Nowadays, it seems as if Microsoft would do anything in order to stay relevant against the ever-growing Apple Empire—even if means releasing a feature film as a promotional device in order to promote Halo, it’s flagship videogame franchise. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn (2012) is an action, sci-fi film that follows freshman-cadet Thomas Lasky at the Corbulo Academy as it’s being attacked by the Covenant, a military alliance of alien races who serve as the main antagonists in the first trilogy of the Halo video game series. The sequence that will facilitate the main source discussion towards the notions of Gunning, Prince and Turnock starts off around the second act of the film when a Covenant Elite hunts down the remaining survivors at the Corbulo…show more content… The film’s director, Stewart Hendler stated, “We're either the best-funded web series of all time, a sort of mid-road healthy TV pilot, or a super-low-budget movie.” How Microsoft achieved such a realistic aesthetic that kind of budget creates a great catalyst of discussion through Julie Turnock’s notions of photorealism especially since the film has fewer than 500 CGI shots—approximately a quarter of what a feature film would have—but have been praised for its photorealism by its reviewers. (Edwards) From an aesthetics standpoint, Hendler explains that his production team went with that “kind of District 9 pseudo-documentary vibe in some ways. But we pretty quickly identified the places where we really needed to focus our resources and absolutely do up to the level of a 100-million-dollar-budget movie. That was definitely the visual effects, the Chief’s suit and the gear of it all. By comparison to our overall budget, we spent a much higher percentage of those elements that we would have otherwise. But in other areas we really tried to be guerilla. The Chief’s suit was done by Legacy down in L.A., which is the top of the top. These guys are the ones who did all of the Avengers suits and Terminator 2. Every cool creature or suit you’ve seen in a movie, those are the guys. This was Master Chief. We wanted to get the best…show more content… The sequence I’ve chosen to discuss about does a great job in terms of perceptual realism since the Covenant Elite was fully CG realized and did not exist in real space but connected with the human eye as a credible object moving throughout 3D space. When Lasky’s squad was hiding in their second hiding spot in the artillery room, the CGI provided a great source of perceptual realism when the Elite stepped on a puddle; which in turn signified to the squad that the antagonist was close. However, not only the sequence, but the film counters Gunning’s idea of the attraction because he believed that special effects were only used as an ability to show something. While in order to create a film that takes place in the year 2526—the filmmakers needed to rely on the spectacle in order to not contextualize the narrative, but to be the