Red vs Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, also known as RvB, is a machinima science fiction comedy series created by Rooster Teeth Productions, and is primarily produced using Bungie Studios' first-person shooter (FPS) video games Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, on the Microsoft Xbox video game console. Chronicling the story of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war in the middle of a desolate box canyon, the series is an absurdist parody of FPS games, military life, and other science fiction movies.

Begun in 2003 and currently in its fourth season, Red vs Blue has won four awards from the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. The series is generally praised for its originality, and has been credited with bringing new popularity to machinima, helping it to gain more mainstream exposure, and attracting more people to the art form. With the first three seasons currently available on DVD, it is one the first commerically released — and successful — machinima products. Graham Leggat, a former director of communications for Lincoln Center's film society, has called the series "truly as sophisticated as Samuel Beckett".^[1]

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler Red vs Blue tells the story of the Red Team and the Blue Team, two groups of soldiers belonging to two opposing armies, who occupy two small bases in a box canyon known as Blood Gulch. Each team's base seems only to exist in response to the other team's base. While both teams generally dislike the other and have standing orders to defeat them and capture their flag, neither team's soldiers are particularly motivated to fight each other. Teammates have a wide array of eccentric personalities and often create more problems for each other than for their enemies.

Although the animation is done primarily with the Halo and Halo 2 games, Red vs Blue has little connection with the Halo fictional universe. The only reference in the main series is a brief, throw-away line in the first episode, in which Grif mentions that there are no aliens to fight because Master Chief has destroyed the Covenant armada. No other references to the Halo storyline have been made in the regular episodes, though Master Chief was again briefly mentioned as a showboating member of the Army in a video made for E3 2003. A separate reference to the Halo universe appears in the trailer, where it is told that, between the events of Halo and Halo 2, there was "a brief but violent period of civil war", in allusion to the events of the series proper. But the Blue Team's failure to recognize the alien that joined the cast in season 4 as a Covenant Elite suggests that the creators of the show either plan on presenting a parallel universe to that of Halo, or that they simply ignore the events of the games.

Rooster Teeth also periodically releases self-referential public service announcements (PSAs) and holiday-themed videos which are generally not connected to the main storyline. However, the members of both teams still act in-character.

Seasons

The seasons of Red vs Blue premiered on the following dates:

• Season 1: April 1, 2003
• Season 2: January 3, 2004
• Season 3: October 12, 2004
• Season 4: August 29, 2005 (in production)

Season 1

The delicate balance of indifference in Blood Gulch is disrupted by the introduction of new players to the "conflict". Donut enters the fray on the Red Team and manages to capture the Blue flag on his first day, after being sent on a fool's errand by Grif and Simmons. Meanwhile, a rookie named Caboose arrives alongside a battle tank named Sheila, and they manage to accidentally kill the Blue Team's self-appointed leader, Church. At the request of Tucker and Caboose, Blue Command hires a mercenary named Tex to help. Church briefly returns as a ghost to warn his teammates about Tex, who soon arrives and attacks the Reds. After severely injuring Donut, Tex succeeds in returning the Blue flag, but is captured by Sarge. Church again appears to the Blues to explain that Tex is actually his former girlfriend, whose mind is partially under the control of a psychotic artificial intelligence (AI). Church organizes a rescue mission that succeeds after some difficulties. In an attempt to keep Tex stationed in Blood Gulch so that he can attempt to remove the AI from her head, Church possesses the Red Team's robot, Lopez, to warn them of Tex's pending attack. He fails and, much to his horror, she is killed in action by Donut in revenge for her previous attack. Church runs to her side, stealing Lopez's body in the process.

