I first met Kyle Pulver at GDC 2011, and we started throwing around the idea of doing a trailer for his new game Snapshot. I love photography, and this game has a really cool mechanic where you can take a picture of an object in one part of the level, and paste it back into the game somewhere else. About a year went by and the game still wasn’t near release, but I still really wanted to work with him on something…

While slowly working away on Snapshot, Kyle banged out a smaller game called Offspring Fling. We met again at GDC 2012, and threw around the idea of trying to make a cool launch trailer.

About a week before Kyle Launched the game, he posted this awesome teaser with a hand drawn fake Super Nintendo box for the game. I fell in love with it, and immediately thought how awesome it would be to do a 90′s style SNES commercial/trailer for it but there wasn’t enough time to turn it around for launch. But Kyle was planning a 2nd push for the game by adding a level editor, to try and get it on Steam. The launch was set for around Mother’s day, so we had plenty of time to start throwing around ideas. After a bit of back and forth, this is the idea that stuck:

[12-03-30 5:01:28 PM]
Kyle Pulver: hahah I imagine this scene of a guy playing the game with the babies flying around
[12-03-30 5:01:33 PM]
Kyle Pulver: so he’s like dodging the babies in reality while trying to play the game

So, now the problem was how to turn those two lines of text into a cool looking trailer… One of the first ideas we had was to use some old Cabbage Patch dolls and have those being thrown at Marlon while he played the game. That would have been cool, but it didn’t totally fit. We thought about putting a live baby in Marlon’s lap, but that might have just been a bit weird…

Creating the Animatic

When dealing with a live action trailer, one of the first things I always like to do is create a really rough animatic or animated storyboard to get a feel for the flow of the trailer. This is usually the point where I freak out and think that it’s never going to work, since it’s hard to look at something in such a rough shape and imagine how it’s all going to come together. That being said, it’s an invaluable step, and really sets the blueprint for what we’re going to need.

So, after throwing that animatic together, this was the rough to do list:

Creating the ‘Offspring’ and SNES Game Boxes

Zoe's Offpring Dolls!

Fake SNES Cartridges

Fake Super Pretendos

So to get all those wheels in motion, we needed to find some collaborators. Alec Holowka, who made the music for Offspring Fling set off on making a custom track for the trailer, based around themes from the game. Kyle started making the custom SNES boxes, and fortunately for us, the wonderful Zoe Quinn was visiting Winnipeg from Toronto, and was already throwing around the idea of making some plush Offspring dolls! We told her about the idea for the trailer, and she was all over it! The dolls turned out awesome, and really ended up making the whole trailer. The shot at the end just wouldn’t have been the same without the dolls, so I’m so grateful that Zoe took the time to put them together!

Final Product shot with SNES Boxes

The other piece of the puzzle was creating a fake SNES cart, pick up a fake knockoff SNES and make some fake SNES boxes of Kyle’s old games. Making the SNES cart was pretty simple. I managed to get an old SNES cart from PnP Games for 99 cents and a knockoff FC Twin SNES for about $70. I found a SNES cartridge template online, printed it off and glued it to the old cart. Getting the old label off was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. They must use some industrial strength glue on those old labels, since it took me about an hour to scrape and clean them off

For the Super Pretendo, we wanted something that looked like a SNES, but wasn’t totally weird. There was a surprising amount of systems to choose from! The red one was pretty cool looking, and has slots for SNES/NES/Genesis games. Crazy! In the end, we settled for the FC Twin. The nice thing about this one is that the SNES cart slot was in the front, so there wouldn’t be this awkward hole in the front of the machine for the final product shot.

