The Austin-based Rooster Teeth Productions is no stranger to creating content. In fact, the production company is responsible for the long-running webseries Red Vs. Blue, created using gameplay footage from the Bungie game Halo to tell the story of two opposing teams of soldiers and the ongoing war between their two camps. 

The series was a huge success for the company when it debuted in 2003, back before even YouTube was streaming content online. While Rooster Teeth has gone on to create a entire slate of online shows and content, it wasn’t until a few years ago that co-founders Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum decided they wanted Rooster Teeth to step into the world of feature films with the sci-fi comedy Lazer Team.

What followed is an almost legendary crowdfunding campaign, where Burns and company raised over $2.5 million dollars for the project. Initially released into theaters in a limited capacity, Lazer Team‘s success continued, becoming part of the YouTube’s launch of YouTube Red, their paid streaming service.

With Lazer Team released on to DVD this week via Anchor Bay Entertainment, Creative Screenwriting spoke to Burns about creating the film, what keeps a fourteen-year-old show fresh, and his biggest pet peeve in science fiction writing.

Let’s start with Lazer Team. When did you decide you wanted to make a live-action feature film?

Well, we actually got our start in college making feature films. The first project that Matt Hullum and I ever worked on together was a feature. We shot it on 16mm film and it was 105 minutes. So, in a lot of ways, we consider Lazer Team as getting back to our roots. To getting back to what inspired us when we started on this journey.

It wasn’t until things like online video became possible from a technology standpoint that we were able to do what it is that Rooster Teeth is really known for, but, in our hearts, we’ve always been very narrative, very feature-minded artists.

Does it feel like a homecoming for you to make another feature?

It definitely does. To stand on a set with Matt Hullum, you know, it just reminds me of when we were back in college. We’ve worked together this whole time, but a lot of times we’ve worked on projects in parallel but headed in the same direction. So it was so great to be back on a live-action set with Matt.

Matt also helped write the script, along with Chris Demarais and Josh Flanagan. How did it work collaborating with a group of people? 

We had this story for about four years. Had some ideas of what all the characters were, knew the premise, had an outline for it. We’d talked about it for so long that we hired Chris Demarais and Josh Flanagan to take the outline and the treatment and flesh out the first draft of the script. .

We knew these guys were incredibly talented, we knew we wanted them to work on big projects again in the future, so from a business perspective, having these guys work directly with Matt and myself just made sense.

They did the first draft, we did some really heavy notes on it, and a further seven drafts, but a lot of them were us just tooling around.

The last draft was a comedy polish, a draft for the voice of Rooster Teeth. Gavin Free, who plays Woody in the film put it well. He said, “We wanted Lazer Team to be a Rooster Teeth movie, not Rooster Teeth the Movie.” That’s a really fine distinction, but it was really important to us.

Was comedy always something you were interested in?

When we started in 2003, two things were really big: animation and comedy. There was a lot of Flash animation out there, but there wasn’t really a lot of video content and so comedy being the language of the Internet we naturally gravitated towards it.

But we always like to push the boundaries especially with the existing audience that we have. We just finished a six-episode run of our dramatic series Day 5. It’s considered our first dramatic series, even though we’ve done some dramatic content before, but it’s a post-apocalyptic series – I don’t even know if that’s the right word – it’s a during-the-apocalypse series about people who are trying to stay alive in a world where sleep has suddenly become fatal.

It’s called Day 5 because it picks up on day five when people have been trying to stay awake for five days straight. There’s an event that takes place one night at 3:01 in the morning and everyone who is asleep at that point in time dies and subsequently anyone who falls asleep after that moment also dies. So the people that remain, there’s very few of them left, they’re trying to do anything and everything they can to stay awake.

This is live-action?

It is live-action and it’s premiering on our Rooster Teeth First platform which is for our subscribers.

What inspires you to write stories in a post-apocalyptic landscape?

As a writer, I tend to be much more character-focused, so I start with the characters then I consider: if we put these characters together, what would be compelling stories for them to go through and what journey could they make together.

Going all the way back to the beginning of Rooster Teeth – I was the writer for Red Vs. Blue, which we we animated using the game Halo. A lot of people haven’t seen Red Vs. Blue assume it’s all about Halo and that it uses a bunch of Halo jokes. But across the entire fourteen year run, we maybe have four or five Halo jokes total.

What was really inspiring from a writing perspective is was to say, “okay, we’re in this video game, we’re in this little canyon where there’s two armies facing off against each other with really no explanation of why that’s happening, there’s a jeep, there’s a set of guns, there’s a skull, and there’s this prism that is a power up for the armor. That’s what you have to write with, now write something to make that work.”

