Techstuff Classic: Techstuff Talks to Rooster Teeth

tech Stuff. Chris Pallette and I got the opportunity to speak with Mr Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth Productions, and uh, I had been a huge fan of Rooster Teeth leading up to this interview, so my objectivity was probably at an all time low, but I thought it would be nice to revisit this classic episode, give you guys a chance to hear it in case you had not heard it back then, and I'll have more to say about

it toward the end, but for now, enjoy. So, guys, this is a very special episode of tech Stuff, something that we hope to do more of in the future. We've got a special interview lined up with Mr Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth Productions. They are the company that make Red versus Blue. So we've got the interview ready to go and we're going to insert it right here, We've got Bernie Burns on the line. Bernie is the founder of Rooster Teeth Productions, the producers of the popular

web series Red Versus Blue, among other things. Bernie, how are you. I'm doing find Jonathan, how are you doing? I am I'm okay. Chris, how are you doing? Great? Thanks for asking. You're welcome, Chris, and I want you to be left out. So Bernie, I wanted to talk

to you. Really, you're a pioneer in web content, especially when it comes to web videos and something beyond just the the one hit wonder web videos that that we're sort of the the earmark of internet video when it first started to take off, And I kind of wanted to talk to you about how you got into that and the development of Rooster Teeth produce actions over time,

and where you're at today. So to start, you were actually involved in creating content for the web before there was even a Rooster Teeth, right, that's right, I mean really back before video was even trually possible on the Internet. Um, I mean you can download a I think one of the first things video I was I ever downloaded from the net was the first episode of South Park or what became South Park, and that was ten minutes short that I think was eighty meigs and it was the

size of a postage stamp on the screen. But yeah, I started off writing for video game sites. I started writing off for writing for what we're called everything Nothing sites where they were sort of like blogs, but there were more articles. You know, A modern day equivalent would be almost like Slate or The Escapist, where their articles that are kind of thematic, but they could really be about anything. So what led you into starting the whole

red versus Blue video phenomen non. Well, I was a filmmaker and I live in Austin, Texas, and so in college I built a non linear editor video capture device that could capture. Back then it was VHS tapes, so we transfer film to VHS and then we would capture the VHS and edited online. So then after making a couple of movies with some friends in Austin, uh, they moved out to l A to start their entertainment careers.

I stayed in Austin because I had a very good tech job, and I was always just trying to find ways to make uh, you know, films or make short little videos. And I had all this equipment laying around, and I thought, well, why don't I just take some of these videos I'm producing and start putting them online. Forget a way to do that, and so started encoding them in quick time and dive x back then, and we'll just upload them to a site. And I did a few of those before I made the first episode

of Red Versus Blue and that immediately caught on. So for for our listeners who may not be familiar with Red Versus Blue, can you can you get sort of a bird's eye view of what the series is and and uh, you know the vehicle you use to create the series? Sure, So what we do in a nutshell, uh, is we use the video game Halo uh to produce short comedic cartoons essentially, um, and we use the graphics engine that's in Halo to do all of our animation.

And probably the best way to describe it for something for someone who's never seen anything like it before, it's almost like using the video game characters as virtual puppets. Um. You know, we're not doing animation cell by cell or you know, sitting down and plotting on all the character moves.

We're actually controlling them in real time. So it's a little bit like animation, and it's a little bit like live action shooting, and that we do takes, we do rehearsals, and the performance that you're seeing is actually a recorded live performance by someone controlling the character in real time. That's that's really a very clever way of creating films.