The boxes were probably the funnest thing to create, even though you can’t really see any of the extras in the final product shot. Kyle made awesome box art for Verge, Jotyobots, Bonesaw, and Depict 1. The boxes were so cool, I couldn’t not show them off, so here’s some images of each of them:

Shooting the Trailer

Shooting this trailer was pretty fun Marlon was nice enough to let us use his apartment as the set, but we had to wait until pretty late at night to get started. Marlon’s apartment gets lots of sunlight, and we wanted to artificially light the set to make it look as cool and dramatic as possible. We started shooting at about 8:30pm and shot for about two hours. And of course, I did a little time-lapse of the shoot too

Shooting the final product shot with the Super Pretendo and the game boxes was a lot of fun. The hardest part of the whole thing was figuring out how to light the scene properly to give it the same sort of vibe as the live action footage.

SNES Lighting Setup

As for the mirror, I found it sitting in someone’s trash in the middle of a snowbank. I knew I needed this thing, but I had no idea what I’d use it for, and it literally sat in my shed for about 2 years before it was pulled out and cleaned off for this shoot. I’m so glad I kept it around, I’m sure it’ll come in handy for something again someday…

To get the nice little camera move in the shot. I did the camera move super slowly, and somewhat jerkily moved the tripod head as I moved it back on the slider. I was never going to get this camera move perfect on set, so I stabilized the shot afterwards, and re-introduced a nice smooth camera move in After Effects.

Editing the Trailer

AE Timeline

Editing the trailer was pretty straightforward using After Effects, my weapon of choice… Overall, this wasn’t the most complicated project since it didn’t have as many visual effects or crazy shots as some of my other trailers…

I’ve kind of changed up my workflow over the last few trailers, by moving basically 100% over to my Macbook air. I love this little powerhouse of a machine, and it specs just as fast (processor wise) as the PC I used to use. But since this machine has an SSD drive, I find the responsiveness of working directly with the .MTS files from my GH2 totally acceptable. On my PC, I took the step to transcode all of the .MTS files into Photo JPG quicktimes, but for some reason on the MB Air, I don’t need to take that step. All of the lagginess that I was experiencing before is totally gone on this system. It’s really a joy to use, and it’s also a great conversation piece, when most people assume I’m working with some crazy PC rig.

One of the subtle cool little effects we did add was reflections of the gameplay in Marlon’s glasses. It was pretty straightforward, but involved some subtle colour correction tricks to get it just right.

After editing everything together, one of the last steps was to find a real voice actor to replace my temp track. I searched for a while, and stumbled upon Geoff Allan. He’s awesome, and more importantly, his voice is super awesome, and sounds just like the voice overs from those old commercials that we were trying to emulate. I have to thank Geoff again for his help since without it, I don’t think this trailer would have had the same impact and vibe

The 80′s VHS Dub Version

VHS Ghettoifier

In the end, we decided to not go with this as the main version, since we felt that we got across the 90′s vibe with the editing, pacing and the rest of the trailer. The other thing is that a lot of people seeing this trailer will have no idea what VHS is supposed to look like, and it might just add confusion. So, in the end, we decided to go with the high definition clean version for release, but you can check out the 80′s VHS version below:

This was a totally awesome project to work on, and I have to thank Alec, Kyle and Zoe for helping me out, and having the guts to go forward with this crazy idea

Since launching the trailer, the game has been covered on Joystiq, & Indiegames.com. If you have any questions or anything about the trailer, please feel free to get in touch! Thanks!

So, Adam was working on a small teaser game for the movie Hunger Games, which would be released right before the movie came out, and he needed a trailer or two to help promote it. The problem was, that the game was still being built, and when we started, it was probably about 20% complete at this point.

Hunger Games iOS Trailer After Effects Screenshot

What we decided to do is this: We’ll make the teaser trailer completely in After Effects, using only the game’s art assets, and use in game footage for the 2nd trailer, which is what’s used in the final version above, except for the opening forest shot, the town shot, and the end card.

The one difference with this game vs. the others that I’ve worked with so far, is that there was no OS X or Windows build of the game to capture the footage from. Since it’s an iOS game, there’s the option to run the game in the simulator in OSX, but in this case, the game runs so slow that way, that we couldn’t capture footage in real time.

