Hollywood Halo

The summer between his sophomore and junior years, Winn had tried making a movie based on Ender's Game, a popular sci-fi book. After writing a script, Winn recruited Luther, who'd taught himself 3-D modeling, and they built some ship models. Winn rounded up a cast of ten friends and 20 extras and borrowed digital video mini-cameras from his school. Winn had 35 minutes of the story on film when he realized that the way he was going, the movie would be 15 hours long. He shelved it.

His next venture was more successful. In video-tech class during his junior year, Winn was given an assignment to make a seven-minute movie with no dialogue. Winn shot an homage to old Bogart movies he'd watched with his grandmother. Filming around Highland Park, Winn was shooting a night chase (and also acting in the scene) down an alley that dead-ended at a bank drive-thru when a cop car screeched up. A Dallas police officer got out, drew a gun on them and barked, "Drop your weapons and step away from the car!"

"It was pretty scary," says Becky Winn, Alex's mother, who'd been driving a van down the alley as a camera dolly. "The officer seemed nervous."

The next night, Alex passed out flyers to residents and had two friends stand with big signs at either end of the alley: "Student Film in Progress."

Jack O'Neill, Private Detective, written, directed and scored by Alex Winn, was accepted by a number of film festivals and won, among other prizes, a CINE Golden Eagle Award in 2004. He was the only high school student to win that year.

Inspired by the soundtrack of Cirque du Soleil's Quidam, Winn came up with the plot for another short film, bought a used digital camera for $1,300 and recruited several teens who wanted to be actors. Shot at Dallas's Love Field, "Baggage Claim" also won recognition in film festivals.

Winn realized from watching Red Vs Blue that recording the action through various characters' eyes was just another way of filming. But he wanted to do a feature-length drama, not a comedy.

When Halo 2 came out, Winn and Luther explored the internal architecture of the game. "We were running on some of the multiplayer maps," Winn says. "One of the maps is a giant cave with a structure in the middle. We came up with the idea that the structure is a compendium of knowledge. Ryan came up with the idea of The Codex, an ancient book."

They pounded out a plot, using an undercurrent in the game that the aliens are a religious race and revere their ancients, the Forerunners. They broke the plot into 20 episodes.

Winn -- writer, director, producer -- spent a week on the script for episode one. Luther -- lead animator and voice actor for bit parts -- designed their logo and Web site. They recruited Malone, a skilled actor and singer, as the male lead and Foster, the hot-shot girl gamer, as the female lead. In December 2004, the core four started filming.

When Meghan Foster sat her mom down to explain why she raced to Winn's house every night after softball practice to play a video game until ten or 11 p.m., Kathy Perry was bewildered. Foster's explanation sounded fishy, especially in light of her earlier compulsive gaming.

It was the middle of Foster's senior year in high school, and Perry thought her daughter needed to concentrate on her studies and college applications. But Perry and Meghan's father, Pete Foster, told her she could participate as long as her grades didn't suffer and she didn't miss important family events.

They rounded up Xboxes and wired one into Winn's computer, where the view through one character's eyes would be recorded. The other Xboxes had four characters on each. Winn controlled the "camera" by moving his character with the Xbox controller and recording whatever his character saw. Instead of shooting, his character would move into a position to film the other characters, dodging bullets to get good shots, just like a war photographer. The other teens acted like puppeteers, putting their "actors" through actions to match the script.

The first few weeks were hard. "You just want to shoot and kill each other," Foster says. But the inadvertent demise of a player would mean reshooting. They came up with a standing policy: Kill an actor and get punched in the face. Accidental deaths were fewer as they got more skilled.

For battle scenes, they recruited more players. At times there'd be 15 people in Winn's bedroom. When they were shorthanded, Luther would use his bare feet on a controller.

They wanted to film at least four episodes before posting the first on the Web. But as true children of the Internet, they knew the value of prerelease hype. When a false rumor went around the Halo boards that something new was coming out on February 9, they decided to ride the hype.