15 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About RWBY

Rooster Teeth’s hit animated series RWBY just started its fifth season! To celebrate, let’s explore a few facts about the show and how it was made that you might not be familiar with!

1. RWBY was conceived by Monty Oum, an animator and director at Rooster Teeth.
2. Oum animated for and directed three season’s of the hit animated series Red vs. Blue.
3. During a 35-hour long marathon animating session, Oum says that the core cast, setting, and concept for RWBY came to him fully formed!
4. From the outset, the creative team behind RWBY wanted to merge the visuals of anime and Western folklore and storytelling to create something unique.
5. Oum knew early on that he wanted the main characters of the series to be associated with a specific color.
6. This color-coding approach is where the show gets its title — the core cast’s colors are Red, White, Black, and Yellow, the first letters of which make up ‘RWBY.’
7. The characters were designed with help from einlee, an artist who gained notoriety through art focused websites like Deviantart.
8. Each of the characters are based on fairy tale or folklore figures.
9. In the core cast, Ruby Rose is based on Red Riding Hood, Weiss Schnee comes from Snow White, Blake Belladonna alludes to Beauty of Beauty and the Beast, and Yang Xiao Long was inspired by Goldilocks.
10. Oum and einlee were dedicated to using even the most minute clothing details to get across character information, referring to everything from high-fashion photos to images of normal people’s outfits for inspiration.
11. Initially, the primary software used to animate RWBY was a tool called Poser.
12. Poser is an efficient but lightweight tool, which created significant limitations for what could and could not be animated by the team.
13. Led by Oum, RWBY’s staff created a unique workflow built around the limitations of Poser — scenes were written and storyboarded with the software’s limitations in mind!
14. Starting in Season 4, the team moved over to Maya, a more robust software that expanded the capabilities of the team.
15. The team’s passion for the project has made it a phenomenal success worldwide, even getting dubbed for Japanese audiences!

RWBY is an incredibly special series made by a passionate team for a very dedicated and loving fanbase. Now that you know a bit more about this show’s history, click here to go check it out on VRV!