and Frank O'Connor, development director for the Halo franchise, has said that a film will be made "when the time is right". Live action shorts were also used in the advertisement of Halo: Reach focusing on the Spartan supersoldiers of the Halo universe. Two shorts, The Birth of a Spartan and Deliver Hope were made, again to appeal to customers who were unfamiliar with the series. Filming In early 2009, McCann received a brief to create a new campaign for the latest entrant into the Halo series, a first-person shooter called Halo 3: ODST. It would be the first game in the franchise not to feature the series' protagonist, the Master Chief. McCann returned with a pitch for a campaign in the same vein as Believe, aiming to humanize the soldiers featured in the Halo universe. The project was greenlit, and McCann brought back several collaborators from Believe to handle this new campaign, now given the working title of The Life. Director Rupert Sanders, known for his work with production company MJZ on campaigns such as Lava for Guinness and Great Return for Nike, Inc., was given five weeks to produce the commercial, with three days set aside for filming. Several locations were scouted for shooting, with an eye towards an "Eastern Bloc" aesthetic. These included several areas around Chernobyl, Ukraine. However, the tight schedule precluded using locations too distant from one another for different scenes and, in the end, three spots outside of Budapest, Hungary were settled upon: the cooling tower of an active nuclear power station was dressed to act as the backdrop to the opening funeral scene; an open-pit coal mine served as the setting for the battle scenes, and an abandoned aluminum factory was used to stage the closing funeral scene. Sanders drew inspiration for the shooting style and aesthetic of the commercial from a variety of sources, including news footage from journalists embedded with military forces in Afghanistan, and Russian feature films such as Stalker and Come and See. To keep the details within the commercial consistent with established Halo canon, the creators of the Halo series, Bungie, provided Sanders with information on aspects ranging from appropriate fur color and rank insignia for the Brute, to the armor and weaponry of the ODST soldiers. Post-production With filming complete, MJZ contacted post-production company Asylum to begin work on the substantial visual effects component of The Life.