So, I take inspiration from a guy that we worked with for a number of years who has unfortunately passed away, Monty Oum. We used to talk about the creative process and a lot of times with animation and live-action when you have that blank page you can be overwhelmed by this feeling of “since we can do anything, we should try to do everything”. Imposing limitations on yourself is something that can help you figure out how you want to craft the story.

You say, “We want to set it in this world, we want it to feature these people, we want it happen at this certain amount of time, and for Day 5, the limitations were “Who is awake at 3:01 in the morning?”

These are people on both sides of society. They’re people who are up all night because they’re doing very important things like running power plants, running hospitals, or they’re on the other side where they’re up at 3:01 in the morning because they’re wandering the streets or they just came out of a club. So it was a good analysis of the people who are already separated from society and what they do once society evaporates around them.

In either Red Vs. Blue or Lazer Team, did you start with characters first? What is your process for creating character?

In Red Vs. Blue every character has to be immediately identifiable, because the way that the show was originally animated, all the characters look exactly the same, they’re just a different color! So we had to do things to really differentiate them as characters.  

They’d be characters that an audience could watch and immediately know who in the frame is talking, what’s happening. It’s something where the audience was – I never heard a complaint of it at least – was never confused or didn’t know who on the screen was talking.

For Lazer Team, the premise is that a suit of alien armor arrives on Earth. And the different components of the suit: the weapons gauntlet, the defensive gauntlet, the super boots, and the psychic helmet, end up in the wrong hands.

It’s fun to approach the characters in such a way that their abilities run counter to their personalities. Herman’s a great example, where the guy who ends up with the super boots, that’s the guy who can’t run any distance. So he can run really fast, but he can only run about fifty yards at a time and then he’s ready to pass out, because he smokes and he drinks and he eats too much.

And the guy who gets the helmet, Woody, he’s not the brightest of the bunch, so it’s fun to take those powers and run them counter to the actual personalities of those characters and see how they rise to the occasion or how they work as a foil for everyone else in a given scene.

Is that where you started in the writing process for Lazer Team? In figuring out the powers of the suit and the then the personalities that would be the appropriate disparity and go from there?

Yes. It started from the premise of the suit arriving on Earth, the courier ship crashing and the wrong people getting the equipment off off it. And from there we focused primarily on fleshing out the characters and the storyline followed.

You have to start with a basic premise, you have to know essentially what you’re writing – or, at least, I do – and then, after that, you want to have good characters you can put in that situation. Like people who are going to create conflict.

It’s an approach to writing I developed with Red Vs. Blue. For example, we have this scene: the warthog, the engine has broken down, they’ve got to fix it, they’re stranded out somewhere, who would be funny in this situation?

And for Red Vs. Blue, Sarge is there because he has to bark orders at people, Griff could be pretty funny because he’s lazy and doesn’t want to help solve the problem, Simmons would be overbearing and try to help, but characters like Donut or Caboose or Tucker, they really wouldn’t contribute anything to that scene.

So you can take a scene as a little microcosm of the whole series and say, “OK, who’s appropriate for this?” And then it’s our job as writers to make those scenes come together in one continuous narrative.

When you’re trying to build an audience for something like Red Vs. Blue, on one hand you’re capitalizing on the popularity of Halo, but, at the same time, an audience will only stick around for the characters, ultimately.

I see Halo as being the star that goes on the poster of a big summer release. You see a movie and buy a ticket because Tom Cruise is on the poster and you trust Tom Cruise, but after you see the movie, all you can talk about is how cool Edge of Tomorrow‘s story was and what great a movie it was. Essentially, Tom Cruise is what gets you in the door.

How did you get the idea for Red Vs. Blue?

Yeah, back in those days, there was no XBOX Live, so we had go to other people’s houses with our XBOX and set them up in different rooms. So we’d be yelling back and forth as we played Halo and the spirit of all those ribbings and all that trash talk is what led to the idea of Red Vs. Blue.

And, as a life-long gamer, I have probably watched as many video game narratives as stories in the cinema or TV and I was always really interested at these huge campaigns that are doled out over the course of what might be a month for a player to finish it. These campaigns have to have a compelling storyline so that when they get to a cutscene, players will know what’s going on.

But it always made me laugh that while they had these really rich narratives, there was always a multiplayer component which was: “Ok, let’s just take all these people from this compelling story and put them in a small arena and they’ll all just shoot each other with no explanation.”

So I thought it was fun from a storytelling perspective to try and go in and give those characters a voice.

And they’ve had a voice for 14 years. How did you keep a series like Red Vs. Blue fresh throughout such a long history?

