Cutting Room Floor: Deleted Cinematics

Deleted Cinematics is a documentary film on two cinematics cut from Halo 2, featuring commentary from Bungie staff members: Joseph Staten, CJ Cowan, and John Butkus. Originally included on the Halo 2 Limited Collector's Edition. The video was later uploaded to Bungie's YouTube channel on April 16, 2010.

Transcript

Opening

DELETED CINEMATICS
_{JOSEPH STATEN,
// Writer & Cinematics Director
CJ COWAN,
// Cinematic Designer
JOHN BUTKUS,
// Animator}

• Joseph Staten: I'm Joseph Staten. I'm the director of cinematics. I'm basically in charge of making the movies, telling the story.

• CJ Cowan: I'm CJ Cowan, I am a cinematic designer.

• John Butkus: John Butkus. Animator.

Arbiter vs. Brutes

• Joseph Staten: This is a scene that used to happen in the middle of the Control Room level where the Arbiter comes across Sergeant Johnson basically about to be executed by some Brutes.

• Tartarus: This one will do. Kill the other.

• Brute #1: Yes, Chieftain. A day's ration says I do this in one cut.

• Brute #2: Two cuts at least.

• Brute #1: You're on.

• Joseph Staten: This was going to be sort of our big crazy fight scene that John and I cooked up, and John did most of the good choreography for it. And then—then we decided to simplify things. I don't know, what would you add to that, John?

• John Butkus: How do you mean "simplify"? By—by cutting it?

• Joseph Staten: (Laugh) Yeah, right. By saying, "This is stupid." No, I think if you—if you watch it, you'll see that there's just a ton of really great action, which I think ultimately we decided, one, was really hard to animate given the time that we had. So it was a fight scene that we wanted the player to actually do himself.

• Joseph Staten: I always wanted to have some big rumble between the Arbiter and a bunch of the Brutes. You don't really ever see these guys go at it unarmed, and this would be the one great situation where you see—look at that! Wha-pow! Look at that choreography! Oh, in the face!

• Joseph Staten: There's still a small part of this cinematic that is in the game. We still have the... basically the end of this cinematic where the Arbiter and Johnson are talking about what they're going to do, how they're going to actually make it to the control room to take out Tartarus. We want to get Johnson safely into the Scarab before the player could get control of things, and that's—that's what actually happens in the real game.

• Arbiter: Tell me, human. Can you drive a Scarab?

• Joseph Staten: This would lead into some gameplay, and the cool gameplay, of course, is the Arbiter riding on the Scarab tank while Johnson was driving it.

• Johnson: They're going to know we're coming!

Mural Scene

• Joseph Staten: This is the scene that used to be called the "Mural Scene," and you're about to see why. This is our big chance in the middle of the game to give the player a really clear understanding of the Covenant religion—explain how it's actually set up, what they believe in, and why. I think the original videomatic that we're looking at—it probably gave the player too much information. I think we were trying to sell the Covenant side of the story a little bit too hard.

• Arbiter: What has happened?

• SpecOps Commander: The Prophets blame us for that braggart Regret's demise and decided to replace our best warriors with these imbeciles.

• Joseph Staten: But I think the cool thing, if you look at the real cinematic in the game—the one that evolved from this—we picked the most important things, which were: the changing of the guard, the relationship—the uneasy relationship—between the SpecOps Commander and the Prophets, and then the sort of conniving way that the Prophet of Truth gets the player—the Arbiter—excited about going and completing his task. Those sort of three critical moments are still in the real cinematic, but they're done much more... much more efficiently.

• CJ Cowan: This is kind of the very beginning of the realization that the Covenant is starting to fall apart, where the Elites are kind of being ushered off to the side by the Prophets, and the Brutes are kind of coming in, and nobody really knows what's going on. The SpecOps Commander is like, "I don't know why we're being kicked out."

• Prophet of Truth: It was clear the Elites could no longer guarantee our safety.

• Arbiter: But we have always been your protectors.

• Prophet of Truth: These are trying times for all of us.

• CJ Cowan: We have this fantastic story arc that we're trying to get across, and we have all this backstory that we're trying to get across. And there comes a point, where we look at the amount of time that we have left to finish this game... and we realize we're just crazy. We're not going to be able to do all of this. And so we pick our battles with, you know, what we can cut out. And essentially, we're not losing that much by the cinematic that replaces what you see here.

• Prophet of Truth: How well do you know the Writ of Union?

• Arbiter: As well as I did the day I swore my oath.

• Prophet of Truth: Recite the first Canto.

• Arbiter: "So full of hate were our eyes that none of us could see. Our war would yield countless dead, but never victory."

• Prophet of Truth: "So let us cast arms aside and like discard our wrath. Thou, in faith, will keep us safe whilst we find the path." Hungry for power and dominion, our ancestors met on the field of battle. Indeed, I suspect we would still be at each other's throats had the Prophets not found evidence of the Forerunners and their Great Journey.

• Joseph Staten: The murals on the wall essentially walk you through the seven stages of the formation of the Covenant—from the earliest time when the Elites and the Prophets were actually mortal enemies and fighting each other, up to the sort of present day where both species, in conjunction with a handful of others—Grunts, et cetera—are actually looking for the Halo ring. So if you look at the first mural, you'll see it's a representation of the conflict between the Prophets and the Elites. And this one shows sort of the Elites' function in the Covenant, which is as the enforcers.

• Prophet of Truth: While some were shortsighted and chose to reject the promise of our Union, all were eventually swayed by the knowledge that those who joined the Covenant would be welcome on our Great Journey.

• Joseph Staten: This one here shows what the Prophets do, which is essentially search through old Forerunner ruins and find artifacts. And one of the most amazing things they found as they searched was this myth of seven rings created by the Forerunners, scattered throughout the galaxy. And this myth of the rings became the thing which drove the creation of the Covenant. It is the foundation of their religion, which is a belief that these rings are sacred objects that will, if activated, make you a god.

• Prophet of Truth: For an instant, our Lords' most splendid creation revealed its hidden power—a divine wind that would rush through the stars.

• Joseph Staten: I think that there's a great push in games these days to throw everything in first-person and to essentially remove any letterbox cinematic time. I think a lot of people are moving in that direction. I think our job is, as efficiently as possible, bracket in letterboxes those critical things the player has to know and tell them in a way that's epic and moving that you just can't always do in first-person. But we don't want to keep the player in this little rarefied, special world too long. We want to give him some questions, give him some answers, but then send him back out into the sandbox. So this is a great example of a six-minute thing that we decided, "You know, we can really do this in about four or three and a half, or maybe even less than that, and let's take that other stuff and let's sprinkle it around in all the different levels." And I think ultimately the player not just appreciates that more, but it makes it a richer game experience.