So the option is then to capture the footage through HDMI out into a capture card/box. Problem is, when we started this project, I didn’t have that kind of hardware. So, the search for options begun…

The day before I left for GDC, I received my Black Magic Intensity Extreme capture box, which captures uncompressed HDMI through Thunderbolt right into my Macbook Air. It works REALLY well, and with an iPad 2/3 or iPhone 4s, you can capture 720p uncompressed video right off the device. It’s pretty slick. There will be a full review of this unit in the next few weeks

Hunger Games iOS Trailer After Effects Screenshot

One of the my favouite parts of putting this trailer together was assembling the “Town” and “Forrest” scenes in After Effects from the in-game assets. I wanted to have some establishing shots of both of the environments in the trailer, but there wasn’t anything like that that I could capture from the game footage. So, I had to make it from scratch, using the assets for the game.

I took the different elements, and layered them in 3D space, added in some stock smoke elements and lens flares to give some atmosphere, added a bit of a camera move, and that was that It actually took quite a while to get them looking right, but I really love how the town image turned out!

One of the cooler parts of making this trailer was trying to find a way to make fire that looked like pixel art! I wasn’t really sure where to start, but it turned out to be a simple enough effect. I found some fire presets on RedGiantPeople.com and used that as the base for the fire. It was tweaked pretty heavily, and I had two copies of Particular on top of each other to give the fire a little more internal volume.

After getting the speed and look of the fire looking pretty good, I colour corrected it with Colourama, then applied the old Mosaic plugin with the “Sharp colours” checkbox enabled. Amazingly, it worked pretty well. I was kind of shocked I really really wish that someone would develop a better version of the Mosaic plugin. It’s so old and so limited, I think there’s tons of cool stuff that you could do with a few more options. Like feeding a depth map into the plugin to control the size/intensity of the effect. I’ve got a bunch of ideas, but I need a programmer to help a brother out!

Anyways, I just wanted to thank Adam again and David Hayes at Lionsgate for getting me involved with the project, it was super fun

Coverage on IGN-iPhone, IGN-Gaming, Kotaku (teaser Trailer), Kotaku (release trailer) Joystiq Official Hunger Games Youtube Channel

A few months later, we heard back, and the talk was accepted to be part of the Indie Game Summit at the 2012 Game Developer’s conference! The only hitch is that they cut the time down to 25 mins from 60, and asked that I do the talk solo *gulp!*. Nathan was cool with that, so I jumped at the chance.

The hardest part about putting the talk together was cutting it down to the 25 minute time limit, and still getting a good breadth of topics and information across. I decided to focus the talk on more of the artistic aspects of making a trailer, and cut out almost all of the technical stuff. So, I didn’t want these few pages of notes Nathan and I had created to go to waste, so I’ve dumped it all online here, in a somewhat cumbersome and insanely large blog post…

For those of you that don’t have the time to read this entire thing I totally understand. I’ve summed up the whole presentation/blog post in a quick 5 point TL;DR version for quick & easy digestion.

I’m sure there’s a few topics I’ve glanced over here, or maybe haven’t given the kind of coverage that people would like, so if you feel something is lacking, feel free to get in touch, and I’ll see if I can shed any more light on any of the topics!

Thanks, and Enjoy!

Table of Contents

TL;DR What makes a Successful Game Trailer?

What is a Game Trailer Supposed to do?