And of course we now call this mashinima, but back then that term probably wasn't very much in use at the time you guys were first getting into Red versus Blue, Right, Yeah, it's funny, we didn't know what it was called. We didn't know this was the movement that people were doing

this kind of thing. So we thought we were brilliant and we had been invented this new technique of shooting, and we were actually wondering what we're gonna call it, and uh, we we got a phone call from Paul Marino, who was the head of the Academy of Machinima, Arts and Sciencests in New York, and you know, they said they wanted us to come out and do a presentation about Reversus Blue, and um, there was an awards ceremony that they had been nominated for and yeah, that's how

we first found out about the word mishinima. Yeah, so and you said that you were It took off almost immediately. Was that like from episode one you immediately saw a real interest in this or did it take a few before it started looking like you really had a hit on your hands. No, it was pretty idiot. We put up the we put up the first episode and we along with it, we put up a p s A which was just the characters looking into the screen and talking and um, we were doing jokes about it. Was

it was so long ago as weapons of mass destruction. Uh, this was back in two thousand and three, very very timely at the time, was very very topical. Um and uh. We were linked. The first episode of the series was linked on farc and slash dot and Penny Arcade, and so it went from three thousand views the first day that we put up the episode to the next day we had about fifteen thousand views on it. By the

time we put out the second video. Quarter of a million people showed up the day of the first day to watch the second video. And Yeah, by the end of the month, we were up to about seven hundred and fifty thousand viewers a week within within four weeks. That's that's meteor. It was, it was, it was the biggest problem for us was figuring out how to get

it out there. Yeah, the bandwidth is shoes. Yeah, I mean we were we were paying tons of money to deliver it because I mean, I'm sure you remember back in the day, people would get banned with bills when they would put up, you know, things on servers and then get a popular site. Um, And so we were trying to figure out how to host what we're at the time pretty massive files. I mean these were, you know, seventy megabyte files people were downloading in you know, two

thousand and to two thousand and three. It was it was hard to figure out how to stir all that. And YouTube didn't exist at the time, so we couldn't just throw it up on YouTube and hope for the best, you know. I have I have a question, um about what's your recording schedule? Look like, I mean, how many of these how fast can you do one of these videos? And and about how long does it take to uh,

you know, from beginning to end. When you're talking about scripting and going through rehearsals and things like that how long does that take. Well, we're a lot faster than we used to be, just soon as we've been doing it for nine seasons that we're we're just going into season ten right now. But if you look at like a pick Star movie and the Machinima what we produced is not on the fidelity of of a picture movie. We do more custom animation now. But um, the big

thing about machiniam is how efficient it is. So a pictar movie might take a team of three to people the course of three years. Um, we can produce five minutes a week with about this is now just a glacting voice actors who you have to have a different actor for every character. But we can produce five minutes a week with about three people. Uh, and that'll take us about you know, thirty four hours to do that.

So every year we put out of a full feature on DVD and we can do that with production crew of anywhere between you know, three to five people. Now now that in later seasons we've been adding more custom animation just because of Sinima got more popular, we found we had to do more to stand out. And you know, like anything, it's like if it stays the same it'll it'll get stale. So we had to kind of evolved the series while it was in place, and so now

we have a much bigger team. Now we have a team of about twenty people that work on it, uh and they do a lot of custom animations, some really fun action scenes, fighting scenes, that kind of thing. So when you guys were first exploring motion capture, UH, when did you guys actually sit down and consciously make that decision? And was that a huge challenge? Was it that or what? Was it surprisingly easy compared to everything else he had been doing. Well, we we made one higher that made

it a lot easier, and that was Monty Home. I'm a big consumer of all things internet as well, so I'm always online, always like looking at you know, online video. I just I love it, and um, it's it's fun to spot people who are doing cool new stuff. And Montyon put up a video where he custom animated master Chief from Halo fighting Sammy's from Metroid and it was the models were okay, in the texture okay, but the animation was outrageously sophisticated and the choreography of what he

was doing. And so we can't acted him, and we tried to work with them like two or three years before we were finally able to hire him, and that was in season eight, and so we essentially built an animation pipeline. That's he's the centerpiece of it. We built it around him, essentially cool. Well, jumping back again back to the early days, about how long did it did it take before you realize that you actually had a

viable company on your hands? I mean, the show was a hit, but there's a big difference between something that ends up getting really viral on the internet and then turning that into something that can actually sustain itself as

a business. Did that happen right away as well? Well, I mean it came in the sense that we all of a sudden had these major expenses for That's what a great way to start a business, right Well, if you know, if there's a massive expense side of this, then they're they're they're theoretically should be some kind of revenue help service that I mean, there's there's obviously a demand for this, so if you sit the demand will

