Halo 4 - Spartan Ops: Season One

Halo 4 - Spartan Ops: Season One
Richard Scott and Stu Aitken Interview

The Halo franchise is one of the biggest entertainment IPs in the world. The Xbox-developed game has had numerous best-selling iterations, with novels, comics, anime, machinema spin-offs and a potential movie all utilising and expanding on the virtual universe. For the launch of Halo 4, developer 343 Industries and animation company Axis which is represented by Flaunt Productions (also located Glasgow Scotland)  have collaborated on story-driven web series ‘Spartan Ops: Season One’ - an episodic adventure that blends immersive storytelling, high-quality cinematics and action-packed gameplay to deliver an unprecedented serialized experience. Connecting the dots between the downloadable gameplay available for users of Halo 4, the 10 episodes contain 45 minutes of content, more than 30 characters, 23 sets and 1200-plus shots. We chatted to the guys at Axis (famous for their incredible ‘Dead Island’ launch trailer) about the scale and pressure of such a project.

How did you come to be involved in the Halo 4 webseries?

Richard Scott, Axis, Executive Producer - We had been working with Microsoft Game Studios on a few different projects and we’d always hoped we’d get a crack at being involved with Halo, it is such a massive brand in the games world and so rich in story and characters.

We were first approached in the very early days of the project and asked to create a proposal that contained options on how we could tackle a 10 episode series with a total running time of up to 60 minutes. We set to work on treatments, creative and styleframes that proposed a range of approaches from stylised 2d animation to a live action and CGI mix. Our focus at that point was on a solution that could deliver character and story plus feel like it was grounded in the Halo canon.

From here we were asked to consider how we’d approach a fully photoreal CGI approach, a big challenge for anyone. Fellow Axis owner and director Stu Aitken was really excited about this as it meant we were not going to be limited in delivering compelling performances by the animation style.

What was the development of the storyline like? Did you guys have much of a say or was it steered by the game-makers?

Stu Aitken, Axis, Director - 343 Industries and Microsoft Game Studios have their own narrative development team for Halo. These guys know this world and the complexity of its backstory inside out - Halo exists as more than just a video game; there are Graphic Novels, Books, Anime. The story so far is massive and the hardcore fans know it well.

However, even with that in mind the team at 343 Industries were very keen to collaborate on the Spartan Ops scripts and not just hand off something to us fully formed, which is an approach we found refreshing and appreciate greatly. One of the reasons Axis and myself were chosen as the partners for the Spartan Ops episodes was because the creative team at 343 felt that we had something strong to offer on the creative side and that we ‘got’ Halo, understood what they were trying to do with this and were passionate about it.

I worked alongside 343 Industries internal Spartan Ops script writer Brian Reed and spent many weeks tossing script versions back and forth, refining dialogue, tweaking story-beats, working out how best to tell interesting character based stories in what were relatively short run times for each episode.

Additionally the games team and what they were doing with the associated mission structures also needed to feed into the process and Halo 4 Game Director Josh Holmes would ultimately have the final say, but it was a very collaborative and creatively rewarding pre-production process from my point of view.

Creating 10 cinematic shorts is no easy undertaking. How long have you been working on the project? What’s the rough production length for each episode?

Richard Scott - This is by far the biggest project we have ever done, over 45 minutes of content, 1200 shots, over 30 characters. End to end we will have done 12 months on the project, pre-production began in February 2012 and we will be delivering episode 10 about 12 months later.

Putting a timescale on the production length of each episode isn’t so easy, we’ve obviously had to create all of the assets for the episodes and shoot all of the performances first, and these were done over the first 4-6 months of the production. We are also creating multiple episodes in parallel with teams of animators and artists dedicated to producing shots and sequences for a particular episode.

The films are extremely movielike and bombastic in their scale and setting, yet have more dialogue and relationship development moments than many would expect. How did you find the balance? Did the attention-span of the audience concern you?

Stu Aitken - The main thing that was agreed at the outset was that to be interesting the episodes had to have a very strong character based element to them - ultimately the audience had to care about these characters to get involved in what was happening to them, and that drove everything else.

It’s safe to say that there was the intent, right from the beginning, to push the story side and especially character development, beyond what people might have expected for this type of game - that’s also true in terms of what 343 Industries did with the single player campaign, which played very heavily on the relationship between Masterchief and Cortana.

At the same time a franchise like Halo of course demands a fair amount of action and the Halo universe is all about epic scale and setting. In our very first proposal to 343 Industries we really made a point of saying we wanted the world to be authentic Halo, to us that mean scale, and lots of it.