Season 2

Three months later, a medic named Dufresne (soon nicknamed "Doc") — on loan to both armies, due to low resources — arrives in the canyon and checks on the Blue team, just before the Reds attack. The Reds take Doc as a hostage, but soon tire of his personality and ditch him in the middle of the canyon. Church is still trying to get used to his new, stolen robot body, of which he eventually loses control. Tex returns as a ghost and informs the Blues that her AI, O'Malley, had jumped to Caboose right before her death, thereby explaining his recent aggressive behavior. Jumping inside Caboose's mind, Church and Tex try to eliminate O'Malley, but the AI escapes and possesses Doc. Later, Donut is captured by the Blues during a reconnaissance mission and Sarge is forced to build two new robot bodies in exchange for his return. Meanwhile, Sheila and Lopez form their own robot army, and come to the exchange in order to conquer the Blues. This culminates in a Mexican standoff, during which Tucker discovers that both teams are apparently secretly controlled by the same Command, as both teams have the same contact, a man named Vic. O'Malley suddenly appears, kidnaps Lopez, and escapes with him through a teleporter. The Red and Blue Teams call a truce and form two-man teams to pursue O'Malley. However, the teleporter malfunctions, and the teams become separated and scattered across various locations outside Blood Gulch.

Season 3

Sarge and Caboose manage to escape from immortal, respawning, flag-obsessed Unknown character "Battle Creek soldiers". Please see Template:Rvbchar/doc for usage. in Battle Creek. O'Malley hires a mercenary named Wyoming to kill Tucker due to his knowledge of the apparent conspiracy. After Simmons repairs the teleporter, the Reds and Blues regroup on Sidewinder and confront O'Malley, only to have a reality-shattering bomb destroy the present and propel everyone except for Church into the future (represented by Halo 2); Church is thrown into the past (represented by Marathon and Marathon 2). While the rest of the Reds and Blues continue to battle O'Malley in the future at his fortress, Church learns of a prophecy that, in the future, a blue being known as The Great Destroyer will use The Great Weapon to bring The Great Doom to billions of people. Believing that the prophecy refers to Caboose, Church decides to travel forward in time to Blood Gulch, in the recent past. He then attempts to prevent the problems that the teams had encountered in the previous two seasons, and therefore prevent the events that lead up to The Great Doom. However, in a causality loop, Church realizes that it is in fact his interference that causes most or all of these problems in Blood Gulch in the first place. Eventually giving up on trying to change the past, he travels to Sidewinder and rejoins the main group as the bomb explodes, so that he can be propelled into the future with everyone else. Shortly after Church arrives in the future, O'Malley lays siege to his captured fortress with an army of robots, only to have them obliterated by an unknown being, just before he himself is seemingly killed by the same being. Unbeknownst to the Blues, the Reds leave mid-battle in search of a mysterious distress call. They arrive back at Blood Gulch, much to Grif's dismay. The season ends on a cliffhanger as a creature is seen creeping up on an unsuspecting Church.

Season 4

As the Red Team re-explores Blood Gulch, an argument over whether Sheila is still roaming the Gulch leads to Simmons' fall from grace and Sarge's search for a new right-hand man. Grif goes out of his way to annoy anyone he can, and as a result ends up being taken hostage by the exiled Simmons, who has painted himself mostly blue in retaliation for the demotion. Simmons then confesses to Grif that he believes that Sheila is hiding something from him. Back at the fortress, the Blue Team attempts to confront the new Alien, only to experience a series of humiliating defeats until Caboose manages to befriend it. The alien reveals that he has been on a sacred quest to save his people, and came to the fortress to retrieve The Great Weapon (an energy sword), which only Tucker can now activate, since he accidentally discovered it first. Threatening to kill everyone otherwise, the alien forces Tucker, Andy (a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed bomb), and Caboose to partake of his quest. Tex, prophesied as the one who would stalk the hero for The Great Weapon, later joins them. Arriving at the Great Freezing Plains, the team finds a temple occupied by the Reds and Blues from Battle Creek. As Tex defeats them in a mad rush, Tucker uses the sword to open a gate to a flying ship, of which the Alien quickly takes command. Wyoming suddenly re-appears, however, and shoots the ship down before fleeing with Tex in pursuit. Meanwhile, Church returns to the Blue Base in Blood Gulch and encounters the blue Simmons, whom he pretends not to recognize, and comes into contact with a distant descendant of Vic, who scoffs at Church's mention of Blue Command. Tucker, Caboose and Andy return to the gulch, and inform Church of the quest's "apparent" failure (though Andy disputes this point), the Alien's death, Wyoming's re-appearance, and Tex's departure. Simmons returns to the Red Base to try to relay information about the war learned from Vic Jr. and changes back into maroon armor. At the Blue Base, Tucker becomes ill for an unknown reason, and Church attempts to call Doc for help.

