I had the idea for Canyonero before Halo 2 even came out. I wanted to film it using Halo 1, but I couldn't really do anything because I only had one Xbox. So I waited. A little after Halo 2 came out, I started the project. First I drew a storyboard, which looked like crap, but it got the job done (kinda) of showing what shots and angles I wanted and when in the song they go.

Next came the hard part: Xbox Live. Doing the scenes with just the one car in the shot wasn't too hard with my main driver Van Helsing. The hard part was the scenes with lots of people in it. When I was filming this movie, I was using the team slayer gametype, and for the team indicators not to show up everyone had to be on a different team than I was. In other words, no voice chat except for proximity chat. I had to tell one person what I wanted and he had to relay what I said to everyone else. It was long and way too complicated, but we got by. To signal that I was ready to film, I shot the sentinel beam up in the air so everyone could see it. And scene by scene we got the movie done.

Finally, I edited the flick together and exported, but the compression was terrible. So when I sent it in to HBO, Louis Wu said that if I gave him the uncompressed version, he could do some really nice compression with Sorenson 3 Pro. So that's what I did, and it looked great afterwards.