Former RWBY Animator Shane Newille Releases Personal Account on RWBY's Production

[andrewHayes]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-H0KuOwKFYwZTJxbXg0SG5CTEE/view?pref=2&pli=1

This has been causing quite a stir in the RWBY community and it wasn't released that long ago.

It's important to note that a lot of this information isn't verifiable and it's unlikely RT will speak out on this in an official capacity. Make of it what you will.

Sheena has retweeted this, Dillon Gu used to but deleted his retweet, and Kristina Nguyen has only said this in response: http://rockets.tumblr.com/post/144261213131

 

[spartenX]

while I think there are some valid points raised in the letter, the majority of it seems to be a man with depression venting his frustrations on how the series his close friend and mentor created was being altered, both in writing and the overall animation process, from what he feels was Monty's true vision. on these points, I can't really agree with shane. the other two writers for the series, Miles and Kerry, had been writing the series form the start alongside Monty and had helped to flesh out the series more or change/cut out ideas so that the story and characters worked better. heck, we know that even Monty would change around his own plans, coming up with a major plot point for season 3 only after season 2 had finished airing, so its hardly like even he was sticking completely to the plan he had set out. Monty may have been a great animator, but his writing wasn't nearly as great.

speaking of animation, the changes to the set up seemed to have been done to accommodate the larger animation team that was brought on for the third season. while Monty was a great animator, he was also an unconventional one, using a process that was inefficient, and could only turn out great results due to Monty's talent and his legendary work ethic. the other animator's would need to switch to a better system, and probably would have had to even if Monty hadn't died, simply because this was a big project they were undertaking and it wouldn't' be right to demand they conform to the kind of schedule and tools that Monty used. Shane, being so close to Monty as both a friend, co-worker, and student, wasn't willing to make the change while also not being able to deliver the same results on time as Monty could while using his methods. ultimately, alot of this boils down to creative differences that I personally don't really agree with Shane on.

there are some other issues that do raise some issues, such as the ones concerning Monty's widow, however I don't know enough about the situation to make a comment on it. there also seems to be a major communications issue that I'm assuming was not deliberately keeping Shane out of the loop and were just issues that came up. the whole thing about sort of tricking him to get at the files they needed on his computer when they fired does seem a bit scummy but I trust RT enough that, even if I do think this sounds like shitty behavior the way it's described here, I would be willing to wait to hear their side on this before making any sort of judgement call.

actually, it probably would be best to hear RT's side before making any sort of judgement calls. these here are really just first impression based on incomplete information presented by a source that is biased and emotionally charged, and as such I'm not going to make up my mind completely just yet.

 

[andrewHayes]

while I think there are some valid points raised in the letter, the majority of it seems to be a man with depression venting his frustrations on how the series his close friend and mentor created was being altered, both in writing and the overall animation process, from what he feels was Monty's true vision. on these points, I can't really agree with shane.

speaking of animation, the changes to the set up seemed to have been done to accommodate the larger animation team that was brought on for the third season. while Monty was a great animator, he was also an unconventional one, using a process that was inefficient, and could only turn out great results due to Monty's talent and his legendary work ethic. the other animator's would need to switch to a better system, and probably would have had to even if Monty hadn't died, simply because this was a big project they were undertaking and it wouldn't' be right to demand they conform to the kind of schedule and tools that Monty used. Shane, being so close to Monty as both a friend, co-worker, and student, wasn't willing to make the change while also not being able to deliver the same results on time as Monty could while using his methods. ultimately, alot of this boils down to creative differences that I personally don't really agree with Shane on.

actually, it probably would be best to hear RT's side before making any sort of judgement calls. these here are really just first impression based on incomplete information presented by a source that is biased and emotionally charged, and as such I'm not going to make up my mind completely just yet.

True, but it is important to note that Monty developed tools to make animation easier and was experimenting with implementing Catmull subdivision for better visual fidelity in Volume 3 but RT rejected them in their pipeline, if what Shane is saying is true. And it's not like RT is completely infallible when it comes to production; I recall they had a recent Grimm Eclipse update that changed the shader from a toon one to one that made the characters resemble plastic dolls, supposedly to improve performance. It was received extremely poorly and to add insult to injury, it didn't improve performance at all, meaning they were incompetent at optimizing their own engine code.

