Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming: Halo 3 diorama -- Believe

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Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Halo 3 diorama -- Believe

If you're a breathing human being, like it or hate it, you're probably not going to be able to get away from Halo 3 over the next couple of weeks.

Microsoft's new "Believe" advertising campaign presents a sober take on the Halo mythos that's vaguely World War II retrospective-ish. I'm liking the campaign, because it's trying something new and gutsy, and hooking into the mythos and heroes that could make the Halo franchise more than it is currently (and hopefully, not just in a marketing capacity).

Featured in the first video, "Museum", the Halo 3 diorama (the "John-117 Monument") will be touring the country soon.

The diorama was put together by the incomparable Stan Winston (Aliens, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man 3, 300, Superman Returns) and is more than 1200 square feet (30'x40') and 12 feet tall. Each figure is handcrafted (eight to twelve inches high). Honestly, it's a beautiful piece of art.

Online, you can tour the whole diorama in an amazing camera fly-through that includes 180- and 360-degree views, enemy and participant pop-ups, and first-person accounts. The fly-through shows some stubs where more videos will be available on September 25 (the date the game launches) and (interestingly) October 1.

This is a cool mix of high-tech and traditional modeling, and is a lot of fun to spin through. More about the filming and diorama can be found at Static Multimedia. And this whole thing is "media intersection" in the coolest sense of the term.

My only gripe is I wish the first-person accounts had voice over, since this would have been a powerful addition to the piano-overlaid experience, and the text is too small to read comfortably on high-res monitors.

And there are spoilers in the fly through, so be careful. I generally "protect" myself from these kinds of things, but I'm such a Stan Winston / old-school set modeling fan, that it's worth the hit to me.

Labels: Halo, media intersection