As promised, Bungie made some exciting announcements on Halo's 5th anniversary. The first surprise was this massive screenshot (scaled down to the left). Take a look at the original post for the full resolution version. Bungie announced that a pre-rendered CGI advertisement for Halo 3 will air during during ESPN's Monday Night Football on December 4. Digital Domain, a third party visual effects company will create the ad using original models from Bungie. Read about Bungie's decision to go with a CGI ad:
For the purposes of this holiday commercial and knowing the tight timeline with which it had to come together we decided a long time ago that utilizing real, final, actual gameplay just wasn’t the right thing to do. As you know, we’re very protective of our baby and we will only show it when we feel it’s ready to be shown (and even then it’s sometimes pried from our protective fingers). We all agreed that a cooler thing to do would be to move as far away from gameplay-style footage as possible, and make something more movie-like. Let our fans see what the Halo universe looks like in a photo-realistic fashion.
A "making of" video will be available on the Xbox Live Marketplace after the ad airs. But here's the really good news. Bungie indicated that a public multiplayer demo will be available on Xbox Live as early as this spring, before the game ships. The demo will help the development team identify issues with the game before it goes to retail.
NIIIIIICE Digital Domain did Apollo 13....Stealth, worked on some of LOTR, I, Robot...they do good work
oh and if you've seen those nifty Saab commercials where the jet transforms into a car...they did that too
you can probably check it out at digitaldomain.com
not as good as ILM but uh....still...woohoo and all that stuff