Talk:Rooster Teeth Productions/@comment-70.164.251.83-20180403193609/@comment-4010415-20180403194916

Dude... You have to take Shane's letter with an entire spoonful of salt, considering he wrote it while highly emotional and it's extremely biased. I'm sure that Rooster Teeth had their reasons for the things they did, especially on the animation and story front.

First of all, the change in workflow. Monty was a self-taught animator, and he taught Shane. The way that those two did things and their style of workflow was something that Monty developed himself from being self-taught, and it may not have been professional. There are reasons that professional animation companies do things the way they do. You wouldn't scoff at how Pixar does things, would you?

Monty got away with the things he did because he was one of the owners of RWBY. He was the one who came up with the idea and the one who started it. He was the lead animator. I assume Shane was around the rank of or the same rank as the rest of the animators, so I have to question why he thought he needed to be notified of every little thing that the producers did and every move they made in regards to hiring Dillon Gu. Does your boss notify you of every little thing they do in regards to hiring new people? No. The newbie shows up to work, you get introduced, and things go on. You are not the boss, you are not in a manager or supervisory position, it is not necessary to keep you updated on every single thing in regards to hiring someone new.

Shane seemed upset about the plans to move from Poser to Maya. Here's the thing. Poser isn't that great of an animation program, while Maya is an industry standard animation program, meaning it is a program that professionals prefer to use, and there is a reason for that. Rooster Teeth already had Maya - they made the models for Volumes 1-3 in it. They animated in Poser because that is what Monty was used to, he didn't feel like taking the time to learn and memorize Maya's interface and keyboard shortcuts, he was stuck in his ways, and again, he was of a higher rank as the person who came up with RWBY and one of the owners of RWBY.

Shane also seemed upset about the animation department moving to a separate building, but from what I've heard, they had to do that because the animation department had grown so large that they couldn't all fit in the same area they used to be in. Yes, it sounds very inconvenient that they had to move somewhere away from the mocap room, but working in cramped conditions is also inconvenient.

He also made a quick complaint about Cinder being OP in Volume 3, but... isn't she OP because of the Maidens storyline, which Monty came up with? After they finished Volume 2, Monty came up with the Maidens, and Miles and Kerry said he was really excited about it. They decided to keep his Maidens idea, even though it meant they would have to make changes to things in the story to get it to fit in the show.

Some of the changes in workflow in the animation department can likely be explained by one big problem that was kept behind the curtain. We got a glimpse of this problem due to a moment in the Volume 1 Director's Commentary where Miles temporarily freaks out. He hadn't yet seen the fight in Black and White until they began recording the commentary. They got to Penny's part of the fight, which Shane animated, and Miles' freakout was in response to Penny cutting airships in half. They explained Miles' reaction.

Basically, as Kerry explained, it began with the Black Trailer, when Monty wanted to have the train itself get cut in half. By who? Most likely Blake, considering Miles and Kerry said "She's not powerful enough yet" in regards to Miles telling Monty it was too early to do such a thing. From there, Shane had begun to joke around with Miles and Kerry, saying that the characters were going to cut ridiculous things in half, such as Ruby cutting the entire world in half. Yes, they were jokes, but this peek behind the curtain sheds a new light on some of the issues and inconsistencies in the writing that were brought on by the action and fight scenes in Volume 2. Monty and Shane made too much of a habit of just doing cool things with the fight scenes without thinking about how it would affect the writing.

And yeah, they cut Raven attacking JNPR in Volume 3, but I have to ask: Why would she have attacked them? There doesn't really seem to be a reason for her to have done that, other than "Wow, cool fight scene", similar to how it was completely idiotic for Roman to chase Blake and Sun through the city in the stolen mech that had the White Fang symbol painted on it. That mech chase scene was done just because it would be cool, without any thought as to how stupid it was in a writing sense.