In this scene, the secondary and tertiary antagonists are speaking with the main villain of the show via a hologram. The game in use here is Halo: Reach for the Xbox 360, utilizing a mixture of the built-in forging mode and theater mode in-game. In forging mode, I am able to place a bright blue light on a pre-existing multiplayer map to simulate the effect of the hologram's glow, which also reflects off of the in-game characters in close up shots before recording them in-game with a capture card and setting up camera angles in the game's built-in theater mode.

Here is the frame without the hologram added, untouched. Each clip utilizing the hologram is captured for 10-20 seconds with Roxio, before the hologram is added in later. The hologram itself is a 3D model in an animation program called Source Filmmaker, which is primarily used for animation. The model is placed on a green screen and animated for 20-30 seconds before being rendered in H.264 MP4 format. The angle of the hologram is determined by the angle of the in-game shot used before it is rendered.

After the animation is rendered, both the in-game shot and the greenscreened animation are put into Adobe After Effects, where the animation is placed in the correct spot that the hologram must emit from. If needed, the angle is tweaked a bit to fit the angle of the Halo: Reach clip.

The next part is very simple: adding in a keylight to remove the green spots. However, once the keylight is added and the greenscreen is removed, the teal color of the armor is changed to blue due to the green color in the armor being removed. If needed, we could use a color correction tool to change the color, but as of now, the blue armor works in our favor, so it doesn't need to change.

From there, we will use the pen tool to crop out the lower half of the emitter's baseplate that has to cover up the feet, getting as close to the edge as possible. This can be difficult when pinpointing it from afar.

Once the animation is placed and cropped, we have to add in some effects to make it glow and look like it is actually a part of the game. First, we'll add a glow and brightness effect to make it glow brightly, before adding in some randomized animated brush strokes to give it a sort of Star Wars-styled feedback effect.

Now it looks pretty good, wouldn't you say? Maybe a little TOO good, as the hologram seems to pop out a bit more than the rest of the clip, and we want it to have the same sort of look as the Halo: Reach engine. To do this, we'll add a small blur effect.

Now the hologram looks like it is actually there as a part of the game! Now to just lower the opacity a bit to give it an actual sci-fi hologram feel to it...

Now all we have to do is render it and place it in Adobe Premiere! Pretty easy right? Unfortunately, not every shot is so easy. For example, this shot where the alien, Clyde, is in front of the hologram and turning around to speak with one of the other characters.

In the Halo: Reach engine, the maximum frames per second rate is 30 fps, and to make up for missing frames, the developers added in a motion blur effect that creates a sort of "ghost" image of the characters while the characters are moving. This can make it insanely hard to greenscreen and mask around the characters at times, especially with how many curves the Elite Officer model alone has around its body.

The only way to fix this so far (at least that I found in episodes after the one this scene was featured in) was to use a pre-comp and create another mask with a low opacity to compensate for the ghosting effect in-game. However, in later scenes with the hologram, this technique was not needed, hence why they aren't shown here.

Regardless, this scene in particular with the hologram was widely praised by its viewers for the effect. The full uncensored episode can be found here (viewer discretion advised): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvpQ9bcN294&t=1833s