Last week at Comic-Con, I had the opportunity to speak with Gus Sorola and Geoff Ramsey, two members of the Austin-based Rooster Teeth Productions, the team responsible for the hit internet machinima series Red vs. Blue, among other things. Machinima has always been an interesting concept, using video and computer game engines to create animation. Now in its eighth season, Red vs. Blue continues on as just one of the many projects the guys at Rooster Teeth are working on, with no apparent signs of stopping anytime soon. Taking a break from production to visit San Diego, meet some fans, and sell some merchandise, I caught up with Gus and Geoff at the Hard Rock Hotel where we had a long talk about their current “Recollection Trilogy”, which wraps up in a few weeks, as well some stories about the early days of Rooster Teeth, their thoughts on Bungie, and the future of Red vs. Blue.

For the interview, jump past the break.

Pixelated Geek: The Recollection Trilogy, which is composed of the 3 recent seasons of Red vs. Blue, is being released as a box set once the current season, Revelation, is over. How did you guys come up with the idea for that?
Gus Sorola: Well, Burnie Burns came up with the idea, so I’m going to try to answer on behalf of Burnie, but who knows if my answer is even correct. I think after 5 seasons of Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, we wanted to do something that was in the same vein but a little different, like a little more serious in tone but still comedic and funny with the characters you remember.
Geoff Ramsey: But something that also felt divorced from that original series.
GS: Something that someone who has never seen Red vs. Blue before could just jump into and start watching.
GR: And we had a lot of plot elements that we hinted at in Blood Gulch that we never got to fully expand, like the AI stuff and Project Freelancer, stuff that just never seemed to find its way into the spirit of the series. The original Blood Gulch series was just honestly those eight dudes being idiots in the same canyon over and over again. So this was our chance to explore a little bit and flesh out that really cool idea that Burnie had that he really wanted to expand on.

PG: Back in 2003, what was going through your heads when you guys released the first episode? What did you think was going to happen? What was your goal at that point?
GS: You know, we had been making websites for years before that, and none of them had ever been really popular, so we thought it would be like one of those websites where maybe a few of our friends would see it and it might get around on the internet a little bit and that would be the end of it. It would just be another hobby.
GR: That was pretty much the goal, you know. To make our friends laugh. See, we all worked in the tech industry and it’s kind of a creative black hole, a soul-sucking job where you just stare at computer screens all day long. We wanted to do something fun and creative. Some of us had been into independent film and stuff in college and it was kinda like a way to stay being creative and also, like I said, make our friends laugh. And, man, we were completely and totally caught off guard by the success of it. I mean, we didn’t really even show it to anybody and, purely through word of mouth, it just kinda blew up.
GS: I think the previous website that we had been working on had been getting like 30,000 hits a day.
GR: No. Not even that many.
GS: Was it 3000?
GR: Yeah, 3000 hits a day. It was a long time ago, but yeah. 3000 was a big day for us.
GS: If we could get 3000 hits a day, if 3000 people were looking at our website, we’d be happy. That was like our goal.

PG: And then all of a sudden, you guys release Red vs. Blue Episode 1…
GS: And we got 3000 hits like in the first minute. *laughs*
GR: Episode 1, in the first day, did like 50,000 hits. And that was just people emailing it around.  This was before YouTube and all that stuff, so that was ridiculous.

PG: I heard you guys overloaded a server at work.
GS: Yeah. *Gus and Geoff laugh* Multiple ones. We kept moving around. Those first six months, we had to move the site around a bunch, trying to find a permanent home for it.
GR: There was a point, because server space was a lot more precious back then and a lot more expensive, where we were hosted in California, Texas, Florida and Chicago, all at the same time. Anywhere we could eek out a little bit of server space we took advantage of it. It was crazy.

