This is a more in depth update to an earlier post: halo-world-lives-on-in-legos
Ok this is simply amazing. 2007-2008 I was involved in one of the most memorable projects of my career – Halo Wars. It was one for the books for number of reasons, huge piece at 26 minutes of animation, lots of fresh guys in the team, co-supervising (with Dave Wilson) a project totally in different scale than before, totally working my butt off etc. And others did too and to my amazement it still looks pretty stunning for its age.
One of the big part personally where I got to leave my own marks was the Spirit of Fire – the big starship. I worked with Hugo Martin who was the concept designer several iterations of sketches. Hugo’s concept had a great mood and very cool silhouette and was a total blast to turn into a detailed 3D-model. As I was modeling it on top of the supervising the days were not exactly short, but eventually I was happy with the result. As always I was bit nervous sending the samples of the final model to the client. Graeme from the client’s end was the person who had envisioned the whole ship. He was serious about the story and the ship – for example he had been already for quite a while writing an imaginary news letter for this ship. Super nice guy but also super vested. His response “Holy shit Heikki!” is one of the top memorable moments for me from my Blur years.
The client company Ensemble got assimilated to Microsoft and already before the launch of the game and it was obvious that there would be no sequels (that time…) and little support. Game itself was good but due to these circumstances it never got the marketing or attention it deserved. In my opinion anyway.
So finally to the point. Not everyone missed the work put by the Blur crew and Ensemble. A few years ago – well 2010 – a person called Mark A. Kelso contacted me that he is building a massive Lego ship of the Spirit of Fire. Already then you could see that it was amazing. Even though he had built it from quite limited reference – I was eager to help but felt bad sending him all the additional views as it showed some differences between his assumptions and what was in the actual ship. I encouraged him to just use the new reference as inspiration so that it wouldn’t set him back. In 2014 I got an email – the ship is finished. He fixed it all. I am floored.
Look at the photos in links below!
Flickr Gallery
Build pages with progress images and details