With Director Stu Aitkin at the helm, Axis Studios collaborated with longtime partner 343 Industries to revisit the Halo universe and create the introductory cinematic for Halo: Infinite Season Three. The piece is vital to setting the tone and readying audiences for the new season of the game. In it, audiences are witness to the unsettling wrath of the first banished AI, Iratus, as he pulls Spartan hero Dinh into a waking nightmare.
The three-minute cinematic sees Dinh travel through a number of distinctly different environments, eliciting a sense of foreboding with layered atmospherics, high-fidelity realistic FX, and the emotional performances of complex characters.
Our teams tackled the challenge of creating a tonal shift compared to previous Halo cinematics, focusing on atmosphere and mood rather than action. A significant part of this was visualising the warped narrative and location shifts. Our Art, Lighting and Compositing teams brought clarity to these dislocations in time and space, as the environments literally and figuratively darken the deeper we travel into Dinh’s journey. Creating an ominous and unsettling mood piece, this project allowed us to further evolve our levels of creative collaboration with the client.
