The Art of Halo 3 - In Context
Yesterday, we supplied you with a pair of narrative interviews detailing parts of the collaborative process that birthed The Art of Halo 3. Today, we conclude our examination with the final installment.
Finding the Voice
Before The Art of Halo 3 could be sent off the presses to be given the voice McLees and the Creative Services team had envisioned, Bungie would have to fight a few battles on the home front. At one moment, McLees described the project as “harrowing,” but her smile never waivers.
“Almost all of the concept art in the book was never meant to be seen outside the studio,” she says. In the case of many of the pieces, only a dozen pairs of eyes had ever been laid on them. And while many of those images looked great on screen, and had done the job they were designed to do, hundreds hadn’t been saved in a high enough resolution to do themselves justice at twenty inches across.
McLees also recognized that there were some contextual issues that needed to be addressed. In some cases, that meant certain subjects and locales simply weren’t given any coverage. “Giving context to the art also meant making sure characters like the Brutes, Elites, and Cortana were in areas that made sense.” McLees, along with coworkers Aaron Lemay and Kris Hamper, and Winter Graphics North designer Derek Hocking, spent the next three weeks – the final twenty-one days of production—making sure the art book adhered to a strict code of relevance, purpose, and quality.
Even while embroiled in the final throes of the assembly process, the team maintained their unyielding adherence to the integrity of the art. They stayed late to add and review feedback. They worked on layouts, dropped in new potentials, filled in blanks, and made revisions. As the digital layouts made the rounds from Winter Graphics North, Prima, Microsoft, and then to Bungie, McLees and her team made certain that the color conflicts they detected in the images were corrected, even going as far as to consider how disparate platforms—PC and Mac—might be influencing the visual results.
“As an art director and graphics designer, it was a nail-biting issue,” McLees recalled. The complexity of all the design process pieces boiled down to an essential question: “Will the colors look right or won’t they?”
Color accuracy wasn’t the only concern. Late in the process, Prima brought Winter Graphic North into direct communication with Bungie to make certain the design aspects of The Art of Halo 3 were kept in line with the overall vision. Together they continued to make shifts in the font design to enhance clarity while maintaining simplicity, and they poured through captions to make sure late additions, reshufflings, and omissions in art were accounted for within The Art of Halo 3’s unique narrative. Bungie was determined to ensure the right vision was being executed.
Internally at Bungie, Art Director Marcus Lheto, along with writers Robt McLees and Luke Smith, were tapped to make sure that any words contained within The Art of Halo 3 would adhere to that same vision, reading as Smith notes, “as a singular voice.”
“Any writing in the book,” Smith continued, “was done solely to be the sidecar to the art’s sweet motorcycle. It’s really all about the art.”
Robt echoed the sentiment and supplied an analogy of his own: “I’ve been at Bungie an awfully long time—and I have influenced, and been influenced by, the Bungie ‘voice.’ So while I was looking at the book-as-work-in-progress, I wrote about the contents in a manner consistent with that voice. This is how I would talk about these subjects with fellow employees—shy a few four letter words.” When asked about the tone and style of his writing for The Art of Halo 3, McLees waxed delicious. “Everything I did was gravy. Lorraine would tell me where to pour it and how much.”
The shifting layout alterations—even late, last minute modulations—didn’t stun either writer.
“I was writing as things were changing and thusly was in constant contact with Lorraine to make sure what I was writing was what she needed me to write,” Robt said, “and if she didn’t have a ready answer and told me to go ask so-and-so, then that was the so-and-so that I would go and talk to.”
“Writing is a much less complicated thing to change than the layout,” Smith said, “it’s malleable, and especially in this case, it could all be adjusted, tweaked, reformed, and edited into what was best for the book.”
What was best for the book, as was the case throughout its production, was to let the art do the heavy lifting. When prompted to summarize the collaborative process and to detail where and how he was involved with the artists and the layout process, Robt distilled the perceived complexity of the writing process into its basic components. “Lorraine asked me for some words, I gave her some words. She asked me for less words, I trimmed down the words. This is an art book, not a word book—and if Lorraine was happy, then I had done my job properly.”
That job properly done, The Art of Halo 3 was ready for the printing press.
Capturing a months long labor of love with words alone is an impossible task. Fortunately, today, November 25th, 2008, The Art of Halo 3 will be available at major retailers for purchase. The trio of short narratives on display here will continue to serve as a minor companion piece to that work: an incomplete chronicling of the overall effort, told from a unique and hopefully insightful perspective. Though these words have been carefully crafted, they could never do the project, the people involved, and the finished project the justice they deserve. Today, it no longer matters, The Art of Halo 3 speaks for itself.