The Sprint: Osiris

The Sprint: Osiris is a video documentary by 343 Industries, about the development of Halo 5: Guardians.

Transcript

• Announcer Sprint : Making a game on the scale of Halo takes hundreds of people with different skills, a singular vision and time. Lots of time. But before a game reaches store shelves, the team must create thousands of assets that are tracked in two-week deadline, we call Sprints. 343 Industries invites you to join us on our journey, creating Halo 5 Guardians from the ground up, one painting, sound and line of code at a time. This is The Sprint.

January 25, 2015
Seattle, Washington

• Brien Goodrich : We’re going down to LA today to shoot a lot of the characters driven scenes. We've been focusing a lot on mostly stunt and action sequences in the last couple months. Typically we would really shoot a little less in a normal four-day shoot, this four-day shoot is going to be a little aggressive. It's gonna consist of two pretty robust rehearsal days and then two significant shoot days. Again we were able to get everyone on set together for a limited time, so we've kind of gotta cram as much as we can in these four days as possible. It's an ensemble cast this time, so availability is tough to schedule sometimes. We're shooting our opening sequence in the Pelican deployment Bay Area where we meet our team, Osiris team, for the first time. Locke, Tanaka, Vale and Buck. These sheets show the briefing room scenes which are on the Infinity. Again that's just a different challenge then, getting all four together because the majority of those sequences are really about Chief and Cortana. You go for maybe two or three characters and you jump to, you know, six, seven, eight. So technically that's, you know, eight face setups on a day, eight audio mics, eight head cams, you know, more makeup people to come in and put dots on faces and then when you put all those actors on set together, the sort of chaos factor kind of goes exponential. Should be a good trip.

EPISODE 2 : OSIRIS

343 Industries
Kirkland, Washington

• Tim Longo : There's obviously an intro cinematic that would lead into, it leads into, every mission has one of them. For E3 we've actually cut things in from cinematics throughout the games, to sort of build that story, build the mythos of what the mission is, who the key players are, but yeah we definitely do edit out things so we didn't give away too much.

Burbank, California
First Day of Rehearsal

• Brien Goodrich : It’s still work in progress man, but uh…
• ? : This is a little rough, sure.
• Mike Colter : That's crazy. That's my face, dude, wtf! It's my face!
• Brien Goodrich : We fade down, we fade up into where Osiris is and we have Buck and Locke talking about the idea of going after Chief. Effectively it has a front part of the scene and a back part of the scene. With the front part of the scene, it takes place in the briefing room, and the back part of the sequence takes place in the infinity kind of hangar bay area. Out that way is a large window, we can see out into space, over here, check this. Roland is here, Lasky's right there with the ?[…]?, right. The monitors are behind you, here our table which Roland is on, and like I said this is back, there's our window.
• Darren O’Hare : Alright, so we're doing a little something at the top here, like am I, am I like in the console?
• Brien Goodrich : Yeah we'll have like some screens that are up here between you and him, so yes.
• Darren O’Hare : I’ll be working on something.
• ? : This table is just a little bit too big, since, you know, it's probably four inches on that side, maybe four to six inches on each side.
• Brien Goodrich : Can we get it closer, dimensions wise?
• ? : If you want to do some construction we certainly can.
• Brien Goodrich : Ready? And action.
• Jen Taylor : “I tried to warn you this was happening!”
• Darren O’Hare : “…and he's gone in search of her.”
• Jen Taylor : “You let him go?”
• Brian T. Delaney : “How is that…”
• Jennifer Hale : “Nobody lets the Chief do anything. He does what he wants.”
• Darren O’Hare : “Until 0630 this morning, when he was declared absent without leave.”
• Brian T. Delaney : “This isn't about the Master Chief.”
• Jen Taylor : “John is not equipped emotionally to deal with her as a threat…”
• Brian T. Delaney : “Hey ! Is anyone going to answer me?!”
• Darren O’Hare : “You're out of line Roland.”
• Brian T. Delaney : “Yes sir. But so is everyone else!”
• Brien Goodrich : And cut. How'd that feel?
• Jen Taylor : Well.
• Brien Goodrich : My notes to myself is “it's worse than you think”. I don't know if that help you.
• Darren O’Hare : It does.
• Brien Goodrich : Okay.
• Darren O’Hare : And is this like an I-told-you-so moment, obviously I'm like “we've been through this before”.
• Jen Taylor : “I told you you were stupid”.
• Darren O’Hare : Do I believe in there, too? Am I kind of defending him like he might be on a mission that's good.

