Colin Ferguson, age 27, software engineer, contracted to Microsoft, located in the greater Seattle area, Bungie fan since 1994.
While I do not have any pretentions of being one of the best Halo costume makers, I think that I can claim to be one of the earliest. I first got into Halo costuming in 2003. A local anime convention was coming up, and knowning a few Bungie employees to be anime fans (Robert and Lorraine McLees, whom I encountered before in a Bungie panel,) I knew that they would be showing up. So, in keeping with the spirit of anime conventions, I fixed together a crude costume of a Halo marine, along with a prop Halo
MA5B assault rifle. The costume was recieved positively, especially the rifle (Robert was the one who designed the weapons for the Halo games) and I decided to wear it to the E3 2003 Bungie Fanfest at the LA Convention Center. With over two-hundred fans there and a lot of Bungie crew,
the costume got a lot of approval (search the page for my handle.) Unfortunately, my armor had not been sufficiently strengthened to withstand the rigors of the flight down to LA and had to be hastily taped back together at the convention, and got even more broken on the way back.
I attended some various other small-scale Bungie-related events around the Seattle area. Several Bungie folks recognized me from the costume, and I got a small rapport going with several of them. This paid off in 2004, when they asked me to be interviewed for the Making of Halo 2 documentary, along with several other fans. Most of the fan stuff, including my interview, got cut from the final production though. Still, with some encouragement by the folks at Bungie, I set my sights on a more ambitious armor project, that of making a Master Chief costume.
Nightmare Armor Studios had already started making their own replica Mark VI armor suits at that time, so I decided to make a Mark V (which I would add battle-damage to) to distinguish it from there armors. We adapted the techniques used to make the marine armor with some additional strengthening measures, and the results turned out pretty well, as can be seen in
these three pictures. However, the problem was one of scale. The techniques we used were very labor-intensive and very slow, and ultimate we could not find the time to really get it completed. Further, while they looked good, the pieces we had were imperfect. The helmet was almost imperceptibly off-balance, we did not have a method to keep the visor from fogging up, the chest and back pieces were too heavy due to over-use of Bondo to compensate for mistakes, etc. We needed to remake them anyway, but that just added more to the production time and we could not afford it.
Still, the upside to all the exposure my costuming had with the people at Bungie was that they asked me to be in a segment that would ship with the Halo 3 Legendary Edition, which ended up being titled "The Cortana Chonicles: In Search of Fandom". If you have seen that, then you have seen me. However, if you have not, some one was kind enough to
upload it to YouTube. Watch between 1:40 and 3:00 to see me and my father and the place we build the armor. That seemed to get me a lot of exposure, and people recognize me from the video at cons (such as PAX08) when I wear the helmet.
In any case, the Mark V armor project is largely abandoned for the moment. Maybe I will come back to it later, but I will probably be rebuilding it again from scratch. Recently, I have been inspired to create an ODST costume based on some of the
concept art Bungie posted to their site for their upcoming title Halo 3: ODST. In my search for techniques and materials for making that costume I came across the 405th Infantry Division and immediately saw that I belonged here.
