By the time the Xbox 360 released in 2005, Red vs Blue was well established in the Halo community, and even recognised by Halo developer Bungie, giving Rooster Teeth new tools to improve the series as it was growing over the first five seasons. The Blood Gulch Chronicles may have wrapped itself up in 2007, but popularity for the web show was growing year on year and Rooster Teeth themselves had expanded exponentially in that time to become a fully-fledged web content creation studio with multiple teams handling different projects both animated and live action. With Bungie releasing Halo 3 in 2007, Red vs Blue fans were eager to see Rooster Teeth make the jump to the new game and use its wealth of creation tools to take the show to new heights. But I don’t think anyone was quite prepared for just how much the show would change over the next three seasons. Season Six, Reconstruction; Season Seven, Recreation; and Season Eight, Revelation; known collectively as The Recollection.
A creature known as the Meta is collecting A.I and has come to the attention of Agent Washington (Shannon McKormick), who is tasked with recovering A.I for the Director (John Marshall Reed) of Project Freelancer.
Washington enlists the help of the Reds and Blues from Blood Gulch because of their experience with the Omega A.I and their affiliation with Agent Texas (Kathleen Zuelch), a decision he quickly regrets. But as Church (Burnie Burns) learns more about Project Freelancer and the A.I Washington is searching for; he learns that his memories are the key to everything.
A creature known as the Meta is collecting A.I and has come to the attention of Agent Washington (Shannon McKormick), who is tasked with recovering A.I for the Director (John Marshall Reed) of Project Freelancer.
Washington enlists the help of the Reds and Blues from Blood Gulch because of their experience with the Omega A.I and their affiliation with Agent Texas (Kathleen Zuelch), a decision he quickly regrets. But as Church (Burnie Burns) learns more about Project Freelancer and the A.I Washington is searching for; he learns that his memories are the key to everything.
Whilst The Blood Gulch Chronicles were good, it’s impossible to deny that The Recollection is better in almost every conceivable way.
Starting off with the story, the quality of writing here is leaps and bounds better than what was seen in The Blood Gulch Chronicles. Whilst those seasons did attempt a grandiose tale of time travel, military experiments, artificial intelligence, and alien cults, it could often become a bit of a muddled mess as to what was actually going on and why it was important.
The Recollection meanwhile takes a couple of aspects from that story and expands on them massively. Who are the freelancers and what is their purpose; and what is the true purpose of the A.I assigned to each freelancer?
The story goes to some crazy places and is often considerably more dramatic in its delivery. Whilst The Blood Gulch Chronicles feels like it was written by a bunch of drunk gamer nerds with no budget and mostly for laughs, The Recollection has genuine emotional highs and lows, three dimensional characters, and actual stakes. Yet, despite all this, it never loses sight of what made the show popular in the first place which is the dumb humour. It balances these two different tones surprisingly well, often within the same scene.
Reconstruction places Washington firmly in the leading man role and I think that’s a wise decision. It allows this first season to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the backstory setup, and because Washington isn’t a moron it allows for him to direct the flow of the narrative in a more focused manner. In fact, I think Reconstruction has the best story of the three seasons because of the way it paces itself, and how it spends most of its runtime reuniting the Blood Gulch soldiers after they have been split up.
Recreation is the weakest of the three seasons, and I think that it suffers from middle child syndrome. Most of its runtime is either dedicated to trying to explain Tucker’s (Jason Saldana) absence from Reconstruction or setting up the events of Revelation. It never gets its own moment to shine, and it really suffers as a result.
Then Revelation tries to tie a neat bow on all the loose ends which it does in a really satisfying way. In fact, Revelation could act as the perfect get-out point for the show as the quality from here on out is definitely mixed to say the least, and it does feel reasonably final.
Starting off with the story, the quality of writing here is leaps and bounds better than what was seen in The Blood Gulch Chronicles. Whilst those seasons did attempt a grandiose tale of time travel, military experiments, artificial intelligence, and alien cults, it could often become a bit of a muddled mess as to what was actually going on and why it was important.
The Recollection meanwhile takes a couple of aspects from that story and expands on them massively. Who are the freelancers and what is their purpose; and what is the true purpose of the A.I assigned to each freelancer?
The story goes to some crazy places and is often considerably more dramatic in its delivery. Whilst The Blood Gulch Chronicles feels like it was written by a bunch of drunk gamer nerds with no budget and mostly for laughs, The Recollection has genuine emotional highs and lows, three dimensional characters, and actual stakes. Yet, despite all this, it never loses sight of what made the show popular in the first place which is the dumb humour. It balances these two different tones surprisingly well, often within the same scene.
Reconstruction places Washington firmly in the leading man role and I think that’s a wise decision. It allows this first season to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the backstory setup, and because Washington isn’t a moron it allows for him to direct the flow of the narrative in a more focused manner. In fact, I think Reconstruction has the best story of the three seasons because of the way it paces itself, and how it spends most of its runtime reuniting the Blood Gulch soldiers after they have been split up.
Recreation is the weakest of the three seasons, and I think that it suffers from middle child syndrome. Most of its runtime is either dedicated to trying to explain Tucker’s (Jason Saldana) absence from Reconstruction or setting up the events of Revelation. It never gets its own moment to shine, and it really suffers as a result.
