"Birth of a Spartan," a live-action short directed by Noam Murro, will be premiering this week on American and British television networks, in select film theaters across North America with screenings of "Iron Man 2," and at the website www.welcometonobleteam.com.  An extended, two minute 30 second version will also be available on download for XBox Live Gold members on April 28th.

Noam Murro is a recipient of the Director’s Guild of America’s 2005 Director of the Year award, and was recently named the U.K.’s #1 director by Campaign magazine. He is also the director of the 2008 feature film “Smart People,” and numerous award-winning ad spots for Toshiba, Saturn, and Volkswagen.

I'm sure no one forgets the massive Halo 3 ad campaign featuring some brilliant short films, most notably the sequence of ads centering around the John 117 Monument, and later Neill Blomkamp's 2-parter "Landfall" that served as a prequel to the very beginning of Halo 3 gameplay. I personally felt that the ad campaign was better, and that the "Landfall" shorts told a much more engaging story, than the actual Halo 3 campaign. I was looking forward to the Battle for New Mombasa around which the John 117 Monument ads were centered, but which was never part of the Halo 3 game.

The Halo:ODST ad campaign featured the "We are ODST" short, which I thought was of superior quality to the previous offerings from Bungie. The F/X work was much more advanced, and I was impressed with how the short told a coherent story of a young recruit signing up for duty with the USMC and maturing into a grizzled veteran.

“Birth of a Spartan” is about the transformation of Carter 259, the leader of Noble Team in Halo:Reach, from an ordinary young man in a Spartan warrior. The training process of the Spartans is a fan-favorite source of subject matter in the Halo canon, and worked its way into the recent Halo:Legends DVD in the short "Homecoming," which was also specifically about the SPARTAN-II program which would have been responsible for the birth of Noble Team.

For fans of the Halo story, Reach has the potential to be an emotional experience. Bungie has shown that it has the ability to tell an excellent story, but the Halo trilogy revolved thematically around hope. "Believe" was the subtitle for the ad campaign. Halo:Reach is a tragedy from the beginning because we know precisely what happens both to the planet itself, but also ostensibly to our team of heroes. I will be shocked if any of them manage to survive past the final credits. I expect it to be a tale of sacrifice and valor, and the widely publicized efforts by Bungie to make the Covenant "scary" again should convey the sense of just how dire the straits were that humanity found itself in before Master Chief turned the tide.

If it follows the maturation of the Halo short films, coupled with the more mature nature of the story in Halo:Reach, this new short has the potential to be an excellent addition to the existing body of live-action work Bungie has produced.