Halo Project

Channel:

Sotalo

Subscribers:

1,000

Published on July 20, 2012 10:09:06 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ_wyVjAhtA

Game:

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (2011)

Category:

Discussion

Duration: 10:37

789 views

11

Ty C. Harmon
John Van Enkevort
Michael Fahel
Steve Calderon

The Halo Project! Now on Youtube!

So, I decided to upload this bad boy. Our Game History finals project was to pick a game and analyze everything in it. We chose Halo Anniversary.

When we started, not all of us were on the same page. For a long time, we discussed doing a live demonstration complete with costumes, strobe lights, a fog machine, a bunch of paper balls to represent the flood, and Ty and Steven going behind people to make slurping noises. We were going to house strobe lights in cardboard guns, then set sound effects to a black video to give the effect of shooting. My idea was completely impractical, no matter how cool it would've been: costumes were too much, craft was too much, and this was all a sideshow to the video which we barely had enough time for. When the fog machine was denied, we collectively agreed this was dumb and scrapped it.

Early on we decided the video to be a roundtable discussion. This allowed us more freedom to express opinions, combat each other, and present the game as a debatable work of art rather than a law study. We recorded the dialogue in Ringling's soundbooths: a small, padded environment with one microphone. 2 hours of recording in, spread across several sessions, Steven wanted me to hate Halo so much. Well, out of everyone in there, I hated Halo the most, so what started off as a bland and boring political discussion became the loudmouthed mudslinging fury that you see here! The last 20 minutes of discussion ended with my Metroid comment, and most of the used dialogue is from that final discussion, after I became the villain. Funny thing is though, I still meant everything I said.

To start off the video, John wrote an introduction to brief everyone on the setting of the Halo universe before kicking off the discussion. Ty read it straight without practice, and started very smooth. Then he almost flubbed the phrase "burn your ship to the glass" for "ground." He managed to say glass, but not before losing his cool. I quickly downloaded the Halo theme on the soundbooth computer and set it to his reading as a quick gag. It was too perfect to not include in the finished product: even John agreed with that!

We recorded all of our own footage of Halo. Ty and John were masters: I was average. We managed to capture such moments as me beating up Steve in co-op (when things went sour and co-op became deathmatch), climbing atop the map and venturing in areas we weren't supposed to reach, shining a flashlight on a floor and the way lighting was programmed made the light darker, and so much things that would've been awesome to include in the video (but alas, time and a graded project).

While we were recording in Steven's dorm, on the floor's common room, Sarah, Noa, and Rachel were analyzing Limbo. To get a new firsthand perspective of the game, they asked one of us to go play it. John went, and I got a turn too! Ask them about the butterflies: I sucked at Limbo. But then we asked someone to come try playing the warthog, and most of the footage shown was actually her driving! New to Halo? Don't drive: you will suck!

The editing process was quite unusual. John handled all of the audio in Garageband, making separate tracks for different sections of the conversation (there was a blooper track that he didn't have the guts to delete). I got the audio all at once to edit in Sony Vegas 8.0 Platinum on my old computer. Nearly 2 hours of gameplay footage and 2 hours of audio were not enough: Ty and John made Photoshop stills as cutaways. They had the soundfiles to work from and emailed me the pictures as they went along (we were all in the common room on the third floor of Goldstein). One of them made a hamer crushing Mario as a joke. The joke was timed well, but in the audio, Steve made a knocking noise. I asked them to make another still of the hammer knocking with Mario already dead. So, who pushed this small gag over the top? Yeah.

The final days of editing were done in the common room on the third floor of Goldstein. A N64 with Super Smash Brothers kept the guys busy as I finished editing our last scenes. The whole project was done 30 minutes before class started. We all played Smash Bros as kind of a celebration for a project well done. That moment was the last we shared before summer began: as soon as class was over, Ty, Steve, and John had to pack up and get ready to leave their dorms for the summer. We shared a couple more class days, but the project was over. We didn't have to think about it anymore. The last class was 3D Design: our Ecorche's were being graded inside while we all waited outside for our turn. That was the last time we were all together. I made sure though to give them all a copy of the final video, and for the amusement of our friends, here it is on Youtube for all to see.

Thanks guys, for making this the most awesome group project ever!

-Michael Fahel, AKA mariomguy

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