March 25, 2015

Demo Animation Review
Three Months Until E3

• Alyson “Zippy” Szymanski : Just don't die in the next 30 seconds. I have to say that cuz Juan Carlos isn't good at it.
• T.J. Perillo : It's true.
• Zippy : For the sake of this, let's try to all get together at the beginning before you go in.
• T.J. Perillo : Yeah bunch up in the archway and go through together as much as you can.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : Three, two, one, go.
• ? : I got teleported there.
• T.J. Perillo : Well you got popped in the position. I don't know, that didn't look too bad to me.
• Chris Woods : Do you want to show me where that dodgy-looking thing was?
• Juan Carlos Larrea : Yeah, so if you stay behind a little, get, get close to where the platform falls. Stay behind and you'll see the far end of the platform, you'll see geometry colliding as it falls down.
• Chris Woods : Oh, I got trapped.
• ? : Okay, on the right-hand side.
• T.J. Perillo : A lot of things have to come together for this sequence to play believably and reliably. And we're just sorting out which components are solid and which ones are giving us trouble and trying to triage out, what we're going to do about each.
• Zippy : We also want a good experience for all four players and so testing that in this type of environment allows us to play through it, see everyone's point of view over and over again.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : Yeah to me, most of it plays really really well there's one section that I think we need to add a little bit more camera shake.
• Chris Woods : I should've asked you while you're in there.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : There's performance things to keep in mind too. It's a lot of, a lot of memory coming from environments, from loop animations, from effects and destruction. So it's a pretty complex area.
• Zippy : We're really trying to make sure it doesn't turn into just another scripted video game experience. Like we want the player to actually play it.
• T.J. Perillo : It's a tall order.
• Tim Longo : Halo 5 is really, very co-op centric, the way we build the levels, the way we build the game itself and the way that we've constructed the characters that you play as in the game. So we actually have two different teams in Halo 5. You have Blue Team, which is kind of all brothers and sisters brought back together from the Spartan-II program, and then you have the Spartan-IVs, fireteam Osiris, which is Locke’s team. You know we have Vale who's our rookie, we have Tanaka who’s a little bit more of a veteran, we have Buck who used to be an ODST. So when you're playing as co-op you're playing as each of these characters rather than just generic, you know, alternates of Chief. And so throughout the story you're alternating between both of those teams.

Design Review
Heads Up Display (“HUD”)

• Eric Will : There's no visual hierarchy or attenuation in these wires yet, so don't get too concerned with the fact that they're all like one hundred percent full white. You know I'll organize them and push and fade them back so that, you know, maybe like the cradles, obviously the health bar, are a little more visible than things like the elevation. Those are here just to add some kind of fancy. It's just like if you ever put on a motorcycle helmet you know you're not really cognizant of, like, the detail, the padding up on your cheeks you know. The last one here was Kelly and she has the EVA visor and all this stuff, I mean, I definitely used her helmet as a template, so actually very conveniently lines like this and the health bar actually match up perfectly with this little horseshoe in her glass, so I tried to be very ergonomic about finding complements, you know, some… I'm not really inventing too many false lines in any of these concepts, I'm really working off of the truth in the model. And that is all I have on Blue Team, I still need to do Fred. Well Jeff actually has done some really interesting explorations into quick projecting normals onto the glass. You actually got a lot of identity of who that Spartan is from the reflection on the glass.
• ? : Yep, on the glass paneling.
• Jeff Christy : And then we have wires on top of this but hopefully we can rely less on the wires and kind of rely on this stuff, because I think this captures better the overall shape of the helmet than like our static wires could do.
• Tim Longo : Yeah I love this stuff, I love doing bold stuff like this we're all, you know, we're always going to be strapped with how much to do that you know and when it impacts gameplay. And starts conflicting with the other stuff going on, because you have this, you have effects flashing, you have lens flares, you know, stretches the layers start getting crazy.
• Eric Will : I think both was Jeff's demonstration here and with these illustrations, I think we're being deliberately kind of heavy-handed just for proof of just to kind of sell the idea. But I think in practice this stuff you're gonna find this stuff like fifty percent, like, to either tone down and push out.
• Tim Longo : Yeah it just feels more interactive, it feels more, more modern.
• ? : Thanks guys.

Performance Capture

• Connor Murphy : So the new dual camera setup that we have on Halo 5, lets us get a stereo view of all Brian's markers so that we can see them with 3D coordinates that's going to make everything a lot more accurate and give us an even better facial solve.
• Brian T. Delaney : What he said.
• Connor Murphy : Guys on standby.
• Tim Eulich : Oh yeah. Ready for trouble. With my cool assault rifle.
• Brien Goodrich : This is the second part of 60, and it's basically Locke and Buck having a moment where Buck’s really unsure and uncomfortable about the fact that they're gonna go track Chief.
• Matt Campbell : Travis here is our backup Buck. Travis is also our primary Fred as well in Blue Team, and we’ll basically be taking his entire performance, if we can’t get Nathan Fillion in here and then we'll just have Nathan do some audio on top of his performance.
• Brien Goodrich : So there's, there's Locke. So we're going to start here, walk around that side of the right side of the table. And action !
• Travis Willingham : “So you're okay with this. This isn't just another target.”
• Mike Colter : “Every target is just another target, Buck.”
• Travis Willingham : “For you maybe. Locke. Every other Spartan, every other soldier who knows we're after him. They're gonna hate us. You know that, right?”
• Mike Colter : “You're not the only one here because of him.”
• Brien Goodrich : Let's cut here.
• Matt Campbell : Cut.
• Brien Goodrich : 60 frames 7. And action !
• Travis Willingham : “Locke. Every other Spartan, every other soldier who knows we're after him. They're gonna hate us. You know that, right?”
• Mike Colter : “You're not the only one here because of him.”
• Brien Goodrich : Let's cut there. That was a good shot. Stand by.

Three Months Later

• ? : We captured, we shot Travis. We actually got Nathan into the studio to redo the entire scene with Mike Colter. Within these blue lines I'm attached to a camera inside of our actual scene, so I can follow people around as kind of a natural cameraman would. It's as if Nathan Fillion and Buck are standing right here.
• Brien Goodrich : Right. Right. And action !

End of The Sprint
Next on

• ? : 700 bugs and 17 days it's crazy.
• Sparth : We have a lot of weapons so we have a lot of different designs.