PG: And what went through your minds when you found out that Bungie had seen your work?
GR: Dude, we were terrified. I remember the day, actually. We had one of those cheap little hit counters on the website and I was looking at the backend around Episode 2 and I saw an IP Address come in from Microsoft and I went to Burnie. And then I saw another one come in and then another one and then like 300 all at once. Then, I swear to God, an hour later the phone rang and they said, “Hey, this is Microsoft. We need to have a talk.” And I was like, “We need to go to Mexico, we need to get out of here. I’m gonna sell my car.” And we were terrified. But they really liked what we were doing. So we talked to Bungie, this really cool guy at Bungie, actually, named Pete Parsons who was the guy that I guess he like got it, that it was this reverent way to celebrate the game and we were really just trying to show how fun the game was and how it’s such an awesome engine, that there’s so much more you can do with it, other than just play the game. You know, there’s just so many ways to enjoy Halo. We were all big fans of the Randall Glass Warthog videos…
GS: Warthog Jump.
GR: Yeah, Warthog Jump, where he’s just throwing grenades at a Warthog and shooting it with a rocket to see how high in the air he could get it. And Bungie was just super cool and supportive. You know, Bungie is probably the most supportive gaming company when it comes to their community.
GS: Just to show how much they get it, they just announced Forge World recently, which is an expansion of Forge from Halo 3 where it’s gonna be even bigger and you can make whatever you want, maps, game types, and do whatever you want. That’s just them opening up the game to the community to make whatever community games they want. With the original Forge, we came up with the idea for Grifball, which is a Halo variant that’s kinda like a rugby-type sport. And now with Forge World, I think it’s just really gonna open things up, we’re gonna see all kinds of new variants and all types of new gameplay methods.
GR: When Burnie and I got to go to up Bungie to make this Bungie Day 7^th Heaven video where we revealed that Blood Gulch was gonna be in Reach, between shooting when we had downtime, I was just playing in Forge World and Blood Gulch and I made a game, a platformer in about an hour and we were just running around and playing it, Burnie played it for a while. Just with free time, not even thinking about anything, just killing time, I made a game type that was super cool and fun to play and Forge World is gonna be nuts like that. People are gonna be able to create all kinds of insane stuff in it.
GS: It makes me think of the openness in Little Big Planet and Little Big Planet 2. It’s the same kind of thing where it’s a sandbox. It’s not a sandbox game in the idea of Grand Theft Auto, it’s a sandbox where you make the game and then you run around in the game doing whatever you want.
GR: Yeah, pretty much.
GS: And it’s phenomenal that it can be done on a console.
GR: So customizable, it’s just crazy.

PG: Speaking of game types, Grifball is now in the Action Sack playlist, so now if you play Action Sack, Grifball can come up and you can just beat the shit out of each other with hammers. How did you feel about Bungie doing that with Grifball?
GS: That’s unbelievable. It’s like the coolest thing ever.
GR: Yeah, in some ways, that’s even cooler than supporting Red vs. Blue because it’s like they let us make Red vs. Blue and that’s really cool, but here we just made a dumb game type and they put it in the game.
GS: Yeah, it’s like…in the game.
GR: Yeah, it’s pretty…I dunno, it’s like the greatest thing that’s ever happened. And that’s awesome.

PG: So you guys mentioned earlier that with Reconstruction and the Recollection Trilogy, you guys wanted to do something a little more serious. You know, still funny but a bit more…plot heavy, I would say.
GR: Yeah, absolutely.

PG: So how did it feel going from the silly humor of The Blood Gulch Chronicles to Reconstruction and the Recollection Trilogy?
GS: I love it. It’s pretty much the same in my opinion, as far as comedy. I do like the plot hooks and the more story-driven stuff that we have.
GR: I like it because I think it highlights the comedy more in a sense because it’s not just dumb joke after dumb joke after dumb joke. We have to space out our jokes a little bit more, so when we do have them, we gotta make sure that those points hit. And I think it probably makes our stuff a little funnier, at least I hope so.
GS: And I think even if I wasn’t involved with production, it’d be something I’d wanna watch. Something I’d be totally in love with.
GR: Well, that’s the whole point of whatever we make, right? Make stuff that we would wanna watch.