Capture your audience’s attention
Entertain your audience
Ensure your audience understands your game

Dissecting Popular Game Trailers

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
Fez Long Screenshots
Super Time Force
Realistic Summer Sports Simulator
Super Meat Boy 90′s Commercial
Dead Island & Transformers Fall of Cybertron

Let’s look at some classic movie trailers

Alien 1979 Trailer
The Shining Trailer

Creating a Trailer with Story and Dramatic Structure

Dramatic Structure in your Game Trailer

Capturing high quality gameplay footage

Screenflow (OS X)
CamStudio, Fraps & Camtasia
HDMI Out: Blackmagic capture cards & boxes
HDSLR Video

Tools to edit and assemble your trailer

Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere

Video Compression, and putting your Trailer online

Video Compression
Colour and Gamma shifts with H.264 compressed MOV files
YouTube Vs. Vimeo
YouTube Vs. Vimeo – Custom Thumbnails
Does Vimeo hate game developers?
So what should I use? Vimeo or YouTube?

Bombs away! Sending out the mail blast & Working with the press

Sending out the email!
Promoter App & The perfect video game press kit

What is a Game Trailer Supposed to do?

Before we get into too much depth about how to make a great game trailer, we have to talk about what the goals are for your trailer… What exactly is the outcome that we want to see? Do we simply want to raise awareness about the game? Do we want people to go and buy the game immediately afterwards? What makes a great game trailer, and will encourage people to want to learn more about your game?

Before you capture one frame of footage, these are things you want to think about, and they should shape how you approach your trailer. We’re going to look at three main points here that I think are critical not just to game trailers, but most online video in general, and it’ll hopefully set you down the right path…

Capture your audience’s attention

This seems very straight forward, but you should do everything you can to ensure that your trailer is engaging and immediately captures your audience’s attention. This is pretty obvious since nobody ever sets out to make a boring trailer, but this should really shape how the first 5-10 seconds of your trailer plays out. One of the ways I like to do this is by immediately immersing people in game footage, or immersing them in the tone/environment of the game. I don’t see the point to spending the first 5-20 seconds on logos/title screens/UI etc.

Just get to the action and start things already!

If you have to show logos for legal or some other reasons, try and integrate the logos in gameplay footage or game elements somehow and don’t put them on a black background. Try and be a bit creative in the way they’re integrated into the trailer.

There’s also data to back this up. The stats on viewer abandonment are pretty fascinating. There was a study done by Visible Measures in Sept of 2010 which showed that 19.4% of a video’s audience defected in the first 10 seconds. 44.1% click away after 60 seconds. (This is an average of watching 40 million videos over 7 billion viewings according to visible measures)

What can we gleam from this? Keep things short! Anything more than 90 seconds is overkill in my opinion, and if your video is sub par, most of your viewers won’t get this far anyways. In the wise words of Phil Fish, “People have shit to do!”

Entertain your audience

This is another somewhat obvious point, but your trailer should be as entertaining as possible. Think of it this way… When the viewer hits play, you’re forming a relationship with that person, and the trailer you create is usually the first impression people get of your game, so you don’t want to blow it. If someone is going to take their time to click play, you don’t want their first impression of your game to be boring, or low quality. You should reward them with something that’s engaging and entertaining.

The worst thing you can do is make a bad trailer and deliver something that’s not the same level of quality as your game.

If you have an amazing game, spend the time to make a cool trailer too so you don’t unintentionally turn people off. If you put out a bad trailer, it almost works against you, since even if your game is awesome, they probably won’t want to check out more info about your game.

Ensure your audience understands your game

Again, this is another simple concept that seems pretty obvious, but by the end of your trailer, you should leave the viewer an understanding of what you’re game is about. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to explain the gameplay, or gameplay mechanic. It could be the story, atmosphere or the tone of the game… It can be about the main character, the goals of the game, there’s literally an almost infinite amount of things you can show off… But you absolutely have to show some restraint!

Focus your trailer around one core concept!

People always seem to cram way too much information into their trailer, and the results are generally poor. You don’t need to go into tons of detail in your trailer. Covering your game’s story, gameplay, atmosphere, tone, awards, price, OS/Devices etc. is way too much for 90 seconds. The trailer is the hook to get people to want to learn more about your game or to buy it, it’s not the place to show off every feature and discuss the nuances of the game. Leave that for the website. Keep things simple, and resist the temptation to cram every feature of your game in your trailer since it might end up confusing people or even worse, just turning people off.

