MPC's teams helped bring the much-loved Halo Universe to life for fans and new audiences across world, via Paramount+’s new TV series adaptation, which was released on 24th March 2022.
Dramatizing an epic 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant, Halo the series weaves personal stories with a large dose of action, adventure, and a richly imagined vision of the future. MPC VFX Supervisors Craig Calvert and Tim Ledbury, and VFX Producers Nick Colanger and Nicola Kingham, led the project from our London and Toronto studios. With over 400 shots across epic battle scenes, to recreating key characters, we aligned with client production to capture the essence of the Halo Universe into a more photoreal setting for viewers.
Roel Reiné
Jonathan Liebesman
Jessica Lowrey
Tim Ledbury
A core focus for our teams in Toronto was breathing life into hero Covenant creatures The Prophets of Mercy, Elites (Sangheili), and Lekgolo worms. The Prophets were a wonderful mix of traditional onset puppetry and our CG takeover of the head and neck. A practical version of the character enabled a certain realness for the actors, and for lighting and shot composition references. Our work included the painting out of the head and neck and VFX shots utilising motion capture.
Our work included bringing fantastical elements of the video game into a more realistic setting, notably shown in the opening battle sequence on Madrigal with the Sangheili. Our creature and digidouble work spanned 120+ shots of gory mayhem. Stunt crew were replaced with motion capture and keyframe animated versions of the creatures interacting with the chaos around them. Multiple skin and pattern types were required, as well as facial variations, rankings, and damage states. Finally, there was also all the dynamic FX gore for exploding heads and alien blood!
Horror elements were brought into the show through the Lekgolo worm attack. Which included a swarming Lekgolo wriggling across arbitrary surfaces and around their targets. Multiple rounds of animation style guides for both individual and clews of worms were developed as reference for the FX teams.
The final battle takes place around an ancient temple on a high mountain plateau. We delivered most of the internal work, including building and sharing a full temple asset to extend the twelve foot practical walls into a vaulted ceiling. For the exterior closeups we extended with a weathered asset, with distant shots for all vendors being a full CG temple.
Our London team concentrated on the fifth episode, ‘The Reckoning,’ in which human UNSC and alien Covenant troops engaged in a spectacular and chaotic battle scene for possession of an ancient artifact on the planet Eridanus.
We focused on creature work/animation for close quarters fighting between humans/MC, digital doubles, energy weapon FX including CG fire, smoke and dust combined into the location photography with some shots requiring over 100 CG elements. Not to mention all the CG explosions, burning debris, plasma, alien bodies, blood, gore, entrails and more!
