose.
That's the problem when you have the gut check as
an artist, I um no, I I can sort of
identify it with that, because a couple of years ago,
not so much now, but a couple of years ago
I bore a passing resemblance to Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters.
(32:59):
I could see that now you say that, Yeah, I
can see that, So yeah, I have different glasses. Now.
The glasses apparently are what made it. But I had
two people within the span of a week make that
that comment to me. And Dragon Con, which some Rooster
Chief people have been to in the past. But Dragon
Con here in Atlanta was hosting several members of the
(33:20):
build team from MythBusters as guests, and so I thought, oh,
this will be fun. I'll go and buy a military beret,
I'll wear an Oxford shirt, and I'll just show up
as Jamie. I'm clearly I'm clearly not Jamie, but that's
gonna be my costume. And um. Then I discovered the
joy and and and heartbreak of revealing to people that
(33:41):
I was not actually Jamie from MythBusters and see that
moment of realization where they're their joy turned to disappointment.
I actually disappointed an entire battalion of the first Stormtrooper
Brigade that was you never want to piss off armed
people with no no. It is funny to watch them
(34:01):
all like deflate. At the same time, it kind of
made you feel like what it would have been like
to be on Coruscant when they revealed that the Death
Star had exploded. Yeah, guys. All right, you know we
had a good run. Um, so here's my last one.
Are there any other projects that you're working on that
you would like to talk about. We've talked about the
(34:22):
live action stuff and Red Versus Blue and r t X.
Is there anything specific you would like to to mention
to our listeners. Well, yeah, it's a crazy thing. Um,
it's it's it's pretty irreverent. Uh, it's a lot different
tone than this interview. Even but our podcast on that
that's on iTunes is the Rishi podcast has actually turned
into one of our biggest hits. Um, and I just
(34:45):
love making it. We just talked about we just get
on Mike and talked for an hour about you know,
what's going on, you know with video games, what's going
on with online culture, what's going on you know in
current events, and you know and our interpretation of it,
which is basically our misunderstanding of what of it all? Uh.
And it's just fun. It's just you know, working Rooster Teeth.
It's it's a bunch of friends working together and so um,
it's fun to get on there for an hour and
(35:07):
just jaw with your buddies and um, you know, we're
working on some ways to punch up the podcast and
maybe change the way we delivered a little bit um.
But we're really looking forward to this year to growing
the podcast and also bringing people out to Austin July
seventh and eighth for r t X, which is our
convention here. We're really excited about that. Fantastic And yes,
(35:27):
I am also a fan of your podcast. And I
should mention that both the Rooster Teeth podcast and tech
Stuff we're mentioned as the rewind best of two thousand
eleven on iTunes. Yeah, so we've got we've got that
in common going for us. Yeah. The the show that
you guys do is is incredibly hilarious, especially if you
(35:48):
can get one of the more clueless members of Rooster
Teeth on Mike's art or or you know, or just Joel.
If Joel's on there and and all you have to
do is say one thing and you realize that he's
gone off on a completely different tangent and he's really
angry about it for no apparent reason. For apparent reason,
now you can see why he played the voice of Caboose. Yes, well, well, Bernie,
(36:12):
this has been a great time. I'm it's it's been
a one of those things I've always wanted to do. I.
Like I said, I've been a fan of the show
from season one, and I'm glad we had this opportunity.
And we did do an episode on tech stuff about Mishinima.
Uh oh, I guess that was one of our first episodes.
We're coming up on episode four hundred before too long,
so yeah, yeah, people are still listening. So this was
(36:36):
really and we we talked a lot about Red Versus
Blue in our Mishinima podcast, So this was really a
thrill for me. Thank you so much for joining us,
and we really do appreciate it. Guys, if you have
not checked out Rooster Teeth, I do recommend you go
and look at their stuff, watched some Red Versus Blue,
watch some of their live action and uh and really
pay attention because these guys have found a way before
(36:59):
almost anyone else did to make new media work in
a sustainable way and build a business out of it.
And that that to me, is probably the best story
out of all of this, is that not only do
you guys create great content, but you found a way
to make that, you know, pay for itself and and
to actually keep it going over time and not just
be Wow. That was incredible. I just wish they could
(37:20):
have found a way to make it work. Yeah, why
you make it sound so legitimate. I'm gonna record that
and play it back at dinner parties. All right, you
have my permission to do that. That's fine, especially if
you if you if you subscribe to text stuff, that
would that would help us out, because you know, every
listener counts it. All right, awesome, Thank you so much, Bernie,
Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Well, I hope you
(37:43):
enjoyed that interview. I think it went pretty well, don't you, Chris, Yes, definitely.
So we only have one little, uh little glitch in
the middle there that we could tell anyway. We'll be
able to tell more once this goes live. But I
wouldn't call your one question a glitch though, Chris, Well,
it's being a little hard in yourself. Well, you know,
I'm a perfectionist. What can I say? And uh, you know,
(38:03):
after having done that episode on Machinema a while back,
it was nice to have the perspective of somebody who's
really involved with it. Yeah, someone who's actually gone through
and done it. It was that was a real thrill
for me as well, just to hear about, you know,
experimenting with this new form of media. Yeah, that's also
(38:23):
very exciting. So guys, we're hoping we can do more
of these, right, Yeah, I was. I was really surprised.
I just want to say, I was really surprised by
how similar it was to live action in some respects um,
you know, of course they have to use tricks, or
had to use tricks, especially in the beginning, but I was,
I was surprised. Yeah, lining up shots and things like that. Yeah,
this stuff that you want to think about when you're
(38:44):
playing a video game, like, oh, yeah, we totally could
tell a story like this. Well, if you don't have
that that background where you know how to line up
shots and you know the importance of that kind of composition,
then you might make something that's amusing, but you're not
necessarily going to make something that's that's going to last
long time. But these guys had not just the writing talent,
but also the the technical talent to create a compelling
(39:08):
looking shot using let's be honest, very limited tools. I mean,
the video game is not designed to give you a
lot of flexibility. So hats off to them. And of
course now a lot of those tools have been built
into those video games so that you can have a
free floating camera that has no limitations, that you can
put it anywhere you want, which now you've got more
(39:30):
options than any any live action director would have without
the use of of c G. I. Yes, so it's
it's kind of again come full circle from the days
when you were pretty much limited to whatever your character
could see. So yeah, great time there. I'm so glad,
huge thanks to Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth doing that.
And guys, we want to do more interviews in the future,
(39:51):
so we're hoping that if you have someone or a
company you think that we should interview for tech Stuff
in the future, let us know. We uh, we can't
guarantee that we're going to be able to get everyone.
It all depends on their schedule in our schedule, but
we will try our best to to land some more
cool interviews in the near future. You can let us
know on Facebook or Twitter are handled. There is text
(40:13):
stuff hsw or shoot us an email. That address is
tech Stuff at Discovery dot com and Chris and I
will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow the house Stuff Works.
(40:34):
I Find app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.
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