Characters

Red vs Blue features a cast of diverse characters, whose personalities are skewed in different ways and to varying degrees. These quirks and the ways that they interact and conflict with each other drive much of the plot and humor. The series has revolved around eight main characters, four on each team. In addition, several other characters, both affiliated and unaffiliated, human and non-human, have played significant roles at various points in the story.

Main characters

Red Team main characters

• Sarge: Sarge is the military-minded staff sergeant and leader of the Blood Gulch Red Team. A grizzled veteran with a Southern accent, Sarge is somewhat psychopathic, bloodthirsty, and the only Blood Gulch soldier on either team actually serious about the war.
• Private First Class Dick Simmons: Reasonably smart and rational, Simmons is the level-headed straight man of the Red Team. His main quirk is that he is a compulsive sycophant towards Sarge.
• Private Dexter Grif: The wisecracking loudmouth of the Reds, Grif is self-centered, acerbic, lazy, and somewhat cowardly. Despised by his teammates Sarge and Simmons, he has the lowest social and military rank on the Red Team. Despite this, he and Simmons are almost always seen together, either chatting or bickering.
• Private Franklin Delano Donut: Donut is the Red Team's over-eager rookie, who, at least initially, is unable to grasp the current situation. His general naïveté, garrulousness, and cheerfulness tend to annoy his teammates, and he becomes increasingly effeminate and childish as the series progresses.

Blue Team main characters

• Private Leonard L. Church: Church is the Blue Team's bitter, sarcastic, battle-hardened de facto leader. Often focused on actually confronting and solving the various crises encountered, he ends up taking their brunt, leaving him increasingly disillusioned and anti-social.
• Private Lavernius Tucker: Smart-aleck, sarcastic, rude, prone to juvenile humor, and obsessed with women, Tucker has many charactersistics of an unruly teenager. Like Grif, he has an extreme aversion to combat and work, and always complains and tries to stall when ordered into battle.
• Private Michael J. Caboose: Caboose is the Blue team's rookie. Despite being well-meaning, he is clueless, childlike, and somewhat insane. However, he is physically one of the strongest soldiers on either team.
• Freelancer Tex: Tex is a mercenary and Church's former girlfriend. Although she lacks the more eccentric personality traits of the other Blood Gulch characters, her pronounced propensity for massive, disproportionate violence makes her anything but normal.

Significant supporting characters

• Lopez: A robot built by Sarge that, due to a damaged voice card, only speaks Spanish.
• Sheila: The AI inside the Blue Team's tank.
• Doc: A medic that exhibits extreme pacifism.
• O'Malley: An evil megalomaniacial AI. Originally inhabiting Tex's armor, then Caboose's armor, O'Malley now occupies Doc's armor.
• Andy: A bomb built by Tex who translates for the alien.
• Alien: An alien who leads most of the Blue Team on a "sacred quest".
• Wyoming: A freelancer hired to kill Tucker.
• Vic: A sardonic, unhelpful communications officer.

Template:Endspoiler

Background

Red vs Blue grew out of Michael "Burnie" Burns's voiceover-enhanced gameplay videos that he created for a site called drunkgamers.com, which was run by Geoff Fink (later Geoff Ramsey) and Gustavo Sorola. With the idea that these videos could grow into a full story, he created a trailer for Red vs Blue, but it was largely ignored, and, for unrelated reasons, drunkgamers soon closed. Four months later, Computer Gaming World contacted Ramsey for permission to include a drunkgamers video in a CD that they were going to distribute with the magazine. Ramsey granted permission, but he and Burns felt that they needed a website to take advantage of the exposure from Computer Gaming World. As a result, they resurrected the Red vs Blue project, re-releasing the trailer to coincide with the Computer Gaming World issue. The first episode proper was released on April 1 2003.^[2], ^[3]

