From hbo:

Vengeance417 stopped in with word of Serenity, a ‘beauty of Halo’ music vid – loved it! Go watch.

Serenity – A Halo Music Video

 

As you may have seen on your local news, a larger than normal amount of snow fell on the greater Seattle area last week. The down side was that dangerous commuting conditions forced many of us to take a few unintended days off. The up side? More time for Halo! Now that things have (mostly) thawed, we wanted to dive right back into the realm of Multiplayer and go for some serious carnage. Fans of the Magnum and Plasma Pistol rejoice, because this weekly challenge is for you:

SINGLE WIELD – 20,343cR
Earn 200 kills with small arms weapons in Multiplayer Matchmaking.

Don’t forget to jump on the forums to talk about your favorite small arms strategies and build your unstoppable squad!

Weekly Challenge Thread

Weekends and webcomics go hand in hand, and there’s no better day to celebrate that relaxing ritual than on Sunday. Today’s
Halo-themed Weekend Webcomic, which chronicles the unknown story of the Spartan named Jun, is brought to you by Levi Hoffmeier. Enjoy this incredible fan-made series, and if you have a comic you’d like to submit for possible future inclusion, send it to bsangel[at]halowaypoint.com!

by: Levi Hoffmeier

You’re a busy person, and we have a thing for releasing as much Halo-related content our multi-fingered appendages can handle. That means—assuming you aren’t a speed reading super-soldier—you probably missed a few stories along the way. Not only do we forgive you, but we’ll also happily provide a convenient weekly wrap-up of absolutely everything we covered during the last seven days. Don’t worry about saying thank you. We’d rather you spend that time soaking in the goodness that is this entertaining collection of articles. Off you go!

News
The Halo Bulletin: 1.18.12
Halo Avatar Collection – January
McFarlane Toys to Create Halo 4 Action Figures
McFarlane Toys to Create Halo Avatar Figures
McFarlane Toys Brings the Entire Halo Universe to Collectors with Halo Micro Ops
343 Industries Community Playdate, 1.19.12
Reach Weekly Challenge – 1.16.12

Videos
Wind Chill – A Halo Mega Bloks Toymation
I Don’t Mind – A Halo: Reach Trick Jumping Montage
Airfield SX – A Halo: Reach Racetrack Review
Reach Customz: Flooded Mines
Banana Sandwich – A Halo 3/Reach Montage
Tyrant’s Halo 3 Legendary Walkthrough – Sierra 117
Key Activated Doors – A Halo: Reach Epic Forge Tutorial
Halo: Reach Top 10 Multikills
Jumping the Guntaz – A Halo: Reach Trick Jumping Montage
Shuffling Hunter – A Halo: Reach Video
Fails of the Weak 70
Cha Cha Ultra – A Halo: Reach Video

Fun Stuff
Weekend Webcomic: A Fistful of Arrows p.4
Tattoo Tuesday: Master Chief and Cortana
Press X to Ride – Halo Cross Stitch
A 117 Picture Gallery
Halo IRL: Spartan in a Box
Friday Caption Fun 36
How to Make Machinima, Part 3 – by CruelLEGACEY

Community Happenings
Podtacular Talks MLG
Community Member of the Week: ShadEO9
TTL Takes a Deep Dive into DMR Behavior
Revolutions – A Fan Collection of Stories and Art

Halo: Reach Screenshots
The Force – Freakin’ Funny
Vault 117 – Fun with Forge
Victory Run – Simply Amazing
Motorbike – Fun with Forge
Frozen Spartan – Simply Amazing

HRSotD (short for Halo: Reach Screenshot of the Day) is a daily feature dedicated to the wonders of Halo: Reach screenshots and the artists that capture these amazing images. A variety of shots—all of which are completely unaltered and captured in Halo: Reach’s theater mode—are included for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy the varied selection of images, and maybe even find inspiration to make your own!

Author: Advanced 90

Louis Wu over at halo.bungie.org saw the Shuffling Hunter video we posted earlier today and felt compelled to pass along this creation. If you’ve already seen it, it’s worth another watch. If you haven’t, hurry up and press play! It’s the button “to the left,” just in case you didn’t know….

Cha Cha Ultra

From CruelLEGACEY:

So far we’ve covered everything you need to know about planning your machinima, recording the voices, and making storyboards or animatics. This week, I’ll be walking you through the process of filming your Halo: Reach machinima.

