Rooster Teeth definitely had some troubled shoots under their belts during their twenty-one years of existence.
- Rooster Teeth's Animation division was rife with mismanagement across the board, which many former staffers blamed on a nepotistic work culture where staff were given management positions based more on friendships than work earned. It had been an open secret for years that staff were forced to work grueling hours, with the news breaking in earnest in 2019. Following a testimony from Kdin Jenzen in October 2022, dozens of accounts came out confirming that working for Rooster Teeth was often a miserable experience fraught with low pay, forced overtime, and inhumane working conditions.
- Working conditions on the animation set were so poor that one staffer, Kim Newman, suffered a severe back injury from doing motion capture
and was unable to file for workers compensation due to being forced to work a twelve-hour day that meant she missed the window to file. - Ian Kedword, a former lead animator, said this about the culture at the company that prevented people from speaking out before 2019:Also, something that came up when the Glassdoor reviews came out was people asking about why no one came forward earlier. We couldn't. While RT has no weight or meaning to the industry as a whole, they're very good at keeping you there. Couldn't leave without a job because you couldn't save any money with such a small paycheck. You couldn't find another job because the work you made was such low quality. You couldn't do personal work outside of RT because you'd be so burnt out you couldn't. And they didn't let you moonlight. Texas is also a right to work state. So if anything happened or you tried to like... do anything about it? Fired. Gone.
- One animator openly said working at the company for gen:LOCK gave them PTSD and they transitioned out of animation entirely.
- Jen Brown, the voice actor for Pyrrha Nikos in RWBY, shared frustrations of the company, including frequent difficulty at getting paid on time. They later elaborated in another comment thread that they largely only saw a profit from doing Pyrrha's voice after beginning to go to conventions.
- Working conditions on the animation set were so poor that one staffer, Kim Newman, suffered a severe back injury from doing motion capture
- Red vs. Blue seems complicated due to the Limited Animation of Machinima, but usually goes well, apart from some hiccups:
- Season 3 had its moments, mostly for the stretch between Episodes 41-43, as they decided to get the chapters out in consecutive days to take advantage of the release of Halo 2 (in Burnie Burns' words, "I got four hours of sleep in three days. After Episode 43 came out, I actually fell asleep in mid-sentence while talking to someone. They thought I died."). Burnie also had to rewrite over and over, twice filling a Cosmic Deadline (the characters going to the future - i.e. Halo 2 - in Episode 43 and the season ending in the nineteenth chapter), and another time because what he intended for the Milestone Celebration on Episode 50 was so much that the events were spread to three installments.
- The show suffered from serious disagreements among the production team over where the story should go following the end of the Chorus arc in Season 13. They ultimately weren't able to come to any kind of consensus by the time they had to start production on Season 14, and decided to buy more time by making that season an anthology of various stories from the fringes of the show's setting, plus some pure joke one-offs, much to the frustration of the fans who had to wait another year to find out what happened after the agonizing cliffhanger ending of Season 13. Season 14 also served as an informal audition regarding who would pick up the series (Joe Nicolosi, of "The Brick Gulch Chronicles", was chosen).
- Season 15, where Nicolosi started, had the natural stresses of switching to a new showrunner and getting used to working with Halo 5: Guardians in machinima. One episode had to be reshot three times because the lighting often made the Reds and Blues' colors look completely off.
- Season 17, Singularity, was this for one co-director, Austin Clark, because basically all Halo games were used, including ones he wasn't familiar with. A recreation of a Halo 4 battle had Clark taking eight hours to do just three scenes.
- Season 18, Zero, had a long production, as showrunner Torrian Crawford noted that by the time it premiered everyone had been working on it for a year (not helped by how the COVID-19 Pandemic forced the crew to work from home), and right before the season would premiere, on October 19, voice actor Ryan Haywood left Rooster Teeth amid a nude leak scandal which snowballed into accusations that Ryan had been having virtual affairs with young fans. Zero was delayed to November, with Haywood's role completely redubbed. By the following year, as Zero had not been well-received and some took to expressing it the wrong way, Torrian revealed that he and his crew were the only ones interested and even then, his pitch suffered Executive Meddling which resulted in the storyline fans didn't like (and apparently the original cast didn't like the script, hence most were written out). One animator elaborated more on the unfavorable conditions.