Well, we have a lot of characters, and we try not to base the story too much on an inside joke.

When we started the series, we did very specifically craft it to be serial. At the time in 2003, people told us it was foolish to be doing serial comedy where one storyline from one episode leads into the next one. The sitcom model of “everything resets so that people can watch one episode and then not watch the rest of it and still understand what they saw and enjoy it,” that was really the model back then.

But we wanted to do it serial because, in my mind, why would you write a show for people that don’t watch it? That’s the model for a sitcom: it’s designed for people to hit it and bounce off.

We were doing something where the cards were already stacked against us. We had a show that was online before you could watch a video inside of a web browser, so I wanted something that was very rewarding over a long period of time but still a lot of fun as well.

That led to us having long-term plans for the series and looking ahead as far as four or five seasons. We said, “These are where these characters are, this is where we’d like them to be, we’re going to introduce these new characters over the course of the next few seasons.” And it’s a methodology that’s worked really well for us. And we’ve had an incredibly ravenous fanbase, which has been great.

Do you use that sense of a longer-form narrative in your features as well?

Well, longer-form narratives are high-budget too, and, as much as we like to think that we do, you don’t always control your destiny with higher budgets. Meaning that, if we have a bad episode of Red Vs. Blue, we’ll probably be okay and we can make another episode, but if we put out a huge movie for a studio, we’re still going to need a greenlight to make the next one.

I don’t know when the trilogy became this all-consuming thing for American cinema where, if you have a really compelling story they say, “This thing’s huge, let’s make it a trilogy!” instead of just making a sequel. They always turn it into three movies and I’m not certain why they do that. Even great films, like Star Wars. When you make the first one, you don’t really know how popular it’s going to be.

A New Hope, is a very complete story. You watch A New Hope, you see the progression of the characters, they’re trying to achieve a goal, they complete that goal – spoiler alert – and that’s the completion of the story. And then they’re going to make a trilogy, so, inevitably, when they write the second story, they know they’ve got a third one coming. So almost always, the second story becomes incomplete. It becomes this middle ground between the first movie and the third movie and they end up being very incomplete movies.

Now, in the case of Empire Strikes Back – a wonderful movie – but, as a story all unto itself, very incomplete! If you look at the last scene in Empire Strikes Back, you learn this incredible fact about Luke and his father and then they’re sitting in a medical ship looking out across the cosmos and that’s how it ends. There’s no completion of anything there and you know it’s all going to be completed in the next iteration of the movie.

So I’m always very careful about that. I always want to be sure that we can leave in hooks for future iterations of the story, but that our job is to tell is to tell a complete story for the people showing up to watch that movie. We’ve been doing this for a while so we always know to leave in things. A lot of times we’ll put things in that don’t get paid off for – in case of Red Vs. Blue – four or five years. And if you never pay them off, people never know there was this entry point back to the first episode.

In the case of Lazer Team, we’ve got some elements in there that I would love to build out in sequels of that movie, but for Red Vs. Blue, we try to treat every individual season as a complete story. You would get them achieving a goal, overcoming some conflict, you would have all of that, but there would still be enough to compel you to come back and watch the following season.

Though, I have to say, this season has been an anomaly because this is our anthology season where we’ve had a number of different writers from different mediums contribute Red Vs. Blue stories. Ernie Cline, who wrote Ready Player One did one. Chris Roberson, the creator of iZombie, did one. So it’s been a really fun season this year.  

I’ve dabbled in crowdfunding. My first webseries tried to raise ten thousand dollars and only raised five. Lazer Team raised over two million. What did we do wrong?

[Laughs.] Well, I have to say, having a global, ravenous fan base definitely worked in our favor in that regard. We were well known for one thing and we reached out to our audience and said, “Hey, you know us for this, hopefully you love us for this, and we want to do something you haven’t seen before, something big and awesome and we need your help to do it and we want to make you a part of it.” And they really answered that call.

I don’t know, crowdfunding is a tough thing. I know a lot of filmmakers don’t like to do crowdfunding because they feel it puts a very public number on their movie, either good or bad, and that comes with a lot of added pressure. At the same time, I’m very grateful to our audience for making Lazer Team possible and making the record-breaking campaign such a huge part of our story.

See, I told my creative partners that we should have a global audience first before crowdfunding. We definitely messed up on that.

You guys just did it out of order. [Laughs.]

The release of the movie was also unique. Would you release another movie the same way?