 

[Kolby Jack]

I feel for the guy, and it's not like corporate shenanigans haven't happened at Rooster Teeth before (Ray's original twitch channel being taken for use by the whole company, which really soured him on the company for a while and might have contributed to his decision to leave). Maybe to him the changes to RWBY and the "shutting out" of Sheena did feel like betrayals. And maybe I'm biased for having been a fan of Rooster Teeth for so long, but frankly I don't see any of this as a real problem. It sucks for Shane and Sheena, but an artist is always going to argue for "artistic integrity" and even more so when they were close to the showrunner.

It seems to me, trying to sift through all the baggage in his letter, that the big wigs at Rooster Teeth felt the best way to honor Monty was to ensure RWBY be a success, which certainly has merit. Shane, meanwhile, seems to believe the best way to honor Monty is to perfectly preserve every iota of anything Monty that already existed, including having Monty's wife there for the rest of the ride, driving the show as she thought Monty would have wanted. That also has merit, but the two ideas are obviously mutually exclusive; Sheena may have had better insight to how Monty wanted the show to go, but Miles and Kerry who CO-WROTE the show would no doubt get tons of resistance from her for any changes they might try to make, which obviously is no good. So it makes sense to me, harsh as it is, why they'd want Sheena to stay out of production.

I can't speak for the guy's friendship with Monty, or Monty's relationship with Sheena, but it's not like they were Monty's only friends. He was friends with Miles and Kerry and many other people at the company. The point is, it sucks that he got fired, but I have a hard time believing he was the only one who cared about Monty's vision. It's just much easier for me to believe that he had a strong idea of what Monty's vision was, and when other people started to stray from it, he couldn't reconcile that with his own hang-ups. It's not his fault; it's not anybody's fault. Someone died, tragically, unexpectedly, and dozens of others were left to continue on without him. Eventually those left go their separate ways, trying to honor the memory of the deceased in what way they think is best. That's just how it goes, sadly.

EDIT: It seems the people over on the RT subreddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/4j20kc/shane_newville_an_open_letter_to_all_who/] (hardly an unbiased group of folks, but eh) have much less regard for what Shane is doing than I do, and I don't have much to begin with. But they make a lot of good counterpoints, the biggest of which is Shane's manipulative use of his friendship with Monty to make him seem like a victim while disregarding all of Monty's other friends at RT as just part of the RT collective. Can't disagree with them on that, really.

 

[andrewHayes]

So JJ, Mercury's old VA, came forward with a statement of his own on the matter:

 

[Cicada 5]

This is sad to hear.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

I'm sure I'm gonna sound like an insensitive fuck nugget, but, is there a TL;DR version? Or can someone summarize for me in a paragraph or two? That is a LOT of text. A lot of emotional sounding text... Oh dear

 

[Paragon Fury]

I'm sure I'm gonna sound like an insensitive fuck nugget, but, is there a TL;DR version? Or can someone summarize for me in a paragraph or two? That is a LOT of text. A lot of emotional sounding text... Oh dear

TL;DR -

Without Monty, one of the original founders of Rooster Teeth and someone with a shit ton of power and weigh to fight the new corporate side of RT, his pet project which he had personally managed and worked on in his own way and had long-term future plans for - RWBY - was instead turned into a company IP and run by committee with corporate standards and methods, leading to the degradation of quality in terms of production and script see as of late, and the alienation of several members of the team up to firing at least one.

 

[09philj]

While this is, of course, a rather sad and sorry state of affairs, the part of my brain thinking about that has been pushed aside in favour of the grinning lunatic part who wants me to get popcorn.

 

[Kaimax]

Now my decision to stop watching RWBY ever since Monty passed away is pretty much justified.

 

[09philj]

Now my decision to stop watching RWBY ever since Monty passed away is pretty much justified.

I actually think the story driven parts of Volume 3 were the best RWBY we've gotten. There was a coherent story, for a start.

 

[Shockolate]

TL;DR -

Without Monty, one of the original founders of Rooster Teeth

Roosterteeth was founded in 2003.