generate bills. Uh, we kind of see a little proactive and figure a way to generate some revenue from it, and um, you know, I think there's a big opinion that a common opinion. I should say that if you make something on the Internet and you get a ton of views, um, that the ad companies just show up like the ad trucks shows up in your driveway. It does. It doesn't work that way. Getting advertisers for content is very hard, and it's always been hard. It was never

it was never easy to do it on the internet. UM. And there's a lot of places that will abstract that for you now, a lot of a lot of video services that will do that for you. But it's a very difficult process, and so we had to go through and figure out a way to build a business model. UM. We actually built one that was based not on advertising,

and we reran on that for five years. UM. We just in merchandise, UM, premium memberships and DVD sales, and that's how we funded the company for the first five years. We never we never ran a single ad on anything. Uh. For the first round of the show actually rings me to the question about the sponsorship the premium memberships that you rant. I've been a fan of Red versus Blue

since season one. Well, I've been following it since season one, and so I'm familiar with the idea of you became a premium member and you would get access to certain videos. Sometimes you get access early, sometimes you get exclusive access, and also for the first few seasons, I remember, you would even get the DVD at the end of the season,

which our premium member. Yeah. Yeah, so, uh so clearly building a community was an important part of your business model as well, right, and we built a community site to that. We knew that eventually the popularity of the show would wane, or at the very least that people watching the show, you know, the individuals would you know,

say well, I can't watch something for you know, ten years. Um, you know, people just naturally fall out, and so we wanted to have something in place to hold people as like our portion of the Internet, so the Peple would always know where they can find us. And when we put new things out, it would be great to be able to show it to people, to get that initial

seed of a of a new project. And that's that was probably one of the smartest things we did, was making sure that we carved out our own portion of the Internet. Yeah, it's it's still a very popular portal. I mean, if people want to go and check out the you have several different your l's that all lead into this kind of uh hub really of all the different products Rooster Teeth does, because it's not just Red Versus Blue, although we'll get into that in a little bit.

I did have another question about the tone of Red Versus Blue and the early seasons the Blood Gulch Chronicles in particular, which is the first five seasons of Red Versus Blue. Uh, it was it was almost exclusively comedic, and then you began to experiment by inserting some more dramatic elements into the storyline, sometimes with uh tertiary characters who were not playing directly with your main cast. What time,

at what point did you decide to do that? Was that something you had wanted to do from the big getting or as you were going, were you thinking, hey, you know what, we could actually try something new here and try and do almost like an action movie type script parallel to the comedic stuff we're doing on this other side. Yeah, So it was essentially when it first started, essentially, like somebody described it as stripes in Space, which I think is a great way to describe it. It's just

just it's very lighthearted. It's a it's a military comedy which which focuses on a lot of bureaucracy humor, which I think crosses over a lot of industries, not just you know, the military, but also business and school and everything else. UM. I was always as a as a writer, I was always writing though background threads so that the story could stay consistent. If you base it in a universe, you know, then it seems more honest. And I was

doing all of that. And when we got towards the end of the fifth season, UM, I was talking with people about stories in the background that we're going that audience members had picked up on. But I had this whole fleshed out uh universe kind of behind the scenes, and I was talking with somebody here about it, and I strive it all. Was writing on the white board about all these things, and they said, maybe you should show this to the audience, you know, I mean, maybe

you should, Maybe you should put this out there. And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe we should. It's it's it's interesting to us. And you know, our philosophy here is, um if we make things that we like, we just have faith that there's enough people on the internet that are like us that they'll like it too. So yeah, it's just a natural evolution. Like I said, it's you know, we started off the very first episode of the very first season saying, all these guys, do

we stand around and talk? That's what they were doing last week. That's what let't me doing five minutes from now and for five seasons. You know, it's it works very well standing around and talking, but you really do run the risk of becoming sale five years on the internet is is like a it's like a glacier, you know, it's it's like an eon. It seems like, um, so

that's the rise and fall of my space. Yeah, yeah, and you know we talked about that to you, like the when I was talking earlier about the carving out your own space on the internet. It's like a lot of people that today, you know, they don't do that. There's a big opinion that the the web is dead and that you should just go all in on Facebook or all in on YouTube or what you know, whatever the darling uh site of the moment happens to be. But I mean, we've been doing this for so long.

