To celebrate this moment, Halo wanted to do something larger-than-life... In a global first, an international team of six artists flew into London to hand paint three 50ft Spartan soldiers from the game, onto the walls of the Westfield London shopping centre. "Almost 1,000 square meters of beautiful and painstaking craftsmanship has provided Halo Reach with an iconic piece of communication on a scale that truly matches the stature of the game," said Rory Behrman of UM London.
This caused curious shoppers to watch the craftsmen over the 11 days it took to paint the mural. The result was a display of photo-realistic paintings that represented the blockbuster success of Halo. This is the first time a photo-realistic mural has been used for advertising in the UK. Creative agency UM developed the campaign in partnership with natural media company Curb, which works with the power of simple natural media to create unusual guerrilla marketing campaigns. The painting is also supported by a 'behind the scenes' film that shows the making of the murals.
The work created a frenzy of social media activity on Twitter, as passers-by failed to believe what they were seeing. "Went to go see the Halo Reach murals at the Westfield shopping centre. Stonking spectacular they were too, hand-painted!" said one Twitter follower. Curb CEO Anthony Ganjou said, "We lost count of the number of times shoppers' iPhones were out taking pictures and how many people were literally rubbing their eyes in disbelief that these 50ft images were actually being hand painted by our artists."
The 'Halo Reach' campaign had 25 000 views on YouTube in a week and over a million on the Xbox live channel.
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