I was vaguely aware of a series of video shorts being done using videogame characters, but I had no idea how popular they’d become — and I had no idea that the creators weren’t college kids. From When Art Imitates Videogames, You Have ‘Red vs. Blue’:
Every week, Mr. Burns gathers Geoff Fink, 28, and Jason Salda?a, 25, and some other friends to play a videogame called Halo. They edit the on-screen images into roughly five-minute videos that have plots, recurring characters and original soundtracks. Like puppeteers, each man controls a computer-generated character on the screen. They also provide the voices along with friends in other cities, who send in their audio tracks over the Internet. The group distributes the series online and on DVDs. Now on its 29th episode, the low-budget production has attracted a cult following and shows signs of crossing over to a broader audience.
And it makes money…
The game-playing and video editing for the five-minute episode took more than seven hours, stretching well into the night. Mishaps were frequent, as when a character accidentally fired his turbocharged weapon in the middle of a scene. Mr. Burns’s 2-year-old son, Jack, toddled into the room a few times. The group broke briefly to eat take-out pasta and discuss fan mail from viewers.The following day, they made the video available to the several thousand people who pay $10 or more annually to get early access. Two days later, anyone could download a version with lower-quality video free of charge.
Mr. Burns won’t say how much money his series has brought in, but he says the venture is profitable despite about $150,000 in annual computer-hosting costs. And he’s spreading the franchise. Microsoft Corp., which owns the company that created the Halo game, commissioned Mr. Burns to produce an episode to run during a big software-developer conference; the clip recounts a fictionalized falling-out between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and one of the game’s soldiers. Microsoft and Mr. Burns agreed last year that he can distribute his films without running afoul of copyright issues. Spike TV commissioned a short piece from Mr. Burns’s team last year, which it ran on its Web site. The rock group Barenaked Ladies asked for Red vs. Blue videos to show at concerts.
Despite spending 40 hours a week on the series, Mr. Burns still works his day job as chief operating officer of teleNetwork Inc., a 250-person technology-services company. Mr. Fink, a heavily-tattooed army veteran, manages a call-center team at the same company. Mr. Salda?a is an unemployed guitarist. Their composer, a Frenchman named Nico Audy-Rowland, sends soundtracks for each episode over the Internet from his home in Cambridge, Mass.
Mr. Burns has just hired the first official staffer for Red vs. Blue, Matt Hullum, a Hollywood visual-effects supervisor. But he says he’s wary of expanding too much or getting too commercial. “You kind of hate to mess with what’s working,” he says.