Halo Infinite: Narrative Lighting

Spoilers for story potentially!
Videos ordered by game progression.
Some of the main shots I worked on for Halo Infinite. All of this is such a tremendous shared effort, between environment, character, audio, animation, fx, technical and so many in between.
The biggest challenge for these was the flyovers that really do go over the world and transitioning seamlessly between gameplay to Narrative and back.
I'm thankful to have had a hand in these awesome shots. I started out in Surfacing but Lighting needed some help an I loved the story telling aspect. It fuses a lot of my background of illustration, animation and cinematics. So I switched to the Lighting Team and as our awesome teammates landed other gigs I helped become the point person for Narrative Lighting and picked up the most challenging shots.

Thanks to Lee Uren our Lighting Lead
Dan Chosich the Narrative Experience Director
Lighting Artists: Kevin Dalziel, Lauren Bennardo, Mary Dee Mateo, Harrison Garvin, Andres Nelson, Adrian Bell, Sebastian Mundo, Will Podepechan
Technical Lighting support: Josh Marvel and Spencer Kopach .
We had so many shots and hoped around supporting each other.
FX artists: Ian Gargle, Michael Wylegly, Matthew Shafter, Forest Baker
Animation: Greg Towner, Matt Cambell and many others
So many of the TDs and people who helped hook up the Narrative systems.

Andres Nelson originally did the shot for this for the 2020 trailer. So following his inspiration I was responsible for updating the lighting, most of it had to be redone due to tech changes and character updates, matching the new style established.

Started by Lauren Bennardo, some work done by Sebastian Mundo. Picked up the shot to fill in the new close up elements of Tremonius and bring it to final.

This one was a fusion of some Narrative driven level lighting in the interior space to create the spooky dark feel and the cut scene.
FX by Ian Gargle
Animation by Greg Towner

Originally started by Kevin Dalziel. I'm responsible for the lighting on Chief and timing of lights inside the Pelican.

This shot was a fun challenge as it flew over the open world and could take place at any time of day.
Thanks to Will Podepechan's script wizardry we were able to tailer our Narrative lighting to work in the time of day cycles

Lighting work initially started by Lauren Bennardo. Picked up to light with the updates to our characters and tech and help bring shot to completion.
The interesting challenge with this shot was it can happen at any time of day.

The scene lighting was started by Harrison Garvin, worked on by Robert Shoff then I picked it up. Direction by Dan Chosich.
Refined the explosion look, the space debris and lights on the Pelican.

Shot lighting started by Lauren Bennardo and Kevin Dalziel. Mainly helped with filling in the end lighting in the environment and some on Chief.
Andres Nelson helped fix up some elements as well.