- RWBY had a long and storied development cycle over the years, as every season had a new behind-the-scenes problem that the team had to overcome:
- The first two volumes had constraints of time and money that overworked everyone—writers Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross reported having to frequently sleep in the studio—and the animations weren’t even rendered due to how long that process can take, and so all was made on playblasts, which could be made faster but meant all lighting and shadows had to be baked into the scenes by hand:
- Volume 1 especially, as writes Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross weren't experienced with writing, from world-building the weaker parts of the lore, to focusing on characters that were unpopular at the time (such as Jaune Arc).
- Volume 2 had a much smoother production compared to the previous one, but Monty’s insertion of elements he found cool over what was practical for the story began to rear its head again. There were reports that indicate that Monty went renegade and added a scene in the finale between Yang and her mother, only for that to never be referenced again and retconned when Yang mentions having never seen Raven in person later on. Rigging complications involving the characters Sun and Neptune led to hasty revisions for fight scene early on in the season, leading to an awkward rewrite when Blake needs her own partner’s Semblance explain to her.
- Volume 3 seemed to have been gearing for a smooth development, only for it to get a two-month delay after series creator Monty Oum Died During Production, preventing the first episode from being premiered at RTX 2015 as planned. Since he was the team's expert in the outdated Poser software the show had used up to that point, CRWBY struggled to finish episodes on time (the final chapter was only submitted with hours to spare). Various sets had to be chopped into segments or else the framerate would dip into single digits, and without Monty skill set with the software, the animation for the fight scenes began to take a dip. Luckily for the team, Volume 3 was considered a success, but it was also the last volume to use Posernote . Beginning with the next volume, the more mainstream Maya was used.
- Volume 4 started off with the crew having to adjust to a new pipeline, and this is reflected in how not only Monty's loss leading to the sharp decline of combat animation, causing the fights of the season lacking many of the trademarks that made his fights stand out in the earlier seasons, but four episodes also had their releases delayed by a week to be properly finished, with the mini-episodes of World of Remnant airing instead.
- Volume 5 suffered from severe constraints, causing the season to suffer at large. CRWBY created character shorts of Blake, Yang, and Weiss that are meant to hype the volume, which ate into the budget and the time needed. On top of that, Rooster Teeth's animation resources were diverted into the first season of gen:LOCK, which also took out Gray Haddock from returning as co-director, overworking Shawcross. The script-writing was particularly rough, with lots of content being pushed to the next volume, such as Ruby having a planned encounter with someone who also have Silver Eyes and would mentor her and her team, and the exploration of the city of Mistral nearly entirely cut, leading to elements, such as its criminal underworld being covered after Team RWBY already left the city. The volume's second half was finished with hours to spare before releasenote , causing the team to rush out several fights. A combination of staff and fan dissatisfaction led to the Production Posse rethinking their approach for future volumes.
- Volume 6 went mostly better, with a new co-director (editor Connor Pickens) and all the scripts written ahead of production, causing fan reception to improve after Season 5’s disastrous reception. But reports made in July 2019 reveal problems within the season, as simultaneous production with gen:LOCK, which shared some crew members and was scheduled to start the same day RWBY ended, led to unhealthy quantities of crunch time toxic work environment at Rooster Teeth, with one source on the employer review site Glassdoor estimating that almost a third of Volume 6 was effectively made for free due to not paying the staff for overtime.
- CRWBY attempted to avoid any hassles during the COVID-19 Pandemic, which caused the team to work at home, by taking a seven-week mid-season break to complete the second half of Volume 8. It seemed to pay off, only for an episode to be delayed for a week due to weather-related power shortages in Texas. Production was hampered enough that the final chapter was finished the week before release. The release of Volume 8's official soundtrack was later delayed by a family emergency. Staff reports from 2022 later revealed that Rooster Teeth management attempted to force its staff to work through the snowstorm that shut down power across Texas, until the staff collectively forced the company to delay the episode.
- Due to wanting to make sure it wasn’t rushed, Volume 9’s release was pushed back to late 2022. To tide fans over, a teaser was shown at RTX At Home 2021. At RTX 2022, it was announced that it was pushed back to 2023, with fans piecing together that it was pushed back due to the work on RWBY: Ice Queendom, RWBY: Arrowfell video game and the RWBY/Justice League movie.
