Rise of the Spartans has just finished being moved to a brand new channel dedicated solely to the series:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3ly_xS4Rs-CwaFONQjkNMw
About the Series
For the vast majority of new audience, you’ve probably never seen the series (or any of our Halo machinima for that matter). Rise of the Spartans was the largest of all our machinima, directed by myself, Arbiter 617. The original series was nine parts long and took nearly three years to finish, plus another year for the Director’s Cut where we went back and added new scenes, redid the voice acting, and much more. The full series is over thirteen hours long! In addition to this, there were trailers, featurettes, PSAs, fan spinoffs, and much more.
It was a series I began with my friends where I wanted to set out on a big adventure and tell a vast story. I poured my love and effort into this series, easily spending many thousands of hours on it in total. It brought our channel from a small ambitious Halo machinima channel of 6,000 subs up to our silver Play button of 100,000 subs. I learned so much from it, met so many great friends, and honestly had some of the most positive experiences of my life despite the constant work and struggle for perfection with the series.
Even though I’m no longer a fan of Halo and often cringe at my old projects and talk about how bad they are, this series was too important for me and the many fans who were moved by the story. I would never delete this for the fans- it had to be moved and preserved forever.
Why It Was Moved
The primary reason was copyright! There are nine parts to the original series (10 including 3A and 3B), and seven for the Director’s Cut. Each of those are around half an hour to two hours long containing dozens upon dozens of copyrighted music each. This is not to even mention the trailers and featurettes which had a lot of copyrighted music as well. This was simply too large of a risk to have on the channel, as many of us here at Black Plasma Studios are now trying to make a living off YouTube.
Secondly, ever since switching away from Halo and having no plans to return (you can read about it here), the Halo machinima felt like a clutter on our channel. If people wanted to scroll through our video uploads and watch all of our animations which look interesting (which I’ve done to channels such as Slamacow), they’d just find a lot of stuff out of their style. In addition to this, we didn’t want people just now discovering the series and then subscribing expecting more similar Halo content.
How It Was Moved
I still have all the fully rendered original videos of each Part and Act. For those, I simply uploaded them to the new channel and copied over the old description (as well as the original upload date for future reference.) Part 6 and Act 3 caused me trouble! The song “Anakin’s Betrayal” which played during the fall of the Academy causes the video to be blocked on YouTube. I had to replace these songs, but in a very round-about way due to rendering issues. Basically: the quality of the video will be slightly worse, there may be a few desychronization issues with the audio, and the fall of the Academy won’t have nearly the same musical impact.
What Now?
One reason which I am not too worried to move the series off the channel is because I am putting all my work now into my next project: Songs of War. After I was about half way done with the Rise of the Spartans series, I already began putting together ideas for my next huge series. After RotS, I wanted to do something with my own original universe. I felt restricted being placed in the Halo universe and unable to tell some interesting stories. Part 6 was where I deviated most from canon and created my own take on Spartan training, and it was probably the most well received Part which gave me hope that my own stories would do better.
I began brainstorming ideas for a new universe/machinima series which was codenamed “Tidesinger” at the time. It was going to be filmed in Halo 4, utilizing humans, elites, and prometheans all as characters in this universe. Short version of this story: we weren’t able to play as either elites or prometheans and thus I was unable to film Tidesinger in Halo 4. This was one of the first huge turning points away from Halo for me.
After animating my first few Minecraft animations, I realized how capable I was of telling this story using Minecraft instead, and how the story actually fit a lot more as a medeival fantasy rather than a sci fi. And thus, Tidesinger was renamed to Songs of War and began serious brainstorming Fall 2015, and production began in early 2016.
Songs of War is the next Rise of the Spartans for me. I am pouring even more love and work into this series than I did with RotS. It is complete with characters, voice acting, an original universe, backstory, and more. Unlike Halo machinima, I believe a Minecraft animation series will appeal to more audiences since we can see character faces and be more expressive with the animation and emotions. I want to make this series better in every way. We are recruiting actual writers to help make the script great (unlike the RotS script which I mostly wrote myself with little writing experience.) The world is being built in full scale in one massive Minecraft map. Imagine that! Imagine a series that is as big as RotS and one you get emotionally invested in, and then realizing you have the ability to explore the world in full! You can walk everywhere the characters walked, and beyond!
I want this series to be one that helps shape the future of Black Plasma Studios. For me, the Minecraft animations I have done up till now have mostly been for practice as well as helping the channel earn a reputation in MC animation and subscribers. I want to bring the channel back to having a huge and developed story where fans can follow. I want to have characters which people will dress as (both in Minecraft and possibly cosplay). I want to bring this series to a convention one day and have panels where we talk about it and meet with fans.
I would rather have a hundred people fall in love with the series than a million watch an animation and move on.
I’m dreaming big with Songs of War, just as I did with Rise of the Spartans.
Thank you for reading,
Arbiter 617