I remember when if we just spend all of our time building up our Facebook or assuming are MySpace friends in two thousand three and two thousand four, we would I think, you know, um, you know, we're dealing with rever or something like that. You know, it's just it's it's it's Twitter, Twitter follower accounts, and you know, Facebook like seemed very important right now, but five years from now they probably won't seem all that important. You have.

The biggest shifts that I see right now are really more platform shifts. So it's more like the emphasis now is on mobile as opposed to the desktop and laptop models, which that makes more sense. I mean, that's an access thing, not a not a you know, this is the particular website that's in vogue right now. Well, oh no, go ahead, I'm sorry. No, it's crazy. It's crazy how much mobile has taken off. I mean, it's just it's just insane. Yes, yeah, we we talk about that all the time here at

how Stuff works as well. I mean, it's it's completely changed the way that we create certain types of content. Because there are some kinds that are perfect for the mobile platform, and that's just people love them. There are other types that just don't quite fit as well. It's a real challenge to try and find the balance there. Fortunately, I think web video is one of those that it transcends the platform you don't have, you don't have to

worry about that as much. UM. Let me ask you also about some of the tricks you guys did working within the confines of a video game universe and actually

within the actual physics engine of the video game itself. Uh, watching some of the behind the scenes stuff, I love the idea that you guys got really creative were the ways you shot the series, especially early on when there weren't as many tools for you to use, tools that I think have been built into games like Halo because of the work you've done when they didn't exist back then.

You found really creative ways of getting around it. The one I think of off the top of my head is using a tank as a crane for crane shots, right. I mean that's goes back to how it's a lot like live action. It's like, we want to get a shot where we raised up, how do we do how do we do that? Um? There wasn't any ability within the retail game to raise the camera above eye level. I mean the entire first three seasons of the show. You're seeing the entire show through another character's eyes that

never appeared on screen. It's it's literally a camera man um. And so we would walk him around in order to set up shots and to meet a camera. And so we thought, well, how can we do this? I thought, why don't we just put him on the end of the barrel of the tank. Can just slowly raise the tank barrel up, and sure enough, that allowed us to get a crane shot with it. Likewise, we would put people on the tops of banshees and fly them around if we wanted to get a really high view of

the cannon or something like that. Yeah, we had to be really creative. In a later season, one of the things we would also just employ like some of the oldest trips that there are in filmmaking. Um, we had a character, a baby alien, so we need a small alien. Well, you can't shrink a character in the game, so we would just do forced perspective where we would set the alien far back in the shot and because there's no

depth of field in the game, it's an infinite focus. Um, we would just set up the scene so that one character is really far away and they just happened to look a lot smaller, and it worked perfectly. I mean it it's it's the illusion was great. It's see you know, just like old things that used to do back in the days when they would you know, shoot King Kong and voyage the Moon. I imagine getting eyelines in this series is a bit of a challenge. It definitely is.

I mean there's nothing in the game where it's like everyone looks in the same direction, you know, And so we're we're probably the best people in the world at playing Halo in a very specific way. Like ever, if you ever point us in a matchmaking game where all the players on the team have to look in the same direction or all run in the same line while looking at their feet, we would we would kill at that. So so yeah, if we ever created Days of our

Lives game within Halo, you guys will rock it. Yes, we would be the dramatic reaction team. Well, let's talk about some of the other content that Rister Teeth produces. I mean, Red versus Blue is probably what got you guys on the map for most people, but you do a lot of other, uh things as well, including some live action stuff. When did you guys decide to start producing live action shorts. Well that's our that's our background is live action. And I mean we start off like

