The Art of Halo 3 - In Context

Like many projects at Bungie, Jason Jones’ Halo 2-related quip about building a cathedral in a hurricane continues to ring true. The latest construct built amidst the swirling winds is an art book, The Art of Halo 3, which releases Nov. 25th at fine retailers everywhere. Studio veteran and resident “Pixelsmith” Lorraine McLees wrangled a team of Bungie folks, and worked hand-in-hand with the book’s publisher, Prima Games, and Microsoft Game Studios to help set The Art of Halo 3 atop coffee tables everywhere.

A Hand at the Stern

Thinking back over the project she helped helm, McLees, the art book’s lead designer, quietly and confidently summarized the project’s ultimate goal with a single statement.

“We wanted to let the art speak for itself.”

It was that mantra that compelled the members of Bungie’s Creative Services team – a group of artists and creatives involved with external facing materials and visual identification for Bungie and its games – to keep a hand at the stern as The Art of Halo 3 powered along its charted course, from concept to completion.

 

This unified effort culminated with McLees and Mario De Govia – a Senior Project Manager at Prima Games – traveling to a nondescript printing facility buried in a natural surround of rolling hills and wilderness. Inside this wilderness-based, book-building outpost, one-ton spools of paper fed ravenous print presses. Ink and water married with pulp at the rate of thousands of impressions per hour.

McLees and De Govia, red-eyed and exhausted from a long plane flight, patiently waited for their chance to inspect the finished product.

In the publisher’s lexicon, this final leg of the printing process is known as the “press check,” or final proofing. It is the final chance for a creative team to make certain that the published work—the culmination of all of their efforts—will be as true to their vision as possible.

It is the last time alterations can be made.

And it can be intimidating.

As the printing process ratcheted up, the pressman invited McLees and De Govia to step into the cacophony. The pair was enveloped by the sight and sound of industrial machinery, much of which they had agreed not to photograph. Many of the methods and processes by which printing houses print, collate, and finish publications are held as closely guarded industry secrets.

Embedded in the plant, McLees and De Govia were called upon to evaluate the press sheets as they were prepared and printed. The duo made valuable use of their time, holding up proofs to scrutinize press sheets as they rolled hot off the presses. Even at that late hour, as The Art of Halo 3 was being rendered in its final form, they continued to call attention to color variances, streaks, and minor shifts in offset before signing off and giving the pressman their final approval.

That go ahead nod was not always easily earned.

After one of the prints came off the press, the shift supervisor pulled McLees aside and pointed out a discrepancy. Though the printing process is never perfect—there will always be minor variances inherent in any large scale printing operation—McLees wasn’t satisfied with the degree of difference she saw.

De Govia picked up on it. “Mario may have seen the disappointment in my face, or read the deflated body language,” McLees said.

However he made his assessment of McLees’ disappointment, De Govia’s action was decisive. He asked the shift supervisor to correct the variance. Though the presses had already been reset—the plates wiped clean and recycled—the supervisor acquiesced. The plates would be reshot and this particular leg of the printing, rerun.

De Govia, McLees notes, had ordered plenty of paper.

 

In May of 2008, the preproduction process of collecting and organizing the more than one-thousand potential images that would be used to comprise the finished pages of The Art of Halo 3 had begun. All tallied, nearly five Gigabytes of digital assets were collected from various studio repositories and marked as art book potentials—conceptualizations that had been utilized and then stored away as Halo 3 moved inexorably along the iterative path of the design process. 

“After the images have done their job, you never get to see them again,” McLees said, but each successive image marks the private and guarded path of progression, from concept art to finished product. That process is what Bungie intended to showcase.

McLees tasked the Halo 3 team with offering feedback. Much of it was positive. Some of it was not. McLees recalled one artist in particular who asked to have his piece pulled from consideration. He felt that it didn’t measure up to his standard of work, that it wasn’t representational of his talent. McLees saw it otherwise.

“That was part of the challenge,” she said, “if we only picked the finished artwork we couldn’t really connect all of the subjects together the way we wanted to.” For McLees, those connections were omnipresent throughout the process. Her vision didn’t just include the most polished artwork—inarguably the best examples of each artist’s offerings—but also the primordial work that drove the creative process towards completion.

“Not all of the concept art pieces get the same amount of time and attention,” McLees notes, “it’s all relative to where we were in the development process. We wanted to showcase our art in a similar way that the game is experienced, instead of just fitting finished elements together. We wanted to lay out a specific path, start to finish, and maintain a certain excitement throughout—a visual pacing paired with valuable sentiment—anecdotes that help make the art even more interesting.”

That vision ultimately manifested itself into 168 10”x10” pages—the measurements themselves yet another atypical design decision reached by way of Bungie, Microsoft Game Studios, and Prima Games’ willingness to collaborate. Bungie’s team knew that the book needed to “stand out,” Prima was willing to eschew typical specifications and provide insightful feedback, and Microsoft’s De Govia ultimately proposed the unusually square format. The trio, literally and figuratively, were working on the same page.

 

Those pages were kept intentionally contemporary and clean, a minimalist approach designed to let the art be the focal point. Even the supplementary graphical elements were whittled down to a Spartan selection of only four unique elements: one graphic, one noise layer, one bracket, and one pointer for captions. Such design simplicity stands out in an industry often marked by the excitement induced by exotic locales and in-your-face Hollywood-style special effects.

“We wanted to let the art speak for itself,” McLees reiterates, “to let it flow naturally.”

That flow—the framework and evolution of The Art of Halo 3—continued to be guided by collaboration.

“In strict business terms, Bungie wasn’t required to be involved since Microsoft owns the Halo IP and Prima had hired Winter Graphics North to do the graphic design work,” McLees said, “fortunately, we have a very good relationship with Microsoft’s Franchise team and they believed in our continued involvement with the Halo IP. Prima also believed in our involvement and knew that we still cared a lot about Halo and would be willing to provide as much help and, in particular, context to the content in the book.”

“At the start,” McLees notes,” it wasn’t obvious just what kind of involvement that collaboration was going to take.”

McLees is a veteran graphic designer whose first foray into running a graphics design department came at an age when most people are still struggling to pin down their college major. Some years later, now firmly entrenched in her role at Bungie, McLees admits that while she was having fun, “retouching the Chief’s butt, making sure the size of Cortana’s bust line was true to character, and making certain a toy Mongoose had the correct number of rivets,” she missed being involved in larger design projects.

 

Aaron Lemay picked up on that passion and tapped McLees to get involved with the upcoming art book. “He left it up to me to figure out what needed to get done.” Mario De Govia, project manager from Microsoft Game Studios, provided a schedule of events and opened up the lines of communication with Bungie. McLees partnered with colleague Carlos Naranjo and began collecting art assets that corresponded with the chapter headings  Prima and Winter Graphics North were using as the structure of The Art of Halo 3.

Much like the desire to allow the art to flow and evolve naturally, the creative collaboration efforts that ultimately produced The Art of Halo 3 progressed organically along its own path of growth. While there was still much work to be done, having all parties on the same page and invested in the work so early in the process helped ensure that the final result would be something everyone would be proud of—something representational of the studio’s hard work and talent.

The images had done their job. Now it was time to showcase them.

Though The Art of Halo 3 will be on store shelves tomorrow, November 25th, 2008, we're not quite down with our brief look into the process that brought it together.  Check back with us tomorrow for the third and final segment.