The story behind Gladiator Evolved is a long one. I thought up the idea to remake the Gladiator battle sometime after Canyonero. Before I began, I did a bunch of tests with cropping and exporting in wide screen to make sure it would look good. After I got positive results, I drew a storyboard including every shot in the entire opening twelve minutes. This wasn't a good idea; it turned out extremely ugly and barely comprehensible, so I never actually used it during filming.
I started filming on the 5th of July. How do I remember that? Because that's the day new maps were available for download, and I initially wanted to film on Relic. So I went around a bunch of forums getting gamertags and sending friend requests and we began filming on relic. And we kept filming on Relic, until we found out that tanks weren't supported on the dang map! So we switched to Coagulation. See what we filmed on Relic here.
So now we're on Coagulation. Probably the hardest part of filming Gladiator Evolved was getting enough people to join. Even harder was getting people who cooperated to join. I pretty much had my whole friends list filled up with gamertags, but even then a lot of people wouldn't be online or just wouldn't join my game. So every time I'd have about four people from my friends list who'd join, and they'd invite their friends, and so on. For half an hour, random people would be joining and I'd be like: "Wanna help make a movie?" And then, I needed them to change colors by changing their profile. Spartan, sage, olive, white, gold, sergeant, circle. It's still burned into my memory to this day. You need an insane amount of patience for this. When we reached at least twelve people, we'd start the game.
The filming process was just as hard (if not more) than getting people to join. I had a Quicktime file of the first twelve minutes of Gladiator on my Mac. So what I'd do was, I'd run up from the basement to my Mac, check the shot, run back down, tell everyone what to do, film it until we got it right, and repeat about 400 times. A lot of the time people wouldn't follow directions, they'd shoot people for fun, or even kill me. This was the worst because I had to redo the no gun glitch. A lot of weird stuff also happened in game that made filming difficult. Warthogs would sometimes randomly disappear if you crowd a lot of people around it, and Warthogs would start going backwards up hills by themselves if someone was in it. Actually, my next movie Machinima for Dummies is based on my experiences filming Gladiator Evolved.
Every day after filming I'd take the footage and edit it into the movie. I did it bit by bit because I had very little hard drive space and I couldn't do it all at once. When I finished shooting, I edited everything together in iMovie. I also used LiveType and Photoshop for the titles and credits. Funny story about the Abraham Lincoln title. I was in Hungary for vacation and one day I saw some graffiti of Abraham Lincoln just randomly on the side of a building in Budapest. Needless to say, I snapped a picture and it ended up in my movie!
When everything was done and edited, I exported the movie full quality and used Compressor to compress it. I submitted my film to HBO, and it passed with flying colors. The whole process took a little over two months, from July 5th to September 11th 2005 when it was released. You can read the reviewer's comments here. I also submitted my Gladiator Evolved Preview, but for some reason they failed it!
After Gladiator Evolved was up on HBO, I posted in all the Halo and gaming related forums I could find to promote my movie, and it became a big success with lots o' downloads. I emailed Louis Wu about how many total downloads there were after the first month, and he said it was around 30,000. Pretty impressive, eh? Then a few really cool things happened. Bungie's cinematic writer/director Joseph Staten emailed me about how much he liked the movie and asked me if he could include it in a reference/inspirational DVD for the Halo movie director (who we now know is Neill Blomkamp). I sent him a high res DVD of Gladiator Evolved and hopefully he got it; I still haven't heard back from him... Also, Paul Marino of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences emailed me about showing Gladiator Evolved at the Austin Game Conference as part of a reel of machinima works. Of course, I told him it was OK.
Since then, Gladiator Evolved has been getting a lot of popularity on YouTube.com and especially SpikedHumor.com, where its already gotten over 15,000 views.