Rooster Teeth was initally unaware of the machinima movement. Matt Hullum stated in an interview with GameSpy in 2004, "When we first started Red vs. Blue we thought we were completely original. We never imagined that there were other people out there using video games to make movies, much less that it was a new art form with a hard to pronounce name and an official organization."^[4]

The nature of the series was different from Burns's initial expectation. A partial character introduction released in between the original trailer and the first episode featured extensive action and violence and was set to Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff". However, the crew realized as the project developed that Red vs Blue was going to focus more on situational comedy rather than on the heavy action initially implied.^[5]

Rooster Teeth also initially envisioned the project to be short, but the series grew beyond their expectations. Burns and Ramsey noted that they had preconceived a list of jokes for Red vs Blue and, at the time of inception, had expected the series to run 6 to 8 episodes. By episode 8, however, they realized that the series had fleshed out more than expected, and, as a result, they had only gotten through about a third of their list.^[5] Another early series length cited by Burns in the middle of season 1 was 22 episodes, but, driven by the series' popularity, he later realized that there was potentially more story than could be covered in that length,^[6] and was able to conceive an extension of the season 1 plot. Just before the debut of season 4, Ramsey's only indication of final series length was that Rooster Teeth planned "to make as many episodes as they can".^[3]

Production

The writing process for the series has changed over time. During season 1, Burns wrote the episode scripts from week to week, with minimal planning in advance; major plot events were conceived shortly before they were filmed. In the second season, Matt Hullum also became a main writer. 40 to 80 pages of rough script are now written before a season begins. Because Red vs Blue is loosely based on the Halo universe, Rooster Teeth encountered some difficulties when trying to synchronize events in the series with the release of Halo 2.

Aside from a few scenes created using Marathon, Marathon 2, and the PC version of Halo, the series is mostly filmed using a number of interconnected Xbox consoles. As the series title suggests, the videos are largely set within the Halo map Blood Gulch (and its Halo 2 counterpart, Coagulation), although later episodes have been filmed increasingly on other maps (mainly Zanzibar from Halo 2). Within a multiplayer game session, the people controlling the avatars "puppet" their characters, moving them around, firing weapons, and performing other actions as dictated by the script, and in synchronization with the episode's dialogue, which is recorded ahead of time.

The "camera" is simply another player, whose first-person perspective is recorded raw to a computer. As the recording occurs within the game, a few different bugs and post-production techniques have been exploited in order to achieve desired visual effects. In particular, Adobe Premiere Pro is used to edit the audio and video together, create letterboxing to hide the camera player's head-up display, add the title and Fade to Black screens, and create some special visual effects that cannot be accomplished in-game.

Reception

Red vs Blue attracted interest immediately; the first episode had 20,000 downloads within a day.^[7] Shortly after episode 2, Bungie Studios contacted Rooster Teeth. The crew had feared that any contact from Bungie would be to force an end to the project, but Bungie enjoyed the videos and was supportive;^[3] a deal was eventually struck to ensure that the series could continue legally. From there, Red vs Blue continued to attract more attention, and, by April 2004, viewership was estimated at about a million.^[1]

Red vs Blue was widely acclaimed within the machinima industry. The first season won awards for Best Picture, Best Independent Machinima Film, and Best Writing at the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences' 2003 Machinima Film Festival.^[8] Two years later, at the 2005 festival, the series' third season won an award for Best Independent Machinima and was nominated for five others.^[9], ^[10]

Among film critics, the response was generally positive. Darren Waters of BBC News Online called Red vs Blue "riotously funny" and "reminiscent of the anarchic energy of South Park".^[6] Reviewing the three season DVDs for Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince wrote, "Red vs. Blue is hysterical in large part because all the characters are morons, and so the seemingly intense conflict with the opposing base doesn’t exactly work the way you’d think it would."^[11] However, Ed Halter of The Village Voice dismissed the humor as shallow, describing the first season as "Clerks-meets-Star Wars".^[12] Graham Leggat, the then director of communications of Lincoln Center's film society, indirectly countered this criticism by arguing, "The literary analog is absurdist drama."^[1]

Another common criticism of Red vs Blue was that its season 3 plot was too far-fetched and out-of-character for the series. Charlie Prince wrote, "By the third season, however, the Red vs. Blue idea seems to be running out of steam.... It’s not funny so much as just odd." ^[11] Writing for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Wilma Jandoc agreed that the first part of "season 3... throws the teams into a ridiculous situation and has limited member interactions, leading to a lack of witty dialogue." ^[13] Nevertheless, both critics expressed optimism that the series would improve from this low point.