Then Revelation tries to tie a neat bow on all the loose ends which it does in a really satisfying way. In fact, Revelation could act as the perfect get-out point for the show as the quality from here on out is definitely mixed to say the least, and it does feel reasonably final.
I think the most immediate takeaway from The Recollection over The Blood Gulch Chronicles is the massively improved production design, and that largely comes down to the jump to Halo 3.
Where The Blood Gulch Chronicles was limited by Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2’s custom match presets and map designs, The Recollection takes advantage of Halo 3’a custom map editor ‘Forge’, allowing maps and items to be tweaked to how Rooster Teeth needed them. If they needed a tank in a level that wouldn’t normally have one, they could do that. If they wanted to rearrange some of the geometry to make it suit their needs, then they could. But perhaps the biggest improvement is in the way it’s shot.
The Blood Gulch Chronicles relied on the camera being a soldier, so it could only move along the ground, and required some nifty perspective tricks to pull off some of the more complicated shots. The Recollection meanwhile has ‘the Monitor’. The Forge mode character model that can fly around the map, meaning that the animators could be so much more creative with shot composition.
This alongside the inclusion of a moodier original score for the more dramatic moments make The Recollection look and sound a million times better than what was possible with The Blood Gulch Chronicles.
But there’s also something else exclusive to Revelation that changed Red vs Blue as a show completely, which depending on who you ask is either the best thing that ever happened to the show, or the worst.
Revelation includes a number of 3D computer animated sequences that use the Halo 3 art assets in conjunction with motion capture technology. It means that for Revelation’s big action sequences these were choreographed and shot using motion capture on a green screen, and then the Halo 3 art assets were composed on top of this. Is it still Machinima is sometimes the question posed by purists? But whatever it is, it’s glorious to witness. The first time I saw the Reds crash through the Valhalla wall and fight the Meta near the start of Revelation I was blown away, and the animators have crafted some really incredible action sequences with it, such as the now iconic Reds & Tucker vs Tex scene.
It certainly has its limitations, and can at times look like one of the Barbie animated films, but when used sparingly for action sequences like it is in Revelation I feel it adds more than it takes away.
The Blood Gulch Chronicles put Machinima on the map and made Rooster Teeth one of the biggest names in online video content before YouTube even existed. The Recollection is where Rooster Teeth started to take the show seriously and show the true depth of their writing and animation capabilities. It’s still got dick jokes, but now it’s got an actual heart and soul to it too.
For some, this was the last great outing for the Reds and Blues of Blood Gulch, as the future projects either strayed too far away from the shows roots that it lost its identity or clung so tightly to them that it felt like it was living in its own shadow. The Recollection was the perfect balance of everything to meaningfully move the show forward without forgetting what made it so popular in the first place.
Where The Blood Gulch Chronicles was limited by Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2’s custom match presets and map designs, The Recollection takes advantage of Halo 3’a custom map editor ‘Forge’, allowing maps and items to be tweaked to how Rooster Teeth needed them. If they needed a tank in a level that wouldn’t normally have one, they could do that. If they wanted to rearrange some of the geometry to make it suit their needs, then they could. But perhaps the biggest improvement is in the way it’s shot.
The Blood Gulch Chronicles relied on the camera being a soldier, so it could only move along the ground, and required some nifty perspective tricks to pull off some of the more complicated shots. The Recollection meanwhile has ‘the Monitor’. The Forge mode character model that can fly around the map, meaning that the animators could be so much more creative with shot composition.
This alongside the inclusion of a moodier original score for the more dramatic moments make The Recollection look and sound a million times better than what was possible with The Blood Gulch Chronicles.
But there’s also something else exclusive to Revelation that changed Red vs Blue as a show completely, which depending on who you ask is either the best thing that ever happened to the show, or the worst.
Revelation includes a number of 3D computer animated sequences that use the Halo 3 art assets in conjunction with motion capture technology. It means that for Revelation’s big action sequences these were choreographed and shot using motion capture on a green screen, and then the Halo 3 art assets were composed on top of this. Is it still Machinima is sometimes the question posed by purists? But whatever it is, it’s glorious to witness. The first time I saw the Reds crash through the Valhalla wall and fight the Meta near the start of Revelation I was blown away, and the animators have crafted some really incredible action sequences with it, such as the now iconic Reds & Tucker vs Tex scene.
It certainly has its limitations, and can at times look like one of the Barbie animated films, but when used sparingly for action sequences like it is in Revelation I feel it adds more than it takes away.
The Blood Gulch Chronicles put Machinima on the map and made Rooster Teeth one of the biggest names in online video content before YouTube even existed. The Recollection is where Rooster Teeth started to take the show seriously and show the true depth of their writing and animation capabilities. It’s still got dick jokes, but now it’s got an actual heart and soul to it too.
For some, this was the last great outing for the Reds and Blues of Blood Gulch, as the future projects either strayed too far away from the shows roots that it lost its identity or clung so tightly to them that it felt like it was living in its own shadow. The Recollection was the perfect balance of everything to meaningfully move the show forward without forgetting what made it so popular in the first place.