The creative team behind the Halo TV show reveals how they brought the ultra-detailed weapons of the video games to life on the small screen. With the first game having been released in 2001, the Halo franchise has now been entertaining fans for over twenty years. With the games only growing more popular as new entries were released, attempts have been made for years to adapt Halo into a feature film or series. After the lukewarm reception to several smaller live-action Halo projects, Paramount+'s take on the games is poised to finally give fans a worthwhile adaptation.
Initial trailers for Halo suggest that the creative team behind the show has gone to great lengths to recreate elements from the games. From Master Chief's iconic armor to the weapons and ships of the UNSC and the alien Covenant, Halo has never seen an adaptation this big in scale before. Halo sees Pablo Schreiber take up the mantle of Master Chief, with the likes of Natasha McElhone, Yerin Ha, Charlie Murphy, Bokeem Woodbine, Shabana Azmi, Olive Gray, and Danny Sapani rounding out the supporting cast. Well known to players of the games, Jen Taylor is also reprising her role as the voice of Master Chief's AI companion, Cortana.
In a new behind-the-scenes featurette in collaboration with IGN, some members of the creative team behind Halo go into detail regarding how they brought the games' iconic weaponry to life. As Props Master Andrew Orlando explains, his department created countless weapons for the show, starting off with relatively simple solid plastic versions before eventually iterating on the design and making metal weapons that can be taken apart, cleaned, and cocked. Check out the full comments from Orlando and 343 Senior Halo Franchise Writer Kenneth Peters below:
Andrew Orlando: "We started off with a solid plastic weapon and then, as the show's progressed, we've had ones they can take apart for cleaning. We've had weapons that we've fabricated for magazine changes and you can actually cock the weapon."
Kenneth Peters: "A lot of the weapons and various props that we use, from the beginning used 3D models from the game as initial reference and block-outs for the actual props. Most of this actually comes from Halo: Reach, though, fans will notice there's also some Halo 3 designs here, and all the way up to and including our most recent game."
Being a first-person shooter, the weapons of Halo are always front and center when one is playing the games. As such, many fans of the games are now intimately familiar with how the guns of Halo look, feel, and sound, be they human or alien in origin. The props department on Halo has evidently put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that all of these weapons are as close to the games as possible. Orlando would go on to explain that the props department paid particular attention to getting the scale of each weapon right, with the larger Covenant weapons still having to be manageable by Master Chief if he were to pick one up.
With previous live-action Halo adaptions never quite catching on, it certainly looks like the creative team behind the new show is working hard to make sure that every small detail is correct. The trailers for Halo have already shown some of the franchise's iconic weapons in action and, hopefully, when the show does eventually air, they live up to fans' high expectations. Halo is set to premiere on Paramount+ on March 24.
Source: IGN
