Filming
Aside from a few scenes created using Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal, and Halo: Custom Edition for the PC, Red vs. Blue is filmed using a number of networked Xbox consoles. Within a multiplayer game session, the people controlling the avatars "puppet" their characters, moving them around, firing weapons, and performing other actions as dictated by the script, and in synchronization with the prerecorded dialogue. The camera is simply another player, whose first-person perspective is recorded raw to a computer.
In the interview on The Screen Savers, Michael Burns described the use of machinima techniques to film the show thus: "It's like normal animation but instead of, y'know, sitting down, drawing everything by hand, we just use controllers."
In scenes using the original Halo, a bug was exploited that made it so that by holding a pistol and looking down, the character would appear to be holding the pistol down but looking up, as if more relaxed. The glitch also either made vertical movement limited or returned the character's appearance to normal, so characters would have to estimate movements, since they were always looking down.
Bungie Studios eliminated the bug in Halo 2, so that the on-screen characters appear to look up or down correctly. Bungie also implemented a new feature that made it possible for Rooster Teeth and others to achieve the same effect as the original bug. In Halo 2, pressing down on the D-Pad of the Xbox controller makes the player character appear to hold his or her weapon in a neutral position, without aiming it at anyone, while looking straight ahead. This also allowed them to move the heads up and down to achieve a more dynamic appearance for some scenes.
In footage made using Halo, a weapon aiming reticle appears in the center of the screen. This reticle appears because, as with most machinima, the camera's view is from the perspective of a weapon-wielding player. The exception to this is footage recorded by killing the camera player's avatar. Footage made using Halo: Custom Edition allowed for a player to act as a free roaming camera, and thus contained no reticule. In Halo 2, a bug in the Oddball multiplayer mode allows the player to drop all weapons, causing the weapon reticle to disappear. This bug has been used in all Halo 2 footage from episode 46 onwards.
To gain unique angles in the series, Rooster Teeth first used a tank in the game to emulate crane shots by standing the cameraman on the turret while it was raised. Later, they found it more practical to stand the cameraman on other characters in the game. This trick has also been used for other purposes, such as standing Donut on two characters to create the illusion that he could jump higher than is possible in the game.
For scenes which include the flag (CTF), only two colours could be used (Sarge's and early Donut's red, and Caboose's blue) as CTF is a team game and only red and blue colours could be used. When the flag used amongst different coloured characters, it is only shown with a standard red or blue character, mixed with scenes with other characters behaving as if it is present.
During filming, there was an issue with the Blue Team's deceased leader, Church. Church appears as a ghost for portions of the show, and he needed to appear transparent to the viewer. To achieve this, all scenes with ghost-Church had to be filmed twice, once with Church in them and once without him.
Another difficulty when filming in Halo 2 was the enormous shadow over Red Base in the map Coagulation. This shadow had a detrimental effect on the appearance of the characters. To avoid this, late in Season 4 a glitch was discovered that allowed a character to appear lit even in a dark area. Burnie Burns stated in the Season 4 audio commentary that the glitch was something they kept noticing a lot while filming the episodes, and when they discovered how to replicate it they utilised it extensively.
The videos are mostly filmed on the Halo map Blood Gulch (and its Halo 2 counterpart, Coagulation), although later episodes have increasingly been filmed on other maps. The Apple Macintosh games Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal have also been used for a few scenes. Halo 2 is typically used for events that occur chronologically in the distant future, and the Marathon series for those that occur in the distant past; this has the effect of making the graphical quality of the series an indication of time's progression throughout the story.
Episodes that have been made with Halo 3 have used the theater mode camera. Starting in season 8, action sequences have been made with fully scripted fight scenes that involve stunts not possible with the previous game engine.
Read more about this topic: Red Vs. Blue Production