VFX Breakdown of HALO: The Battle of Block Planet

The Halo video I released in September included a lot of visual and special effects, more than one might think at first glance. I saved myself a lot of time animating by going nuts with the masking tool in After Effects. The above video quickly breaks down some of the effects, but it is very brief. I will explain some of the effects in this article.


Most of the shots that include multiple characters were animated one character at a time, then composited together afterwards. A simple version of this is the reveal of the elites (those creepy blue monsters). I only have one elite, so I really had no choice but to animate them seperately. In After Effects, I traced around the characters with the the Mask tool (G). Some of the characters had to be traced frame by frame due to close movements, but this shot was relatively easy to pull off.

Applying the same technique described above to moving characters was much more challenging. The premise of this scene was three spartans are running out into the battlefield. Again, I was limited by the number of figures I owned (two), so some effects had to be called in. The raw footage is actually just of one figure running. In post-production, I masked around the character for each frame, then duplicated it twice, offsetting the time by a couple frames. What this did was place two more copies further along the path than the original. In essence, three characters were created from one shot. This is one of the shots one would probably not think has been edited.

The POV shot was filmed in two parts. The first was of the elite being shot and the spartan getting electrocuted. The second shot was angled differently to give a new perspective, and showed an elite being shot by the POV guy. The two shots were time-remapped and stitched together to make one super widescreen shot. A digital camera followed the action, and an arm/HUD was placed on top.

Once again, masking played a critical role in the shot of the spartans jumping out of the truck. This time, I had to be exact with my tracing, as the characters would be placed on top of eachother. Like the running spartans shot, I offset a single shot multiple times (each one masked), which made it look like there were a lot of figures exiting the truck at once. The back row is also a single shot looped, though the masking is much simpler, as these characters wouldn't be placed directly on another.

Here is a shot that isn't focused on masking techniques. I'm not totally sure what that energy sword looks like when in use, so I decided to give it a fractal lightning look. The outline of the sword was traced onto a blue layer, with an 'Add' blend mode, and some added glow. There is also some animated Fractal Noise on this layer. When the sword hits the spartan, lightning sparks radiate around the character. The lightning was simply done, and by playing around with the 'Advanced Lightning' effect in After Effects, you could easily replicate this. Lastly, a glow layer was added on top of the spartan to simulate real light coming from the sword and lightning. Ideally, an actual light would be used during shooting, but sadly I did not do that.

Making a vehicle look like it's driving across a stone desert is difficult to accomplish in stop motion. That's why I didn't really use stop motion. The raw footage is of the vehicle staying in the same spot with Lego pieces shooting out the back and the tire spinning. There are also a couple frames of rubble. In After Effects, I added motion blur to the entire scene, and radial blur to the wheel. Digital camera shake was also done, and the rubble was animated to flyby every second or two. To top it all off, the ground in front of the wheel was animated seperately so the shot didn't look like it was shaken digitally. It doesn't sound like it would do much, but that variation in shake really sold the effect.

The last shot I'll cover is the explosion of the ghost. Yeah, I know ghosts can't fly, so don't tell me again, I've had about 100 people comment on that. Anyway, none of this shot was actually stop motion, it was all stock footage and single frames. Parts of the ship were rotoscoped and animated behind a giant fireball from the Action Essentials 2 pack. Add a little bit of motion blur and voila.

There are quite a few shots that I haven't covered, but most of the effects have been explained to a degree. Regardless, if you want to know more about a particular shot, contact me and I might add another section to this article!