PG: Also, in the transition between The Blood Gulch Chronicles and Recollection, you guys started bringing in more outside voice actors. Before, you guys used yourselves, friends, and people you knew. But now you’ve brought in people like Shannon McCormick as Agent Washington, Jack Lee as the Chairman, and several other new people coming in to work with you. How did it feel to go from your small group of friends to a bigger cast that you make the show with?
GS: They’re all great. I think we need people who had better voices than us; that’s what it boils down to. We brought the Wash character in and we used someone who could drive the story and deliver a lot of the dialogue that is plot explanation.
GR: Like the new straight man.
GS: Yeah, to replace Church and to be able to tell the viewer what’s going on. You know, this is the story…this is what’s happening. And that’s kinda the roll that Wash fulfills. And as far as the Chairman and the Director, we just needed people with really authoritative sounding voices.
GR: Yeah, we couldn’t do it for sure. But it was kind of an interesting process because we were used to just jumping into the booth and doing it whenever we needed to. With Reconstruction, we had to start scheduling these people to come in advance. Shannon could only come in at 2 o’clock on Wednesdays so we had to have the script ready for him by then and make sure there’s not gonna be any changes. I mean, Shannon’s an actor…he’s gonna be in Prague doing improv or whatever for the next month. We have to make sure our shit’s all together and ready to go. And that was kind of a process because we do a lot of ad-libbing and a lot of modifying up until the episode comes out. You know, we’ll change a line or maybe we throw another line in and we couldn’t do that as much. And so it was a bit of a process to learn how to deal with that.
GS: We also started learning that a bit with the Recovery One miniseries. We had Agent Washington and we had South…
GR: Played by Shana Merlin.
GS: And it was a very similar situation where we had to have the dialogue ready. So I think Recovery One helped prime us for it, but then doing Reconstruction was a much bigger project.
GR: But it’s fun, because, like Gus said, it’s nice to hear, first off, people who are actual voice actors who make their living acting, to hear really talented do that stuff. And also so the series doesn’t just sound like the same five guys that all sound kinda similar anyway.

PG: So this season, you guys brought in Monty Oum to do CG animation for the show. I remember seeing the third episode of the season, hearing the Warthog in the background, thinking it was going to be a funny scene where they try to crash through the wall and fail. Instead, they actually crash through the wall. How did it feel to bring in Monty Oum to work with you and what was the motivation for that?
GS: We’ve been wanting to work with Monty for a long time, ever since we saw Haloid about 4 years ago. The week after that came out, I met him at Anime Boston and I tried to convince him to come out to Austin and meet us so we could work with him, but at that point he was off to go work for a video game company. Ever since, we’ve been wanting to work with him and we finally reached a point where we were ready and had some ideas and he wanted to work with us and also had some ideas.
GR: We always wanna grow the production and make it better every season. This felt like a natural progression for that. Nobody, that I can think of, is doing a mix of machinima and CGI quite in the same way. What’s actually kind of funny is that it took us months to make some of that footage. We usually knock out about 5 minutes a week of machinima footage. We can’t really do that with Monty. He still works very fast but it takes months and months. He started working on some of those episodes in December. Even the Tex fight in episode 10 that just came out about 3 weeks ago, he’s been working on that since about February or March. It was also kinda hard to keep that a secret. We couldn’t even let people know that Monty worked for us because as soon as they found out, they’d piece it together. So Monty’s living in Austin and literally hiding because every once in a while, he’d run into somebody and he’d have pretend he was on vacation or something and just leave.
GS: If anyone came to the office between October and March, we had to tell Monty to leave. We’d either send him to the coffee shop, the store, or hide him in the closet.
GR: It was really hard keeping that secret for five months but I’m glad we did. We officially unveiled the Warthog scene at PAX East and, for the first time in the history of Red vs. Blue, I got nervous about showing something, wondering how the audience was gonna respond to it and worrying it might be too different for them.
GS: Also, we showed off the first 18 minutes of Revelation and the animation doesn’t kick in until about 12 minutes in. You get 12 minutes of machinima and then suddenly you have this whole new element thrown in at the very end.

PG: With the Recollection Trilogy coming to a close, what’s in store for the future of Red vs. Blue?
GS: I think our next trilogy is gonna be the Retarded Trilogy. *Geoff laughs* We’re running out of Re words to use.
GR: Regurgitation.
GS: Repetition.
GR: Man, I honestly don’t know. Burnie had some ideas that we’ve talked about. But we’ve got some time to figure things out. To meet the released date we needed to hit for the new DVD, we needed to finish the season super early. Usually, we’re working on episode 19 up until episode 19 comes out and then we start making the DVD. But 13 just hit on Monday and we’re already done with the season. The reason Burnie and the others aren’t here is because Gus and I came and everyone else stayed to finish work on the season. The next season, if-and-when it happens, will come out next spring around March or April so we have some time to figure things out, a lot more time than we normally have.