Monty was hired in 2009-2010.

Google, use it.

 

[Worgen]

I was never big on RWBY but I can see roosterteeth pulling something shady like this. The last time I watched one of their main vids it was weirdly shillish, like they were paid for an opinion and they were damn well going to give that opinion.

 

[Paragon Fury]

TL;DR -

Without Monty, one of the original founders of Rooster Teeth

Roosterteeth was founded in 2003.

Monty was hired in 2009-2010.

Google, use it.

I should clarify - as the larger studio of Rooster Teeth. Rooster Teeth was founded earlier, yes, but it was a very small thing focused basically entirely on RvB skits for a long time (basically until early after Halo 3's launch).

When people like Monty started getting hired is when they started to get bigger. In fact, if memory serves, wasn't Monty's hiring announced and all that kind of fanfare as them becoming bigger and more professional?

 

[spartenX]

I'm sure I'm gonna sound like an insensitive fuck nugget, but, is there a TL;DR version? Or can someone summarize for me in a paragraph or two? That is a LOT of text. A lot of emotional sounding text... Oh dear

TL;DR

an animator, Shane, that was hired to work with Monty on creating his series RWBY and was sort of Monty's protogei wrote a piece discussing issues he had with RT especially after Monty's death. while some of what he discusses could possibly show that RT hasn't treated their employees as well as most would like to think, most of the letter seems to be about creative differences with Shane believing he knew best what Monty wanted for the series and that RT was deliberately moving away from that which he felt was disrespectful to Monty's memory, as well as issues when the company tried to shift the animation methods from the more unique methods Monty and Shane used to more standardized methods as the animation department started to grow much larger.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

After taking 30 minutes out of my life to not be a lazy toss pot, I went through the whole thing. I have no idea how much of this is really as it is, only the people that were there can say as such. As some others have said, it seems like he may have been using his relationship with Monty as a crutch in being the victim. I somehow doubt this is the case, so only time and some statements will make the truth come out.

But, I do have something for Rooster Teeth. If this is REALLY how it went down, and that Shane is giving us a pretty clear insight on how you do things... Go suck a rusty railroad spike and choke on it.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

It's amazing to me how so many of these "fun" companies turn out to be just as shitty places to work as any other. Channel Awesome being another one.

What the hell happens? Ya start out just making fun, making art, and then at some point... what? It becomes a job? Jesus Christ who would want their baby, their child-company as it were to become that?

 

[MoltenSilver]

It's amazing to me how so many of these "fun" companies turn out to be just as shitty places to work as any other. Channel Awesome being another one.

What the hell happens? Ya start out just making fun, making art, and then at some point... what? It becomes a job? Jesus Christ who would want their baby, their child-company as it were to become that?

The pattern I've noticed in cases like this is that being a little guy/group working on small projects that hit the lottery and become massively popular seems to build up a sort of ego even in the most level-minded people; if someone spends a long time being praised by many people, whether it's fans or someone with a bank account trying to schmooze in, even the most humble person is likely to begin believing their own hype, 'drinking the koolaid' so to speak.
It starts with steps such as the artist making the leap from passion project to full-time supporting themselves on it; to most people it sounds like a dream come true, no more boring grind job and getting to do what they love all day every day (And despite the numerous warnings of the past, of course, many and especially young people think they're going to be the exception). But now that it's a job they're completely forced to do it because failing will get them in the poorhouse, possibly even reaching the point they actively hate working on it but feel they're too invested to stop, or don't have an alternative income, or even a selfless reason like they feel (granted, probably accurately) they're now responsible for the jobs of their new employed subordinates. Then the businessmen start coming in, trying to hook in to this new thing's popularity, and of course it's entirely in their interest to pump up the feeling of importance and greatness in their client. And then, after just experiencing that combination of being fed ego and a constant income, or even being shaped by passion-turned-responsibility as financial logic has to trump ideals to keep everyone else employed, every day the passion project is thoroughly warped into assembly line GenericCo-brand 'fun', just one small cog in the mechanism of their business.