We try to be two things: we try to be format-agnostic, which means when we set out to make a project, we don’t really say what it’s for. During the crowdfunding campaign for Lazer Team, people asked: “Will this be a theatrical movie?” And I said, “As quickly as media is changing right now, I can’t tell you how people will be watching movies twelve or eighteen months from now when we get this thing done. There’s just almost no way to predict that. So we’ll just do it for whatever format makes the most sense at that point in time.”

But I wouldn’t say that when we sit down to develop a project, we’re not writing something for television or we’re not writing something for the web, we just release it in whatever format is appropriate.

The other part of that equation is that we try to be fearless as well. There were not a lot of people doing crowd-sourced theatrical screenings, so when we partnered with Tugg to bring the movies to theaters in the U.S., the U.K., in Australia, it was another roll of the dice.

It was one of those things where we were reaching out to people all over the world and said, “You know the story behind how we made this thing, now come see the movie” and, once again, people were ready for that.  

When you’re working on a project, and you know what the story is, do you start with an outline? Do you have a premise and a bunch of jokes in mind for it or start with an idea and add jokes in?

You have to have those things when you’re working as a team. You have to have an outlines, you have to have structure. When you’re a solo writer, and I have been for a big part of my career, you can get by on what I call rock-tumbling, where you take the idea and put it in your head and you roll it around for a few weeks or, if you’re lucky enough, a few months and polish that idea up in your head and then the act of writing is really just typing out what’s already in your head.

But when you’re working on a team, you have to have structure. In some cases, concept art is huge help to a lot of people, a bible – if you’re heading somewhere big with a franchise – to make sure you’re putting the right things in play.

One of the things I always talk about with writers is when you’re writing for sci-fi, people always want to say numbers. Numbers are very concrete. Like a guy wakes up and says, “I can’t believe I slept for three months.”

Unless there is a compelling reason to specifically say “three months” and there’s a justification for it, all that does is cause people to look at that number, analyze why it took three months to travel from Jupiter to Saturn, how long would that take, and then if anything else needs to be built in to the narrative as a flashback, you’re beholden to this number that you put out there for really no reason. That’s one of my pet peeves!

What do you think it takes to write a really good webseries episode? What are the components that you need in there?

The most important component is you have to write something that you want to watch. You can’t approach a webseries as being something that’s “I’m gonna write a project that other people want to see” or “There’s no alien invasion set in the Congo, so I’m going to make that.” Or “people really love these things, I’ll just go make another one of these things and an audience will show up.” The reason being is that online audiences are amazing in their ability to sniff out things that are not genuine and there’s a high rejection level when they see something that’s not genuine.

YouTube publishes a really scary stat that says that every minute that passes, four hundred hours of footage are being uploaded to YouTube. So that’s two-and-a-half weeks of content uploaded every minute. So during the course of this conversation, there’s been years of content that has been uploaded to YouTube.

It goes back to what we were talking about with the limitations of writing. The same thing applies to people who are watching content, which is: if they can watch anything – and in this environment on YouTube, if you can think of something, you could probably watch a video about it – so if you can watch anything, you can’t watch everything. If you tried to watch everything on YouTube, you’ll fall two-and-a-half weeks behind every minute.

So you have to pick and choose what you’re doing. People are going to choose things that speak to them and are genuine, and if you’re making something that you want to see, if you’re writing something that you want to get made, then you just have to have faith that there’s enough people like you that want to see it as well.

You once said, “The Internet demands progress, but the Internet hates change.” Do you still feel that way?

Oh, I absolutely do. Change is like a death knell on the Internet. You take even things like Facebook, when they change the way the algorithm works or how comments are displayed, people get furious.

The same applies to stories. If you make something that’s so different that people can’t identify with it, then that’s change, but if you can make that slow, steady progression over time, that’s really the sweet spot.

Because the other end of the spectrum is you just give people what they want all the time and then, eventually, they just don’t want that anymore. The opposite end of that spectrum is never changing and then you just become stale.

Or even worse, you service nostalgia, like you should be locked in time and continue to do things the way you always have because that’s the way the audience remembers you. You don’t want to be doing that for anybody. You want to be making content that people want to actually see.

So you got to find that sweet spot between changing too much and alienating your audience and not changing anything and looking stale. In the Facebook example, if you went back to Facebook and saw the way it was seven years ago, the way the UI was, you would say “this is an unusable site, this is horrible.” But every new feature, every change they made along the way, was at the expense at a huge outcry of the existing audience.

But all of those things, over time, made those platforms what they are today. And the same thing applies to stories.

Featured image: Burnie Burns as Hagan, Colton Dunn as Herman, Gavin Free as Woody and Michael Jones as Zach in Lazer Team. Photos courtesy of Rooster Teeth Productions. © 2016 Amplify Releasing

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