The Life

The Life, also known as We Are ODST, is a television and cinema advertisement launched in 2009 by Microsoft to promote the first-person shooter Halo 3: ODST in the United States. The 150-second piece follows a young soldier through enlistment, training, and battle as an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper (ODST), analogous to a paratrooper that drops from space to a battlefield. The Life was created by advertising agency T.A.G., an offshoot of McCann Erickson. Production of the commercial itself was handled by production company Morton/Jankel/Zander (MJZ). It was directed by Rupert Sanders, and post-production was conducted by Asylum. It was filmed in Hungary, just outside Budapest in a coal mine and abandoned factories to give the sequence an "Eastern Bloc" aesthetic. The commercial and its associated campaign proved hugely successful; on the week of its launch, Halo 3: ODST became the top-selling game for the Xbox 360 worldwide, and over 2.5 million copies were sold within the first few weeks of release. The Life went on to win a number of honours from the advertising and entertainment industries, including two Clio Awards, a London International Advertising Award and several honours from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, the most prestigious awards ceremony in the advertising industry. Sequence The Life opens to a military funeral of an ODST. Rows of candles arranged along the floor burn as a bagpiper plays a dirge. The assembled mourners, a mix of military personnel and civilians, attend as the casket's red ODST flag is removed, revealing the name of the deceased. A young man looks on as the cloth is ceremonially folded and passed to a woman among the mourners. A song in Welsh begins to play as the attending officer orders a gun salute in Hungarian. The camera cuts to another scene; the young man, Tarkov, is having his head shaved in the first of a montage of scenes depicting Tarkov undergoing recruit training. Again, the camera cuts ahead. Tarkov is in a one-man "drop pod", known in universe as the Single Occupant Exoatmospheric Insertion Vehicle (SOEIV), entering the atmosphere of an alien planet, onto a battlefield. He emerges under fire alongside several other soldiers, moving over corpses and through plasma fire until a Covenant Brute knocks him aside, sending his helmet flying and scarring Tarkov's face. Tarkov unholsters and fires his M6S (silenced M-6 magnum) sidearm at the Brute to no avail.