I made a feature film. In college. I was a computer science student, but I want to learn how to uh make films because that's from premedic computer science and

surprisingly not a lot of stuff transferred. So I had a bunch of I have like organic chemistry as a as an elective on my transcript um and so I had a bunch of hours on campus where I was trying to kill time, and I found the student run TV station down there, t STV, and started meeting film students and wanting to get involved in video editing in film production. But I did not want to go and

sit through um film classes. So I thought, you know what, Robert Darriguez just made El Mariachi at ut I went to the University of Texas. He made elm Actually just a few years ago, there was this idea that you could just make an independent movie and set the world on fire. So I thought, why don't I just make a feature film, uh, you know, spend ten thousand dollars doing that as opposed to spending it in a classroom, and then I'll probably know everything I need to know

about filmmaking by the time it's over. Well, that took about eighteen months to get that done. You know, we we actually did shoot a feature on film on sixteen millimeter film. That was a long process, but uh yeah, that's that's just how I got involved with it. And I uh, um, you know it was it was worked out pretty well. I mean, you know, I own a production company and I don't have a degree in in

any kind of entertainment. I have a computer science degree that just hangs on my wall and I never use Chris and I have more to say with Mr Burning Burns of rooster Teeth, But before we do, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So, who are the writers on your on your staff? I know you write red versus blue, right, Yes, that's right, I write versus blue. Uh. And you know the actors add a

ton when they get in the booth. Uh. All the actors know their characters so well now that they you know, sometimes I'll just like have blanks that they can fill in for ad libs, you know, where they add a lot in as well. Uh. And then we have a team of writers upstairs, um that work on our shorts,

and that's a that's a very collaborative effort. Um. They have a whole team like a writing room where they go in and pitch ideas and then they take them away and then come back with scripts and trade them off in new drafts. It's a it's a very fun process. Cool. Well, and we're pretty familiar with the writing process around here too. It's not not this similar, although we of course write

articles and not not not scripts. But tell me about the Immersion series, which kind of married this video game and and live action short thing into an increasingly hilarious series of misadventures. Well, that was kind of fun. That was had this idea that we could take things from video games and test them in real life. And I had the idea for a while and eventually I said, you know what, I should make one of these because someone else is going to do this if we don't.

And that's a big thing on the internet. Man. It seems like by the time you think of an idea, you should go look it up because somebody's probably already done it, you know, if things move that fast. And so this this idea, this probably gives you a good example of what the whole series was about when you play a Grand Theft auto game or one of those open world urban environment games, when you drive a car,

you drive from a third person perspective. Your your view of the car is behind the car, and that's not the way you drive a car in the real world. So we thought, okay, let's try that. Let's set up a car in real life that is a third person perspective. So we blacked out the windshield safety first uh and blackout the entire cockpit, and then suspended a camera on a rig behind the vehicle and then ran that down to a monitor that was on the dashboard of the car.

So you're in the car, driving it through a course and you're looking at the car from behind, your views from behind the car. And we shot that episode. It took us about six hours to shoot the pilot um to the driving part of it, and then we spent another four hours out there afterwards because everyone in the crew want to drive the car, which we had a

blast doing it. It It was great. It reminds me there's a guy there was a It was more of an art project than anything else, but there was a guy who an MMO suit that did a sort of the same thing, but it was just a it was just a person in a in a suit where you have a helmet that has a monitor built into it. There's a rig that's uh that warned like a backpack that suspends the camera above and behind to give that that

MMO view of a character running around the world. So the only view you had of yourself was as a third person. And of course they added spikes on the helmet to give it that authentic MMO feel. And apparently anyone who put this on would first spend the first half hour struggling to interact with the world in a way that wasn't going to feel like it was going to kill them because it was so weird to be

have an out of body experience like that. And then the next half hour was spent stomping around and swinging your arms around because you look like the incredible Hulk. So yeah, walk up to people and ask them for quests, right exactly, Yes, Yeah, that was yeah. No, there there are people who are still in therapy because of that.

