Marketing of Halo 3 - Promotional Videos - Trailers and Shorts

Trailers and Shorts

Halo 3 was officially announced via a cinematic trailer rendered in real-time, shown at Microsoft's press conference at E3 2006 on May 9. The trailer is set in the dry plains of Africa, with the ruins of a space elevator and other damage visible. The Master Chief is slowly revealed walking through smoke and dust, occasionally obscured by distorted images of the artificial intelligence Cortana transmitting a message composed of portions of the character's lines in the Cortana Letters, as well as a line from the poem "The Hollow Men". The distorted voice of Cortana was a deliberate clue to the character's predicament in Halo 3, with a Bungie staff member stating, "We don't know what has happened to her...We don't know it's Cortana. It could be any sort of bizarre, almost Satanic sort of voice. Something seems wrong." The trailer featured music by Martin O'Donnell, with the addition of a piano and brass section to the classic Halo theme.

Advertising company McCann Erickson created a second trailer that was aired only once on December 4, 2006. The video used a mix of computer-created graphics and live action; computer graphics were produced by Digital Domain and directed by Joseph Kosinski. The spot, dubbed "Starry Night", was seen by 7.9 million viewers in its broadcast and watched more than 3.5 million times on YouTube by September 2007. The final trailer, shown during E3 2007 on July 11, consisted of actual campaign cinematics and gameplay.

The video teasers for Halo 3 included a series of videos directed by Neill Blomkamp, the proposed director of a possible Halo film produced by Peter Jackson. Unlike previous trailers and videos, the shorts were the first to depict the Halo universe in a live-action setting. The production was a collaboration between Weta Workshop, Neill Blomkamp and Bungie. When asked about the shorts, Neill said that he hoped that it would help to interest movie studios in his currently inactive movie project, since it lost its studio support in October 2006. GameTrailers released a compilation of the three videos edited together, titling it Landfall.

The first live action video, titled Arms Race, was originally shown at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2007. It was followed up by another short, Combat, which featured Covenant and human vehicles and weapons. The final video in the series aired on October 4, 2007 and was used by Discovery Channel to promote their reality show Last One Standing. The short ties the events depicted to the beginning of Halo 3, which begins as the Master Chief plummets to Earth.