"I feel you guys deserve an explanation and since I can't talk publicly about this without putting my job in danger I'll post this here where everyone will think I'm larping. Everybody that was working on this show knew this backlash was coming but Hefferon has his head so far up his ass he wouldn't listen to anybody and nobody could tell him to smarten up since he owns the whole company any idea he came up with was put in no matter how stupid, hell sometimes he brought his kid into reviews and had the kid give notes, also fun fact the main character shares a name with his kid and the main character's father's name is the name of his assistant. The production itself was a massive disaster as well, Hefferon got sold on using the unreal engine for lighting and rendering the series despite rainmaker having a superb traditional CG pipeline because the first ReBoot was the first CG show on TV he wanted to make this show a first as well so the first unreal game engine show on TV.
"To compound that problem those of us that came over from a traditional pipeline were given next to no training in unreal so we are figuring it out as we went along, the guy that was supposed to be the big know it all guy about unreal ended up being completely incompetent at his job but was great at kissing Michael's ass and creating conflicts by going behind the art and animation director's backs. Also wouldn't be surprised if a # MeToo story comes out about this guy as he was just creepy in general with the girls on the team. The project also went through a number of different art directors as they got fed up and quit due to the related issues this of course caused a lot of issues to the point where most environments in the show were just improvised off of single concept images. Also in the trailer you might notice some of the CG shots look extremely crappy and some look good, here's why that is.
"The creepy kiss up guy from earlier convinced Hefferon early on that reboot wouldn't need a team of lighters since "The game engine will do that automatically for us." So for the first few episodes there was no team dedicated to lighting the shots so it fell to the world builders to light those episodes and as no world building had any lighting experience you can see the results, after those episodes were complete they finally came to the realization that you actually need lighters to get good TV show level lighting so they hastily hired a team of lighters but because it was so late in the production schedule they had to hire basically anybody that applied so that means the majority of the lighters were straight out of school, and I don't think they finished up hiring that team till episode 11 or 12. Another reason for the crappy looking CG is because there was absolutely no training provided to the surfacing team on how shaders in unreal work, so you had them going in blind muddling their way through trying to figure out how to make ship work, hell the most any of us got to training in unreal for the whole project was about 2 weeks. I know to people outside the industry surfacing and lighting may not sound important but they are the subtle things that make something go from looking cheap and bad to looking good in CG.
"In summary the production was a complete cluster **** with a CEO making all the decisions, refusing to listen to anybody just making his pet fantasy project about his self inserted son, but hey he got what he wanted, he can now say reboot the guardian code is the first ever show to be made with the unreal engine and rendered in 4k plus there is some VR stuff. Watch anytime he talks about the show he'll hit on those points, hell those are the points we've been told to hit on in the handout they gave us about how we're supposed to talk about the show in public.I'm very sorry about the product we put out there, I can't imagine how hard it is for long time fans of ReBoot to look at this abomination, if you're holding out any hope for this show don't, not only did the spit on the grave of ReBoot they did it in a badly written, badly acted show. If you're wondering if they tried to do anything to placate you guys, that'd be episode 10, they have all the old main characters in that episode but only that episode and it's just as badly written and acted as they other episodes. Do not watch this show, do not support this show or if you feel the need to satisfy your curiosity about it wait at least a month after release, netflix tends to make a decision on renewing for more seasons based on the numbers after about 2-4 weeks so the last thing this show needs is to do well out of morbid curiosity during those weeks and get another season."
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