Like many first time documentarians, Dominic Rodriguez decided to pick a subject close to home. In his case, it was the sub-culture of furries for his debut feature Fursonas. A furry himself, his portrayal isn’t exactly warts-and-all, but it’s more nuanced than either the PR pieces that the scene can produce, or the prurient and exploitative ‘reporting’ that comes from the cavalcade of daytime talkshows. His film may not endear him to everyone in furrydom (especially its self-appointed “storyteller,” Uncle Kage), but it’s lovingly critical of the anthro-scene.

(A version of this story first appeared at www.austinchronicle.com.)

Richard Whittaker: It always seems like there’s a group that it’s ‘OK’ for popular culture to be dismissive of or be mean about. It used to be LARPers, then it was Bronies, now it’s furries. Why do you think that it’s this group at the moment?

Dominic Rodriguez: I don’t know. I just think about when I started it. I didn’t know a single furry, I didn’t know any fur suiters, and all I saw was just this image of all these hundreds of people in costume. You don’t know who they are. They’re just furries. And because you don’t know who they are, they’re easier to judge. That’s why I thought it was so important in the documentary that it took its time, and you got to feel who these people were in the first half, so it’s not as OK to judge. So when it does happen, it’s not OK. How could anyone judge Boomer? How horrible. But then, of course you judge Boomer. Look at the first scene in which you see him – he looks like a crazy person. But all it takes is getting to know people and accept them.

RW: Why did you decide to make the documentary in the first place?

DR: I guess there are two answer to that question. One is because I needed to have a senior thesis film.

Continue reading Interview: Dominic Rodriguez on Fursonas →

Richard Whittaker: RWBY Volume I introduced characters, Volume II broadened the world, and Volume III is where the plot really fits together. The Twitter response when everything came together – and started falling apart for the characters – was basically ‘what the hell?’ Where you prepared for the response from the fanbase?

Kerry Shawcross: When we started off with this story, it was important to us to pull a Lost. We didn’t want to start in a cool place, not know where it was going, and then try to figure it out as we went. When we came up with this initial story, we tried to think years and years ahead. We knew the events of Volume III were going to happen before the show even started, so it’s really been a case of biting our tongues and not letting anything slip. We really wanted to hit the fans hard, in the same way that the characters were hit really hard with all this. We wanted them to share in these emotions.

Miles Luna: When it came to introducing the characters in volume I, the thing that we tried to do with them is that you think you know the archetype at face value. A great example is Yang: when the audience first meets her, she seems like that party hard kind of girl, the popular preppy girl, and that’s what you get the first time you see there, and then you learn she’s like a mother figure to Ruby, she has this very compassionate side, she has this history with her mother. We wanted to do the same thing with the tone of the show, whereby it’s introduced as a Hub anime, it’s this fun show where it takes place in a magic school, but then we wanted to do an about face and pull the rug out from under the audience as say, no, this is not what the show is about. It’s just as intrusive to the audience as it was to the characters, that suddenly, woah, everything that was going according to plan is suddenly out the window.

Gray Haddock: And Rooster Teeth has never put a parental advisory on its videos in the company’s history, and we didn’t want to start now, but halfway through this season was a good time to remind all the parent andf babysitters and uncle and aunts who would have been sharing the videos with the much younger end of the audience that, hey, we’ve been trying to make as much noise whenever possible in the behind-the-scenes supplements on the DVDs, or at panel appearances at conventions, that there was more to this story than what they had seen in the first couple of volumes, and the full story of RWBY is going to involve a lot of changes and emotions. So halfway through volume III was a good time to re-start the conversation with the audience, just to let them know, hey, no reason, but if you’re sharing the world of RWBY with the most extremely young members of the audience, maybe you want to start watching the episodes first and seeing whether it’s suitable for them.

Continue reading Interview: RWBY Creative Team →