Are project. So if we did a funnel one like that where we tested what it would be like to be in a side scrolling environment where we had a wireless rig that we can send a video signal to to goggles that the person would wear, and we shot them from a ninety degree angle directly from their side. And so we had like a Mario course that these guys had to navigate while only being able to see themselves from the side. So what short straw that Gus and Jeff draw that they have to be in all

of these They drew the academic short straw. They should have just been better in school and they would have better career opportunities and they wouldn't have to be subjected to all this terrible stuff. We we we got to the point whe we were torturing them. I think, I mean we we did this one thing where we tested video game foods. You know, when you're playing a video game and your character is hurt, if he eats a steak,

then he immediately feels better. I don't know what they think the healing properties of food are in video games. So we took him out. We did tell them this. We took him out drinking until two in the morning and to celebrate something. It was all a ruse. And then the next day we showed up in the production

crew at their house at five in the morning. They just I mean they literally just gone to bed so they would woke up and they were just miserable, and we just do like fed him food for about an hour and a half, big hams and pizzas and strawberries. Everything you see in a game that is supposed to cure you. And let's put it this way, it did not cure them. Gess. To learn more, visit the Rooster Teeth's website and you can watch all of these or get the DVDs if you want to be able to

have them for posterity's sake. Uh well, let's also talk. There's another another project, Achievement Hunter, which is again hosted by Rooster Teeth, which is all about achievements on Xbox three sixty games, although you guys also cover other games occasionally as well. Right, yes, we cover It's the achievement focus does seem to make it seems although achievements are

bleeding into bobile games and Steam games as well. Um, it does seem to think it's like a three sixty um site, but no, they cover all different games like they've been covering a lot of the Star Wars Old Republic MMO lately. But it's just it's a celebration of video game culture, which which we love. We love online culture and video game culture, and we're actually had holding a convention uh in Austin this year rt X, which is the intersection of gaming and online culture. But schieven

Hunter has been a huge, huge success. Um, it's just been It's something that you know, we kind of kicked around for a while of you know, recording actual gameplay from our footage from gameplay video games and then commenting on it. And uh we Jeff Ramsey, who plays Griffin our Reverend Blue series, he ended up, he hited up the project and he has just been. Man, it's been an enormous thing. We're about to hit uh one billion total views on YouTube across all of our videos and achievement.

Hunter has been a huge part of that. That is incredible. And I also should have ad the the successive Rooster Teeth has been truly phenomenal and that your effects. You know, you guys talk about how you have absorbed video game culture, but you've also become part of it. I mean you several people from Rooster Teeth have been featured in games as voiceover talent and other things. Can you talk a

little bit about some of those. You know, we actually are trying to go through and compile a list of the places where Rischarchie's has been referenced to Rivers Blue has been referenced um, just in most recently. Um, there's a there's a reference in the World Warcraft expansion where there's a I forget the name of the thing, but it's essentially like a parody of Blood Gulch, And there's a character in there that's based on griff um Uh in there. And then we just did a like a commentary,

a bonus commentary for gun Stringer Twisted Pixel. And then we always it's funny things. We always send up been achievements, references and achievements, Like there's a lot of Red versus Blue referential achievements. Um, there's Wanting Gears of War. Um, there's a dishwasher, Samurai dishwasher. They just put out a new version of the game that has the Caboose is Achievable system as part of the game. And the coolest things ever is that we got to be voices in

Halo three. I mean that was that was an honor to actually participate in the game that we're obviously such huge fans in and that's that's pretty incredible. It's like a full circle right there. Well, when we started Reversus Blue me when you have your you know, your initial meetings and you know you're talking about, well, what's the

coolest thing that could happen? I mean, we thought the coolest thing that could happen, by far was that we somehow get referenced in an actual Halo video game or like some kind of east Rin because Bungee has always pretty put east Rings in their games. And getting getting to play marines and contribute, you know, contribute our voices

to the game. That was just it was nuts. Yeah, it's fantastic that that that turned out that way, especially that Bungee ended up being such fans of your work, because if they had gone another way, especially when we see things like on tech stuff, we talked about a lot of stuff like uh, intellectual property and patent wars and about this sort of litigious side to a lot of companies. Uh, it could have gone a totally different way.