First: the basics. I do all of the filming for Playtime in offline Halo: Reach custom games. I set up a custom game with the forge map and game settings that I need to film a scene. I then sit down with four controllers in front of me and act out the scene in split screen mode. After acting out each scene, I switch to Theater mode and record all the shots I need, upload them to my file share, and render the clips. I can then download all the clips to my computer. Of course, there is a wide variety of capture devices available for recording video from your Xbox to your computer.

Filming Playtime Season 2 is a logistical nightmare. Because I do all the body acting myself, I need to plan out every element of every single shot extremely carefully. The most obvious challenge is the physical task of manipulating multiple characters at the same time. This leads to some tricky controller juggling as I quickly swap back and forth between characters to act out a scene. As I described in Part 1 of this guide, I already have all the dialog for Playtime Season 2 recorded and edited into a rough mix. I use this audio file as a guide to follow when acting out each scene. I load the audio into my iPod, put my headphones on, and press play. I then move the characters on-screen in time to their voices. This ensures that the characters’ movements and head bobs are very much in sync with their speech.

Some people will do the filming for their machinima first, and then record the voices afterwards. This is how I filmed Playtime Season 1. When making the first season, I would actually do all the filming at the beginning, then record the dialog and try to get it to sync up the character’s movements through editing. This proved to be incredibly time-consuming, and the results were often not on the level I wanted them to be. When you compare Season 1 to Season 2, you will notice that every character’s body and head movements are far more tightly in sync with their voices.

Here’s an example of a shot that features a conversation between Warren and Cobra. Remember, this is the rendered video straight from the Halo: Reach theater mode, so you won’t actually hear their voices.



As tricky as the body acting can be, it really is just the tip of the iceberg. For every single shot, I need to consider the following factors:

1. Spawning and respawning, and other map requirements.
2. Weapons, loadouts, and other custom game settings.
3. Armor configurations and character models (Elite characters, Spartan characters, or both).

For example, let’s say I’m filming a scene that includes five characters. Split screen limits me to controlling four characters at a time, so the first thing I need to do is go through every single shot I have planned for the scene and work out which combination of characters appear in each shot. This is where the storyboards and animatics I made last week come to the rescue. I use those storyboards to create a list of all the different combinations of characters I will need for each scene.

I have four controllers in front of me, each logged in to a different gamer profile. One of these is my main online gamertag: CruelLEGACEY. The other three are silver accounts that I created just so I could save controller settings and armor customizations for some of the secondary characters. Once I’ve figured out which combination of characters to film with for a given shot or scene, I need to go into each of the four gamer profiles and make sure that their player settings, character models, and armor designs are configured properly.

In addition to all the player settings that I need to juggle, I constantly need to go into forge mode to make slight adjustments to my custom maps. I might need to move a couple spawn points around for a couple shots, or add in one of the special effect pieces to simulate a night time environment.

Once the custom map and player settings are configured the way I need them, I still might need to make more changes to the custom game options. After all of this setup work is finished, I start up the custom game and act out as many shots as I can with that particular combination of player, map, and game settings. I’ll sometimes get as little as 10 seconds of usable footage before I need to back out to the main menu and make more changes to the players or game options.

But wait…. it gets worse.

Playtime Season 2 features 10 different characters. It was very important to me that each character has their own unique visual appearance, either through different armor combinations or color schemes. Halo: Reach offers a fantastic range of different ways to customize the appearance of your character. There’s only one problem: most of these options need to be unlocked by earning and spending in-game credits. Lots of credits. This becomes a problem when I have multiple characters that I can only create using my main gamertag. For example, Warren and The General.

Both of these characters feature relatively high level armor sets. It would take me months to build up one of my secondary profiles to the point where I could unlock the required armor pieces. This means that I simply can’t film a scene using both of these characters at the same time. The simple solution would be to write the script in a way that keeps both characters from being in the same place at the same time. But since when did I like to keep things simple?! Using a combination of clever editing and careful camera work, you will indeed see Warren and The General interact with each other. Movie Magic to the rescue!

Hopefully, you now have at least a basic understanding of how I go about filming my machinima series. It really is an incredibly complicated and time-consuming process. And yet, we’re still only about half way through! Next week, I’ll take you through the editing process, which is where the real fun begins. See you then!

– CruelLEGACEY
www.cruellegaceyproductions.com
www.playtimeshow.com

 

From Rooster Teeth:

Jack and Geoff deliver you a pile of goodies in the form of Halo: Reach fails. Join them in their laughter!

Fails of the Weak 70

Last week, for our Friday Caption Fun festivities, you provided quips for an image featuring an angry, not to mention large, bomb. Here are the top captions you left for that particular image!

