Monty Oum

Monyreak "Monty" Oum was an Asian American web-based animator and writer. A self-taught animator, he scripted and produced several crossover fighting video series, drawing the attention of internet production company Rooster Teeth, who hired him. He was also the original creator, director, writer, lead animator and a voice actor of RWBY. He worked for Rooster Teeth Productions, where he originally started animating the popular Machinima series Red vs. Blue in its eighth season. He had also worked on several individual fan projects, such as Dead Fantasy and Haloid, although he had stated that his main goal was to create an original series, which came to pass with RWBY. He voiced Lie Ren. Oum attracted attention within the gaming community after releasing the hit video Haloid in 2007 on GameTrailers, which a Destructoid article called "the most interesting Halo-related fan movie in existence". The video has received more than 4 million views and is the most watched user-created content on the site. In October of the same year, he released the first video in his Dead Fantasy fan series which, like Haloid, featured fantastical combat sequences between characters from two different established games series (this time Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy). He released five episodes of Dead Fantasy, a preview of an additional episode and two music videos featuring the heroines of the series. After Oum announced that he had started working for Rooster Teeth, the series was put on hold. Oum suffered a severe allergic reaction during a medical procedure and fell into a coma on January 22, 2015. He died on February 1, 2015. He was born on June 22nd, 1981 in Providence, Rhode Island. According to Monty Oum on his twitter, he said that he was "Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese" of descent. He dropped out of high school around 2002 and started creating fan videos. In 2007, he used model from Halo 2 and Super Smash Bros. Melee to have a Spartan (Halo) and Samus Aran (Metriod) fight in the "ultimate showdown". Afterwards, he worked at Midway Games as a combat designer and then worked at Namco Games as a combat designer and animator for Afro Samurai. In 2009, he met Burnie Burns at a SDCC International panel. A year later at PAX East 2010, he was announced to be working at Rooster Teeth. He started to animate in Season 8 of the show that started Rooster Teeth, Red v Blue. After working hours on end on RvB, Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum decided to give him his own project. This project would later be known as RWBY. Monty brought on Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross to write the animated series. RWBY premiered in 2012. On January 22, 2015, Monty was rushed to the hospital due to a severe allergic reaction. The doctors operated on him and Monty fell into a coma for 10 days. He passed away at 4:24 P.M on February 1, 2015.