Outside the machinima and film community, Red vs Blue has also attracted positive attention. Rooster Teeth Productions has been asked to create special Red vs Blue videos for various events. For example, Microsoft, Bungie's parent company, has commissioned Red vs Blue videos for Xbox demo kiosks found in game stores and for a developer conference.^[14], ^[1] Additionally, the Barenaked Ladies also commissioned videos for their concerts.^[1]. Other videos have been specifically created for gaming magazines, including Electronic Gaming Monthly and Computer Gaming World; gaming conventions, including E3 and the Penny Arcade Expo; and the Sundance Film Festival.

Impact

Red vs Blue is credited with attracting public attention to the art form of machinima, which existed as a mostly underground form of filmmaking, with limited notice (and only within the computer and video games industry), up until RvB's release. It also allowed for the machinima medium to expand without fear of legal persecution, as an undisclosed agreement with Microsoft allowing Rooster Teeth to profit from the series without fear of copyright infringement has set the standard for video game publishers to allow machinima use of their properties, and in some cases to create machinima for promotional use.^[1]

In the machinima industry, the series is credited with popularizing the idea of shorter, multiple episodes, and in turn, the long-running serial. This allows gradual improvement as a result of viewer feedback, and gives viewers a reason to return for future videos. Previously, most machinima productions were released in lengthier, singular pieces. Following the success of Red vs Blue, more machinima has been released in serial format.^[15]

Distribution methods

All released episodes of the season in production are freely available from the official site, in 320-by-240 resolution. Videos are released in Quicktime (QT), DivX, and, starting with episode 26, Windows Media Video (WMV) formats. Five or so episodes from the previous seasons are available from a "rolling archive"; each week, the videos are rotated to the next set. This setup is to help to control bandwidth costs; as Burns noted in late 2004, "We routinely have about 180 Terabytes of downloads in a month now."^[14] However, nearly all freely released episodes of Red vs Blue are also available from websites such as Machinima.com, PlanetMirror, Fileplanet, and Google Video.

For a fee of US$10, members of the official website can gain sponsorship status for a period of 6 months. Perhaps the best known of the extra features that a sponsor receives is access to the new videos two or three days before the release to the general public. In addition to the public low-resolution videos, sponsors can also access high-resolution (720-by-480 for QT and DivX, 640-by-480 for WMV) versions of the videos, sponsor-only special videos, and access to the entire video archive at any time, as opposed to having to wait for a chosen video to make its way through the public rolling archive.

In addition to being distributed episodically online, Red vs Blue is one of the first commercially released machinima products — as opposed to a commercial product containing machinima — with each of its three completed seasons having been released on DVD. The DVDs are sold through the Rooster Teeth official website, as well as at some GameStop and Hot Topic stores in the United States.^[16] Each season is released on DVD within two months of that season's final episode. For the DVDs, the episodes of the main storyline are edited together to play continuously as a full-length film. Because the episodes as individually released often contain dialogue that continues into or past the fade to black at the end of the episode, Rooster Teeth either removes that dialogue entirely, or shoots extra video footage to replace the original fade to black.^[5]

Additionally, a third version of the season is further edited for time for showing at the Lincoln Center. For example, Burns noted in a website news post that the 135-minute season 3 DVD version had to be shortened to "a watchable-in-a-theater runtime of 100 minutes".^[17]

See also

• Sponsors vs Freeloaders - A parody series created by forum members of the Red vs Blue official site.
• The Codex - Another popular machinima series, that focuses on drama rather than comedy.

References

External links

• Red vs Blue official site
• Red vs Blue at the Internet Movie Database
• Rooster Teeth Productions
• The Unofficial Red vs Blue Resource Site