... but can it only be used as a marketing tool?
by Samuel Marlow
I was visiting my brother a couple of weeks ago and we watched some stuff on his Netflix account. He took the opportunity to show me the live-action trailer for Halo 4.
While we both used to play Halo and Halo 2, I find I don't have the time or disposition for video games these days. Even at the time by brother would get annoyed with me for playing Halo 2 on the easiest setting.
"But I'm playing to relax," was my defence having seen him get so irate shooting Flood-infected Elites that he would be just about ready the throw the controller at the TV.
Regardless, I enjoy the universe and occasionally shoot some Grunts when I want to blow off steam. The amount of time, money and effort that is spent on the Halo series' marketing material has always impressed me. And this is certainly true of the above trailer. I commented at the time that it is sad that an advert for a computer game could look and be acted better than the Star Wars prequels - though seven years, several lifetimes in special effects terms, has elapsed since Revenge of the Sith.
While looking up the trailer once back home, I came across the trailer for Forward Unto Dawn, 343's five-part live-action web series. With a total running time over 85 minutes (the length of a short feature film), and featuring the Master Chief as a secondary character, this seemed to fill the Halo Film-shaped hole in the lives of so many people (but not me, it should be said).
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn - to give its full, colonic (as it were!) title - streams from Machina Prime's YouTube channel with a new episode coming out every Friday. The last episode was uploaded this morning, and I have just finished watching it. All told, it is an impressive affair. The sets and digital matte-painting-extended locations look great, the acting is certainly more than acceptable, the Master Chief costume manages to just be in the realms of believability, and Peter Jackson's Weta company supplied the production with a functioning Warthog vehicle.
However, with a budget reputed to be somewhere between $5 to $10m, this "web series" had more money spent on it than a lot of independent feature films. Exactly where this went is hard to say. The sets may well be scratch-built, but if they are they don't look too far removed from the sort of real-world locations that a bit of careful set-dressing would make serviceable. The cast, while all perfectly fine, are not "name" actors. The only one I recognised was Anna Poppelwell from the Chronicles of Narnia films, though an internet search revealed the lead character played by Tom Green (who give probably the best performance) was in Australian teen drama Dance Academy. I'm sure the Master Chief's costume was expensive, but did not look substantially better than the plethora of fan-made costumes visible on YouTube, while the CGI aliens and training academy again seem to be in the ability of amateur effects enthusiasts, while the un-tweaked locations were forests and interiors. Given the scratch-built Tumbler in the Dark Knight films came with a $1m price tag, it is probably a fair assumption that much of the show's budget went on its whacky-axelled Warthog.
If any of this is coming off as criticism it is not meant to. The reason I mention it is this feels like the sort of show that could cause people to look at web television more seriously, which is great, but with a per-minute price tag greater than many broadcast TV dramas, and akin to a feature film, what does it say for the funding model?
Without wanting to accuse 343 of anything, it is fair to say this series forms part of their marketing strategy for the release of their new game. Each episode starts with a brief view of the Chief in Cryo-sleep where the plot of the third game left him, and the series as a whole starts and ends moments before the start of the fourth game. It would be unfair to call Forward Unto Dawn an 85 minute advert, as the majority of the action takes place prior to the first game, but (let's split the difference) $8m for a marketing campaign suddenly seems more reasonable, especially when weighed against the cost of prime-time broadcast advertising that could run to hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute.
In an era when your target audience is moving away from broadcast television to online content, could this represent an new model in web TV production funding and distribution?
Once the webisodes are online, they don't cost you anything. In fact with the ability to sell ad space within and next to the episodes themselves (and this a view-rate of 3m views in a week) could actually be making the channel money. If Forward Unto Dawn is little more than an advert, what does this mean for the format as a whole?
Web TV started as user-generated stories in the found-footage vein such as lonelygirl15, then made to look like a vlog in shows like The Guild. They had a rough-and-ready look, which was charming. They also provided a way to access an audience with no gate-keepers. The budgetary constraints forced their creators to focus on plot, character and humour.
Few of these were evident in Forward Unto Dawn. In this series, things happen, but I would struggle to call it a plot. Indeed, the whole 85 minutes felt like the first half an hour of a normal feature film, an effect the slow pacing failed to help. The characters never really change - Lasky has his doubts about the war with Insurrectionists, but these doubts are never shown to be right or wrong - and the series as a whole is so serious. What Forward Unto Dawn does have is special effects, chases, CGI aliens (who were used gratifyingly sparingly) and money. Lots and lots of money.
So unless you arrive with the sort of money that, say, Stargate SG1's Amanda Tapping was able to bring to bear on her Sanctuary series or restrict yourself to the Flash animation of, say, Broken Saints, are web series either doomed to be small-scale affairs or used as part of another marketing campaign?
While it is true YouTube's Partner programme is able to pay a living wage to some successful creators, these fees could not support the multitude of people necessary to create a series like Forward Unto Dawn.
How Forward Unto Dawn will effect people's perceptions of web series, and whether it will prove to be a watershed for the medium only time will tell. What can be said for certain is that it enjoyed the sort of budgets that most people can only dream of and, to an extent, came with an in-built audience, many of whom would have watched regardless of quality for the promise of seeing an official Master Chief on the screen for the first time. It's fair to say, then, that as impressive as the series looked, thousands of others of this production quality will not be flooding the market immediately.
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