It could have been that one episode went up and then you've got to cease and desist and then no more opportunity. So I'm so glad that this was a case where a company said, no, they're they're adding benefit to what we do. We enjoy their work. We want to see them succeed. Well, I mean, I think that would be what you're saying about the episode going up and then it gets pulled out. I think a lot

of people say that is the expectation of what would happen. Um, And certainly that was in our minds as we were doing it. And UM, you know, I can't speak for them, you know, why they made the decisions they made, but I mean, you know, Microsoft took a look at it and said, you know, here's something that's innovative and creative, and let's see what happens, you know. And that's that was the attitude they took, like, let's let's just go

forward and see where this goes. And I met with them and told them, you know, here's the plans for what I want to do with it. More importantly, here's what we're not trying to do. Um, you know, we're just trying to have some fun and do something and we're huge fans of Halo, and um, you know, let's see what happened turned into a three relationship and has

now turned into a tenny relationships. So I can't. I cannot say enough good things about the risk that Microsoft took on us and how much that is mentor business, because they have been very open and and very cool, fantastic. Well, I I have just two more questions. Here's the second to last one. This was one that was suggested by a follower of mine on Twitter. Um, how frequently are you mistaken as the guy who does the voice for Caboose?

All all? It's so insulting. It's uh, yeah, Caboose is easily our most popular character, and uh, you know, it's uh whenever we go to conventions, it's, oh, here's Vernie. He plays the Uh he's the writer and director and created a show and plays the lead character because I write it. Of course I make myself lead character and like, hey,

that's great. Where's Caboose? Yeah? And often it's like, it's not so much getting mistaken for Caboose, it's the it's the raw disappointment that you see in people's faces when they realize that you're not Caboose. That's when you had the gut check as an artist. I um no, I I can sort of identify with that because a couple of years ago, not so much now, but a couple of years ago, I bore a passing resemblance to Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters. I can see that now, you say that, Yeah,

I can see that. So yeah, I have different glasses now. The glasses apparently are what made it. But I had two people within the span of a week make that that comment to me. And Dragon Con, which some Rooster Chief people have been to in the past. But Dragon Con here in Atlanta was hosting several members of the build team from MythBusters as guests, and so I thought, oh, this will be fun. I'll go and buy a military beret, I'll wear an Oxford shirt, and I'll just show up

as Jamie. I'm clearly I'm clearly not Jamie, but that's gonna be my costume. And um. Then I discovered the joy and and and heartbreak of revealing to people that I was not actually Jamie from MythBusters and see that moment of realization where they're their joy turned to disappointment. I actually disappointed an entire battalion of the first Stormtrooper Brigade that was you never want to pist off armored people with gunn no no, But it is funny to

watch them all like deflate. At the same time, it kind of made you feel like what it would have been like to be on Coruscant when they revealed that the Death Star had exploded. Yeah, guys, all right, you know we had a good run. Um, so here's my last one. Are there any other projects that you're working on that you would like to talk about. We've talked about the live action stuff and Red Versus Blue and rt X. Is there anything specific you would like to

to mention to our listeners. Well, yeah, it's a crazy thing. Um, it's it's it's pretty irreverent. Uh, it's a lot different tone than this interview even. But our podcast on that that's on iTunes is the Roster Chief podcast is actually turned into one of our biggest it um and I

just love making it. We just talked about we just get on Mike and talk for an hour about you know, what's going on, you know with video games, what's going on with online culture, what's going on you know in curt events, and you know, and our interpretation of it, which is basically our misunderstanding of it all. Uh, and it's just fun. It's just you know, working at Rooster Teeth. It's it's a bunch of friends working together and so um, it's fun to get on there for an hour and

just jaw with your buddies and um. You know, we're working on some ways to punch up the podcast and maybe change the way we delivered a little bit. Um. But we're really looking forward to this year to growing the podcast and also bringing people out to Austin July seventh and eighth for r t X, which is our convention here. We're really excited about that. Fantastic And yes,