PG: Any word on the animated series?
GS: Not really. It was a test piece that we made. We wanted to explore some ideas that we couldn’t accomplish through machinima. But now that we’ve brought Monty on, we can express some of those ideas without having to go through animation. The problem with the Animated piece, we loved it and it looked great but we like to control what we’re doing. It was hard to give animators a script and have them make something and give it back to us. There’s just not as much control over it.
GR: They ship off storyboards and there’s a dialogue and they were great, don’t get me wrong, but that 3 ½ – 4 minute piece took about six months to make, which is a really long time. We just don’t move at that pace.
GS: We just made all of RvB: Revelation in about four months compared to a four minute test piece in six months.
GR: If we need to, we can come in at 8am on a Monday and make seven or eight minutes of machinima by the time we go home if we absolutely have to. We really like working at that speed. Also, we like the immediacy of being able to make an episode, show it to the sponsors and see how they react, especially if there’s something in it that we’re a little nervous about, get their feedback, see if we need to change it a little bit and fix it by Monday. That would never be possible with 2D animation.

PG: You guys are also working in live action now. You’ve got Rooster Teeth Shorts Vol. 1 out on DVD, with Volume 2 airing online on Fridays. What motivated you to do live action and do you prefer live action or machinima?
GR: I guess it may seem weird to the typical Rooster Teeth audience that we went into live action. But the reason we started making machinima is because we were all pretty interested in film. Burnie and Matt made independent films in college, Joel was working as an actor in Hollywood, Matt was working in Hollywood doing visual effects, and I had done PA work out on the East Coast. We all had a major interest in film and that was where we wanted to be. Machinima was a quick and easy way for us to make movies that we didn’t need to have expensive cameras for or a lot of editing equipment and lights and the whole deal. Really, it’s been a process over the last five years of slowly building up the equipment we needed to be able to do the stuff that we wanted to do from the get-go. I feel like we’re kinda catching to being able to finally make live action stuff and do what we’ve been wanting to do all along. I would say now that we’ve done a season and a half of live action, I much prefer machinima. It’s so much easier and faster and the game takes care of a lot of that annoying stuff like lighting and set and design. You can’t beat just sitting down, picking up an Xbox controller and in eight hours having an episode.

PG: What do you guys have in store for Halo: Reach? After all, you guys showed a little Blood Gulch piece you made for Bungie Day.
GS: It’s hard to say. We had a little bit of time working with the game when we were making that video but we really haven’t had a long chance to look at it. Until we really get our hands on it and play around with it, it’s hard to say.
GR: I guarantee it’ll take us some time. After Halo 3 came out, it took us almost a year to make our first Halo 3 video aside from some marketing stuff we did for Bungie. Reconstruction probably came out about 10 months after Halo 3 came out, and that entire time we were just learning the ins and outs of the game, learning to use Forge and the Theater mode. We didn’t just wanna jump in not really understanding the game and its intricacies.
GS: I feel like we jumped in too early in Halo 2. Some of our early Halo 2 videos, you see us messing around with different aspect ratios, trying out different guns, trying to figure out armor emblems.
GR: We really didn’t wanna do that again.
GS: We really wanna make sure in the future that when we jump into a new game that we really understand the ins and outs that can make it the best possible result from the day one.
GR: It’s the worst to be three or four seasons into a show and figure out something in Halo and think, “Oh, well this would have made the last three years twice as easy. Son of a bitch.” So we try to do all that testing before we start. It’ll probably be a while before we make anything in Reach.
GS: We like to wait and make sure it’s just right. So we won’t be the first but we’ll be the best. I said it. There it is. Boom.
GR: I don’t know if I agree with that, but we’ll be the dumbest.
GS: Wait, you can’t spell dumbest without best. I just realized that.
GR: We’ll be the dum-best, there you go.

PG: Alright then, this will be my last question. Will we ever see a Strangerhood 2?
GS: I’d like to do it. We learned a lot doing that also. But we had some problems with mouth animation in Sims 2. You have to record a lot of video and hope that you get something that matches up. We’ve gotten better at that though.
GR: Plus there are tools now, things like Crazy Talk that make things a lot easier. I think we all really liked The Strangerhood. But the work flow took like four or five times as long to make an episode compared to Red vs. Blue, so it was kind of daunting. I think it’d be a lot faster now. I don’t know, it would be fun to go back and maybe just make a video, like an episode for old time’s sake. So maybe.
GS: The problem is that we’re still such a small company. Everyday we have a new project going on and it’s hard to have any time at all.
GR: It’s like 11 people making Red vs. Blue, Rooster Teeth Shorts, the comic, Achievement Hunter, the podcast, and all the commercial work we do. We just don’t have a lot of time, unfortunately.

PG: Well, I guess that’s all. Thank you for your time.
GS: Thank you.
GR: Yeah, absolutely. We appreciate it.

Red vs. Blue is currently finishing up its 8^th Season. To find out more, visit the Red vs. Blue website.