#rvb book

[in-sufficientdata]

YAAAAS

[alwayssadaboutfreelancers]

“I hated him so much. He used to sit behind me on the tram to school and flick my ears, say things about my family. Sometimes he’d do more than talk. So... yeah. I was behind him in the bathroom three years later. He asked me what I was looking at, and then I put his face through the mirror.”

[rp-michael-j-caboose]

*reads up Washington’s backstory from the RvB Book*

Iiiiiinteresting......

[anneapocalypse]

Our first foray into animating the Red and Blue goofballs everyone loves resulted in RvB: Animated, a cartoon that we debuted at PAX in Seattle back in 2008. For the first time, we had new gestures and actions at our disposal, which opened up a bunch of new story possibilities.But we had no actual animation talent in-house, and we quickly realized there were some problems with outsourcing so much of the production work to another studio. For one, it was expensive. It turns out that creating each individual animation asset from scratch requires a lot of work. And the turnaround times, although quick by traditional animation standards, were out of sync with the blazing fast speeds we had become accustomed to with machinima. But third, and most importantly, we felt like we had lost touch a bit with the production. There's something about being hands-on--literally holding the Xbox controller in your own hands--that was an essential element of our style.

Matt Hullum, “Headbobs to Karate Chops,” Red vs. Blue Ultimate Fan Guide

[anneapocalypse]

[A]lmost every joke in RvB had to be spoken. The verb 'say' was the only new verb we could bring to the table, and believe it or not, that was where our creativity blossomed. Sure, it would be great to have a character change a lightbulb while standing on a ladder, balanced on top of a folding chair, but we couldn't show those things because they did not exist in our kind-of-looks-like-a-movie world. Because of that limitation, we were forced to write a funny story for our audience from the very first episode. And you know what? It is one of the many things that made the show better. Oddly enough, placing limits on our storytelling abilities forced us to be more creative. We had to adapt. Years after that first episodes of RvB hit, we were lucky enough to have a very talented animator named Monty Oum join our staff. In the early days of his hiring (way back in Season 7: Recreation), Monty and I spoke at length about the characters and what they might do when their actions could expand beyond what the Xbox controllers told them to do. We would talk for hours, almost to the point where I didn't know what direction to take a scene. And that's when Monty pinpointed an issue: now that the characters can do anything, we feel compelled to do everything. We were plagued with a paralysis of possibility.

Burnie Burns, “Why We Are Here,” Red vs. Blue Ultimate Fan Guide

[anneapocalypse]

RvB Fan Guide: Tucker & Junior

There’s a whole transcript of Tucker getting debriefed post-Sandtrap that is a fun read if you like Tucker. This isn’t all you get out of it by any means, just a few  Fun Facts(tm) for your enjoyment.

Junior survived the pelican crash and escaped to reunite with Tucker. 

Tucker claims he found Junior two months before the ship actually crashed, due to “some weird time shit going on.”

While Tucker was at the desert temple, Junior was deployed to a remote colony to aid in diplomatic efforts with some Sangheili who were dissatisfied with the treaty at the end of the Great War.

At some point, Tucker and Junior took a trip to Sanghelios, and Tucker learned some new swords skills.

[anneapocalypse]

I remember the first time I saw the Orion nebula from a cruiser, the interstellar dust bursting with all manner of color against the black vastness of space. I stared out of the viewport thinking one day I might know the full limits of our universe, one day I could comprehend its depths and see every uncharted corner. But in just one second, I knew the opposite was true of her, this woman who had just punched Delaney--I thought I could spend a whole lifetime with her and not even know a fraction of her.

Leonard Church, boldly nerding where no nerd has gone before (from the RvB Fan Guide)

[anneapocalypse]

Added some more Halo dates to the merged timeline that I realized provided some pretty illuminating context for Project Freelancer.

Namely, that by the time Project Freelancer got underway, the SPARTAN-III* Project had in recent years lost both its Alpha and Beta companies of 300 soldiers each.

So, says Dr. Leonard Church, how’s that strength in numbers thing working out for you?

Fuck you, says the UNSC.

Would you like to hear about my Freelancer idea, says Dr. Leonard Church.

FINE, says the UNSC.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve thought for a long time that Freelancer was kind of a direct inversion of the SPARTAN program--augment the armor instead of the soldier, a focus on brutal competition rather than teamwork--but the recent heavy losses of the SPARTAN-III program certainly lend something to that reading.