I am also a fan of your podcast. And I should mention that both the Rooster Teeth podcast and Tech Stuff we're mentioned as the rewind best of two thousand eleven on iTunes. Yeah, so we've got we've got that in common going for us. Yeah. The show that you guys do is is incredibly hilarious, especially if you can get one of the more clueless members of Rooster teach

on like or or you know, or just Joel. If Joel's on there and and all you have to do is say one thing and you realize that he's gone off on a completely different tangent and he's really angry about it for no apparent reason. For no apparent reason, now you can see why he plays the voice of cabouse. Yes. Before we hear the rest of the interview with Mr Bernie Burns, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Well, Bernie, this has been a great time. It's it's been one

of those things I've always wanted to do. I've, like I said, I've been a fan of the show from season one and I'm glad we had this opportunity. And we did do an episode on tech stuff about Mishinima. Uh oh, I guess that was one of our first episodes. We're coming up on episode four hundred before too long, so yeah, yeah, people are still listening. So this was really and we we talked a lot about Red Versus Blue in our MISSIONEMA podcast, so this was really a

thrill for me. Thank you so much for joining us, and we really do appreciate it. Guys, if you have not checked out Rooster Teeth, I do recommend you go and look at their stuff, watch some Red Verses Blue, watch some of their live action and uh and really pay attention because these guys have found a way before almost anyone else did to make new media work in a sustainable way and build a business out of it.

And that that, to me, is probably the best story out of all of this, is that not only do you guys create great content, but you found a way to make that, you know, pay for itself and and to actually keep it going over time and not just be Wow. That was incredible. I just wish they could have found a way to make it work. Yeah, you make it sounds so legitimate. I'm gonna record that and play back at dinner parties. All right, you have my

permission to do that. That's fine, especially if you if you if you subscribe to text stuff, that would that would help us out, because you know, every listener counts. You got it all right? Awesome, Thank you so much, Bernie, Thank you very much. Out of I appreciated after having done that episode on Machinema a while back. It was nice to have the perspective of somebody who's really involved with it. Yeah, someone who's actually gone through and done it.

It was that was a real thrill for me as well, just to hear about, you know, experimenting with this new form of media. Yeah, that's also very exciting. So guys, we're hoping we can do more of these, right, Yeah, I was. I was really surprised. I just want to say, I was really surprised by how similar it was to live action in some respects. Um, you know, of course they have to use tricks, or had to use tricks, especially in the beginning, but I was, I was surprised

lining up shots and things like that. Yeah, this stuff that you want to think about when you're playing a video game, like, oh yeah, we totally could tell a story like this. Well, if you don't have that that background where you know how to line up shots and you know the importance of that kind of composition, then you might make something that's amusing, but you're not necessarily going to make something that's that's going to last a

long time. But these guys had not just the writing talent, but also the the technical talent to create a compelling looking shot using, let's be honest, very limited tools. I mean, the video game is not designed to give you a

lot of flexibility, So hats off to them. And of course now a lot of those tools have been built into those video games so that you can have a free floating camera that has no limitations and you can put it anywhere you want, which now you've got more options than any any live action director would have without the use of of c g I. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff, and thanks once again to Mr Bernie Burns for agreeing to be

our experimental guinea pig test subject with the first ever interview on text Stuff. It was intimidating to speak with him. I had such a huge fan of his I've had the chance to meet him a couple of times since then. He's always been incredibly gracious and Rooster Teeth continues to

make really interesting content, both in comedy and in other fields. Uh. They now encompass multiple companies that have been making online content for quite some time, and it ranges from the scripted comedies of things like Red Versus Blue, and then there's the anime series Ruby, which has become a real phenomenon for Rooster Teeth, and then they have their unscripted stuff like Achievement Hunter, their various podcasts. So they're really a an online entertainment empire at this point. So if

you're not familiar with them, check them out. They probably make something that you like and maybe one of their lesser known series, or maybe you'll end up ending, you know, watching the exact same stuff I watched week after week. I'm still a fan years later, So guys, thanks so much for listening. If you have any suggestions for episodes of tech Stuff, send them in my way. Use the email address tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,

or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those Text Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works dot com