 

“Ummm…. there’s an achievement for this, right?” –daynes068
“We’re gonna need a bigger weapon.” –dk33x
“It’s your turn to disarm….” –ITZ BERS3RK
“Does this mean this map will be renamed Blood Gulch?” –BurstingBox478
“This is it baby, hold me.” –MaxAwesome
“Is it just me or has Oddball gotten a lot more dangerous since last year?” –AshMason
“See? I told you we shouldn’t have picked “GIANT ASSAULT” as the game type!” –Jasper 250
“Though Sarge didn’t like it, he finally had to admit that the Blue’s base was, indeed, the bomb.” –Xenoblade013
“Looks like the playlist updates are live.” –Coux73

Now that we’ve wrapped up that picture, let’s start a new one. Up for your captioning pleasure this week is a picture featuring a potentially painful situation. Soak in the screenshot, then leave your witty and relevant quip in a comment. Off you go!

Author: worthycrawler1

 

From aVeryEasyTarget:

Sometimes, maybe every day, a Hunter has to shuffle.

Shuffling Hunter – A Halo: Reach Video

HRSotD (short for Halo: Reach Screenshot of the Day) is a daily feature dedicated to the wonders of Halo: Reach screenshots and the artists that capture these amazing images. A variety of shots—all of which are completely unaltered and captured in Halo: Reach’s theater mode—are included for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy the varied selection of images, and maybe even find inspiration to make your own!

Author: Wolfie Legend

 

From FBWalshyFTW:

This is a Halo: Reach trick jumping montage from Lord Guntaz, edited by himself, entitled “Jumping the Guntaz.” The jumps are great, featuring a ton of really sick Evade jumps along other sweet maneuvers involving grenade launches, the Concussion Rifle, Drop Shields, you name it. The editing focuses on showcasing the jumps like it always does, and I really enjoyed the fun song. Enjoy!

Jumping the Guntaz – A Halo: Reach Trick Jumping Montage

From XsSHAD0WsX:

Hi. My name is XsSHAD0WsX, and I’m one of the project leads on Revolutions, a fan collection of Halo stories and art. If you would like to submit a short story or piece of fan art for the next installment, you can do so through our group called The Secrets Within. Hope to see you there!

The Secrets Within

 

From Anoj:

Anoj counts down his favorite 10 community-submitted Halo: Reach Multikill clips. Enjoy!

Halo: Reach Top 10 Multikills

HRSotD (short for Halo: Reach Screenshot of the Day) is a daily feature dedicated to the wonders of Halo: Reach screenshots and the artists that capture these amazing images. A variety of shots—all of which are completely unaltered and captured in Halo: Reach’s theater mode—are included for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy the varied selection of images, and maybe even find inspiration to make your own!

Author: Eshcka

From Hoovaloov:

Since the Title Update for Halo: Reach’s multiplayer went live in the fall, there have been many discussions on the changes it implemented. The Title Update most notably impacted the mechanics of the DMR and the Needle Rifle, specifically their “bloom.” The question is, does 85% bloom encourage or discourage “trigger spamming” compared to default Reach settings?

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF DMR BEHAVIOR

Halo is a fictional universe. However, sometimes we catch sight of things in real life that remind us of our favorite science fiction video game franchise. This particular series, titled Halo in Real Life, showcases those very moments. Enjoy the subtle Halo references sometimes spotted when out and about in the real world, and if you have a picture you’d like to submit for possible future inclusion, send it to bsangel[at]halowaypoint.com!

As seen and captured by @Fullmetal1986

 

From Team0Epiphany:

Halo: Reach Epic Forge Tutorials is a series where we show you some new and unique forging tips, from everything to forging outside of maps to forge-mechanisms and more! This episode shows you how to construct key activated doors.

Key Activated Doors – A Halo: Reach Epic Forge Tutorial

On the third or fourth Thursday of every month, we host Xbox LIVE Community Playdates, and tomorrow just so happens to be one of those days! So, if you feel like joining us for some Halo: Anniversary multiplayer shenanigans, simply send an Xbox LIVE text message to any of the following gamertags:

• bs angel
• SamPand
• Total Sellout
• VeroHime

We get a lot of messages during these festivities, so to increase your chances of receiving an invite, send your text message during the event itself. Hope to see you tomorrow! On the other side of our shotguns, of course….

 

From MythicTyrant:

Not quite ready for the herculean task that is Mythic Difficulty? Have no fear! My Halo 3 Legendary video guide is now up and running in beautiful high definition, with a different guest star each week. This week’s spotlight is the Master Chief himself, Mr. Steve Downes. Thanks for watching!

Tyrant’s Halo 3 Legendary Walkthrough – Sierra 117