While most commercials for video games simply string together footage from the games, McCann San Francisco and T.A.G. went all out to create a spectacularly epic film titled “Believe” to promote the release of Halo 3 for Microsoft’s Xbox 360.
For those of you who aren’t members of the Halo Nation, Halo 3 is a first-person shooter game and the third in a Halo series that was launched in 2001, and continued with Halo 2 in ’04.
At the center of it all is the iconic soldier known as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117–a fictional character so revered that he was recently honored with a life-size wax statue at Madam Tussauds in Las Vegas.
Hardcore gamers have been eagerly anticipating the release of Halo 3, which went on sale in September. But McCann and T.A.G. wanted to reach a much wider audience with its marketing effort and recruit new players, according to McCann Group Creative Director Scott Duchon. Therefore, the decision was made to devise a campaign that focuses “on the emotional aspects of battle and celebrates the heroism of Master Chief,” Duchon said.
This goal is achieved to great effect in the hauntingly mesmerizing “Believe.” Directed by Rupert Sanders of bicoastal/international MJZ, “Believe” takes viewers into the heart of a heated battle frozen in time on an enormous diorama. Known as the John-117 Monument, the diorama is populated by miniature soldiers in poses portraying everything from fear to anguish. The fearless Master Chief stands amidst the chaos clutching a glowing grenade.
Painstakingly crafted by a team of artisans at New Deal Studios, Los Angeles, led by company co-founder/creative director Matthew Gratzner, the 1,200-square-foot diorama is packed with still-frame explosions, buildings, debris, sections of freeway and Banshee, Scorpion Tank and Warthog vehicles seen in the game itself.
Meanwhile, the vast landscape is populated by nearly 1,000 four-inch tall soldiers produced by the team at Stan Winston Studios in Van Nuys, Calif.
As still as the characters are, they are remarkably alive. “Our biggest challenge was in finding how to bring emotion to inanimate objects,” Sanders said.
Face value
Sanders did so by focusing on the faces of the soldiers. Incredibly detailed, each figurine has a face based on a real person’s. Marines, T.A.G. creative director John Patroulis and Sanders are among those who lent their identities to the soldiers.
The first part of the face creation process involved making 3-D scans of each real person’s face as he acted out an emotion. Each face was then outputted onto a hard resin sheet and sent to Stan Winston Studios where it was sanded down, painted and placed onto a soldier’s body.
While the faces bring humanity to the inanimate soldiers, the music that accompanies the spot, Frederic Chopin’s Prelude in D Flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15, works in tandem to quietly enhance the drama. Robert Miller and Jason Johnson of Santa Monica’s stimmung arranged the piece.
Back to the production, once the diorama was built–which took about four weeks–and the soldiers were in place, Sanders and DP Chris Soos spent three days shooting “Believe” with two motion control cameras.
Ballet attire
Given the delicate nature of their set, Sanders and his crew walked around it gingerly wearing ballet slippers and karate shoes.
Sanders can’t help but enthuse about the incredible level of detail in the diorama. “You could actually see bullet holes,” the director said.
Most everything you see in the diorama itself was captured for real, Sanders noted. The artisans at Santa Monica’s Method Studios led by VFX supervisor Cedric Nicholas and CG creative director Laurent Ledru contributed greatly–they created a pre-visualization and the digital matte paintings seen in the background and added the glow to Master Chief’s grenade and his helmet among other crucial touches. But Sanders stressed, “There were no special effects as far as rig removal. We had this rule that we could only shoot something if it existed in the real diorama. There was no trickery at all. Everything that was there was built into the model.”
Theoretically, “Believe” could have also been executed entirely digitally as opposed to hand crafted the way it was. “There was talk of that at the beginning, but it would make no point doing it any other way than for real,” Sanders insisted, noting that despite the expense in doing it for real, the agency and client “were very much behind that idea.”
