Halo 3: Iris

Iris is one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on.  By the time it got to me the idea and structure had been flushed out but all I got was "we're going to make an ARG, it will be long and complicated, and at the end of each part we want there to be a video being played through an alien server."

When they asked for that they had no idea what anything was going to look like. The server, the environment it was housed in, and the video itself were all up for grabs.  So I along with my immediate supervisor set about designing the actual servers themselves.  We each came up with 4 different designs, and internally decided on 1 that could be subtly modified and repeated to create 5 different servers.  Mine didn't get chosen which meant I was tasked with the rest of the materials needed to make the servers.

This turned out to be the best job I could have ever hoped for.  I wound up being put in charge of all the environments that the servers would be housed in as well as all of the content videos that would play when the user figured out which symbol to click on.

There were Five in total.  For the most part they were edited with Final Cut Pro, and tweaked, colored, and effected in After Effects.  When the videos called for assets that couldn't be bought as stock footage, or shot locally, I wound up doing some work in Maya to fill in the gaps.

Below are the 5 videos:

Server 1

Server 2

Server 3

Server 4

Server 5