Edit: As an example think of any break-out song or joke that became hugely popular to the point even memetic no longer properly describes it. While that sounds great the truth is it now puts the creator in an unenviable position: their fans expect or might even demand hearing this same thing over and over again and reject any new creativity the artist tries to inject, so, do they give in to what keeps them housed and fed or do they risk flopping with new creative material and ending in a dead career. Sure someone who's already really big and secure could probably survive a flop, but what about someone who's just broken into streaming or youtubing, where this single burst of success might be the only chance they ever have an audience to capitalize on?

It's the same way with how you see a lot(not all, but a lot) of celebrities act as if they don't live on the same planet as us, because functionally, well, they don't: they have someone who drives them, they have someone to do their shopping for them, their job is utterly alien to everyone else, their agent/manager/whatever will tell them they're the second coming of Jesus Christ if that will keep the celebrity earning them money, and do it so often that the person will honestly start to believe they're God's gift to the world. And their 'friends' are little more than yes-men willingly reinforcing this fantasy so they get to come along on the coattails, as anyone who tried to breach this circlejerk circus and offers any criticism, no matter how true or useful, gets thrown out and labelled a 'hater'.

 

[flying_whimsy]

So what I'm getting is that a guy neglected every aspect of his life for his job, and then blamed the job when the rest of his life fell apart. Oh yeah, lots of drama relying on putting a dead guy on a pedestal (don't get me wrong: I respected monty's work, but it really rubs me the wrong way when people justify self-destructive behavior like this).

If gamergate taught me anything, it was to wait for verification after shit like this gets flung all over the internet. Too many easy points to score with the hate machine and not enough fact. I doubt we'd get the other side of the story, but I suspect it would look considerably different while still having all of the same events.

 

[BX3]

Read about this on Tumblr the other day and got incredibly sad.

Now, I have a relatively business oriented mindset, so right off the bat I went through his description of some of the creative differences and going "yeah, that's fair" quite a few times. Heck, maybe Monty's workflow was just too slow. Maybe they just thought there was worth more in having Yuri Lowenthal play Mercury. Whatever, it happens. That said, there were some parts that did kinda made my heart drop, like removing Monty's wife from production, the haphazard change from Poser to Maya as soon as the dude died, the straight-up removal of pivotal fight scenes which resulted in certain revelations being cheapened or downright confusing (The Ruby and Torchwick/Neo fight felt like it might as well not have happened). All of this is factual, provable stuff that speaking out of passion had no involvement in, unless he was straight up lying. It really sucked to read that stuff.

Someone on Tumbles told me that commenting on the issue in an extended capacity it kinda out of RT's hands legally, but I really do hope we hear something, anything to clear this whole mess up. As it stands, after reading all that, even if Shane was just a disgruntled employee, there's clearly some not-so-great stuff going on in the show production wise. Perhaps not done out of malice (in fact, assuredly so), but with enough apparent apathy to make me far too uncomfortable to look at the show with the same eye I use to. Kristina Nguyen's heart is in the right place, and I do want to support the cool people that were doing the best jobs they could... but I'm not sure I can. Monty was one of the few individuals I truly looked up to, and it saddens me to see these accusations thrown around in his absence.

I really hope RT give us their side of the story as best they can. Bernie? Miles? Anyone?

---------

EDIT*
Also, can I just say this? As I do make it a point to try to see things from all sides, but there's something going on with some people that's making me equally as sick. Could we not demonize Shane please and accusing him of shit he never even said in the fucking letter? He made it a point not point fingers and name too many names, which leads me to believe that the likes of Miles, Burnie or Kerry had little to do with the changes that were purposed. They were probably as annoyed with them as Shane was, but just didn't flip out about it because they felt the show's success was homage enough. RT's a big place nowadays, I doubt they're the toppest brass anymore. Our trust in those individuals doesn't make Shane the enemy, nor is the opposite true.

Which is not to say not to criticize him, there's plenty to criticize, but this particular aspect of the dissents doesn't sit right with me when he was very careful in his wording as he was. I know it hasn't really reared it's ugly head here that much yet, but I've seen it devolve into that in enough places where that shit needs to get nipped in the bud imeeeeediately~