- The first two volumes had constraints of time and money that overworked everyone—writers Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross reported having to frequently sleep in the studio—and the animations weren’t even rendered due to how long that process can take, and so all was made on playblasts, which could be made faster but meant all lighting and shadows had to be baked into the scenes by hand:
- Making gen:LOCK, as mentioned above, was not a pleasant experience for the crew. The commentary track has several frank discussions between the higher-ups on the animation team about how rough the production cycle could be for the show:
- Behind the scenes, despite backing from outside parties, gen:LOCK quickly began to go over-budget due to Gray's exacting demands on the staff and several high profile actors doing voice work for the shownote . This led to several staff members later mentioning that Gray internally sabotaged Nomad of Nowhere, another show greenlit around the same time as gen:LOCK. Gray allegedly slashed Nomad's budget and rushed it into a pre-production state while refusing to appoint Georden Whitman (the man who pitched Nomad) to a director position, giving him no power within the show and forcing him to work the normal hours of intense crunch. Georden would eventually leave Rooster Teeth, embittered by the events that occurred.
- In 2022, several staff members spoke out against Rooster Teeth Animation's poor management- a problem repeatedly highlighted was that Haddock's mismanagement was known to the higher-ups in the company, but many of them didn't care so long as Haddock's shows made a profit. It was only after details leaked of the show's intense production and crunch culture (and internal reports that gen:LOCK flopped financially) that steps were taken to remove Haddock, but most of the staff considered his removal a scapegoat procedure to try and convince the fans that crunch would be avoided, and many of the working conditions Haddock popularized continued onwards in RWBY.
- In 2022, several staff members spoke out against Rooster Teeth Animation's poor management- a problem repeatedly highlighted was that Haddock's mismanagement was known to the higher-ups in the company, but many of them
- The nanosmoke effect in general was a pain to work with. The composition and R&D teams had to effectively remake it for each individual use due to settings it was used in and due to having multiple different states, models and modes. Episodes where nanosmoke didn't need to be animated were generally far easier for the crew to work on.
- Several design choices, such as having the final versions of the Holon suits appear in the opening, meant that they had to be made far ahead of when they were intended to be modeled in the production pipeline (RWBY specifically does the animation for its openings near the airdate of the season premiere so it has as much resources pre-made to avoid this where possible).
- Episode 6 was a rough experience for the crew. Video post supervisor Zane Rutledge acutely remembered the stress and anxiety he and the team went through making sure the episode landed, given it was an extensive and heavy collection of fight scenes. The episode's extended flashback sequence included a particularly strenuous one-take shot that proved too much for many of the composition team's computers. Only one person (Kim Newman) had a rig powerful enough to run the entire scene while working on it.
- As with RWBY above, most of the animation staff had to work 80-hour weeks with unpaid overtime, resulting in a third of the season being effectively made for free.
- The end result was that gen:LOCK was an Acclaimed Flop as despite good reviews, the Rooster Teeth First requirement to watch it locked the show behind a paywall and kept prospective customers out, with the show seeing a brief spike in popularity due to airing on [adult swim]'s Toonami block. A weak marketing campaign led to the series dropping like a stone in search metrics after the first season finished airing, and it's only thanks to Warner Bros. taking over management duties that a second season existed at all (for better or for worse) which is being aired exclusively on HBO Max for a three month period.
- Behind the scenes, despite backing from outside parties, gen:LOCK quickly began to go over-budget due to Gray's exacting demands on the staff and several high profile actors doing voice work for the shownote . This led to several staff members later mentioning that Gray internally sabotaged Nomad of Nowhere, another show greenlit around the same time as gen:LOCK. Gray allegedly slashed Nomad's budget and rushed it into a pre-production state while refusing to appoint Georden Whitman (the man who pitched Nomad) to a director position, giving him no power within the show and forcing him to work the normal hours of intense crunch. Georden would eventually leave Rooster Teeth, embittered by the events that occurred.
- The Strangerhood was unquestionably the most difficult of their Rooster Teeth's machinima works, as noted by this New York Times piece, because working with The Sims is akin to trying to direct real actors as opposed to the simpler "input commands to make the characters move" in every other RT series, given any action needs to be preceded by making Sims predisposed (the very opening scene with Sam and Wade in bed needed those Sims to be good friends) and when the Sims get bored, they storm off. No wonder that when the second season was made nine years later, the Credits Gag has the machinimation crew very angry at the guy who pushed for the idea.
- Achievement Hunter:
- With Let's Plays in general, it's common for somebody to lose footage or desync. GO! gets hit with this the worst, as everybody is playing separate games so they can't use someone else's footage to fill it in. It's not unusual to see somebody's footage replaced by a black screen saying "This footage was lost", even if they win.
- A tiny version occurred in Episode 39 of Let's Play Minecraft where the entire Let's Play ended up having to be restarted from scratch when a brief power outage killed their Xboxes and the recording footage was lost. One of the guys playing, Jack, was very distraught because he was in the lead in that episode's game and having to restart meant losing everything. Ironically, Jack would go on to win the game anyway.