Taking on a beloved IP like Halo is dangerous ground when it comes to fanboy reaction. How did you ensure you wouldn’t receive an angry backlash? Was that a consideration when constructing the episodes?

Stu Aitken - Indeed an IP as big as Halo does give a lot of scope to rub the fans up the wrong way!
Ultimately we had to follow the lead set by the narrative team at 343 Industries - Halo 4 was obviously a big thing for the guys at 343 Industries and they had a very strong sense of exactly how to steer things from that point of view.

For my part we tried to make sure I was as enmeshed within the Halo canon as I possibly could be and many of the crew at Axis were big fans of the previous games anyway, so we had our own internal compass to an extent. I spent a lot of time getting inside the Halo canon, reading all the novels, playing all the previous games, watching spin off animated material, digesting as much of the world as possible, then later, working with both 343 and our internal Art Direction team to ensure every design that we came up with, every shot we created felt like Halo. Not just the Halo from the past however but Halo 4.

The virtual performances in the films are very fluid and realistic. Did you use performance capture technology or more traditional techniques? Were the character models based on real people?

Richard Scott - Over the last few years we have been developing our own pipeline in house to make our character performances as authentic as possible. This has included improved facial animation, better shaders and rendering for characters but more than anything the focus has been on working with the best acting talent.

We worked collaboratively with 343 Industries on the casting and then shot the performance capture sessions with Giant Studio in LA who are best known for providing the performances on James Cameron’s Avatar. These sessions are shot just like a live action shoot, we were recording the actors' performance and their dialogue simultaneously.

For the characters' heads we did scan real people in a number of different ways (in some cases the actual actors' likenesses were used, in other cases we cast models to use for reference scans), both static neutral poses at very high resolution and a number of additional scans to capture a wide range of facial expressions which were then used as the base for a fairly complex rigging setup we had been developing over the past couple of years. We are able to drive our in house rigging system with video data extracted from the performance shoot that gave a very accurate representation of what each actor’s face was doing during their performance

In all cases though there is always the hand of an excellent animator involved, refining the performance and making it as believable as possible on the CG characters - performance capture is never a perfect solution, you always have to do a final pass where you polish things and make sure they work as well as possible by hand.

What’s the reaction been like so far?

Stu Aitken - We’ve been delighted with the reaction so far. The fans are loving it and many people have picked up on the fact that there is a great feeling of depth to the story and world. We are also getting great reactions from non-gamers, which is really important to us.

A lot of ‘added value’ content seems to have little-to-no relevance to the product other than the look and feel, but these films plug much more into the storytelling structure of the actual game. Was it important to have that level of integration and do you think it’s something we’ll see more of in the future?

Richard Scott - What 343 Industries and Microsoft Game Studios are trying to do here hasn’t really been done before. It is a first-of-its-kind approach to deliver an unprecedented serialized experience. The idea was that the episodes would deliver story to the players via their Xbox when they are playing Spartan Ops but also that the story could be watched by others, potential new fans to the Halo series. So the integration to the game is the key driver for the creation of these episodes but it is not their only purpose.

You guys were behind the multi-award-winning ‘Dead Island’ trailer, which seemed to be one of the first examples of game-related cinematic content that was taken seriously as a stand-alone emotional piece. Were you aware of the impact it would make when you crafted it? Has it now made you the go-to guys for videogame marketing?

Stu Aitken - When we made the Dead Island trailer we knew we had made something special but at the time we thought it would be something special for gamers. We didn’t expect the crossover nature of that project at all. At the heart of what made the Dead Island trailer successful was story and characterisation that made the audience respond to that story, and that is what is at the heart of the work on the Halo 4 Spartan Ops episodes as well.

I love to create visually stunning work but we also want people to engage on an emotional level. This is something we want to bring to all our work whether it’s associated with games or not, but specifically it’s something we think that gaming needs more of - better deeper stories, with more believable, fleshed-out characters that make those stories matter to those experiencing them.

There’s been talk of a Halo movie for a while. Have you guys thrown your hat in the ring?

Stu Aitken - Nobody has explicitly asked us at this point, but you can be 100% sure our hat is ready to get thrown into that particular ring at any time!

We’d love to be involved in developing our involvement in Halo further as the experience has been incredible for everyone at Axis.

What’s up next?

Richard Scott - As is the way with video games a lot of what we do we can’t talk about until it is out there in the world. We have two new trailers launching soon for other games and are involved in another very narrative heavy project right now. Working with Little Minx & RSA we are also looking to develop more into commercials and branded content and take Stu’s experience working with character led stories into live action.

Published December, 2012