Dissecting Popular Game Trailers

So, I’ve stated that you should focus your trailer on one core concept or idea, but how many trailers actually do this? Unsurprisingly, most good, memorable trailers do exactly this, and I’ve gathered a few different trailers to showcase how they each tackle this problem.

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

First up, I wanted to talk about the commercial for Yoshi’s Island. Now, this isn’t an indie game, nor is it a standard game trailer (I don’t think game trailers even existed in the 90′s so a commercial is as close as we can get) but I wanted to talk about it for a few reasons. This game was released while Nintendo was the king of the video game industry, and they could do whatever they wanted, But the commercial still focuses on one core message.

This commercial is totally nuts, but what’s interesting about it, is it spends 25 seconds focusing on a fat guy eating food, and 5 seconds of actual gameplay. Considering how beautiful and amazing Yoshi’s Island is, this seems like the weirdest way to advertise this game. But the commercial has ONE message: This game is full of content!. They just chose to relay this message in the most bizarre way possible. Maybe they’re trying to subtly reference Stand by Me and Monty Python, subconsciously making teenage boys want to buy the game. I don’t know But that being said, the message is simple, and focused, and delivered in an entertaining and memorable way.

Fez Long Screenshots

The 2nd trailer I’d like to look at are the “Long Screenshots” that Phil Fish released for FEZ. Now, these videos are a little bit different than your standard game trailer, but I think they’re perfect videos for showing off the tone and feel of the game. When playing FEZ, there’s no enemies, it’s just walking around, exploring, solving puzzles, and enjoying your time in this world he’s created. I’ve probably watched each of these videos a dozen times because there’s so much detail and each side of the environment has something different going on, there’s just too much to take in in one viewing.

What Phil is trying to convey with this trailer is that FEZ is a slower game, but if you take the time with it, there’s many beautiful places to explore and see.

The other great thing about these videos is that it teases the viewer in the best way possible. He’s saying “Hey, look at all the detail in just this one section of FEZ. When you play this game, the variety and detail in the rest of the game is going to make your brain explode”. Or at least I think that’s what he’d say Phil released three of these videos, and I think they’re a great expression of the tone and feel of the game, and gives you a perfect idea of what you’re going to expect when you get immersed in the world.

So, Phil is focusing SOLELY on the Tone and Feel of the game. He doesn’t talk about the story, the size, length, or gameplay, though he does subtly allude to it through the rotating environment, which again, is a brilliant tease.

Super Time Force

The video for Cappybara’s Super T.I.M.E Force is the pinnacle of what you can create for a teaser trailer. There’s lots of cool things going on here, so let’s break them down…

Cappy decided to focus on the gameplay for this trailer, and one of the things they do to help you focus on the action is slow down the footage. Slowing down the footage helps the viewer focus on what’s going on in the game, since in this case, it’s total batshit insanity. This is kind of similar to how the Long Screenshots for FEZ slows down the rotation to help you focus on the details of the environment. They’re slowing things down here to help you focus on the gameplay. But be careful you don’t misrepresent your content, or you’ll create disappointment or resentment when people play your game. This happened with the Dead Island trailer which we discuss later in this post.

The 2nd thing they’re doing is zooming in to specific areas of the footage, to again focus your attention and show the viewer where to look.

You’re intimately familiar with your game, but the viewer isn’t. This is likely their first time seeing the game.

So show the viewer exactly what they should be focusing on by zooming in to specific areas of the footage.

The other cool thing that’s going on here, is that there’s a bit of a structure to the trailer. The music and gameplay builds to a climax, and they hint at a storyline by having the guy screaming at the end. The trailer has some Dramatic Structure with a beginning, middle and end. It starts out with a bunch of guys streaming out of a transporter, telling the viewer, OK, all these guys are coming from the same place… Then it shows a variety of gameplay footage from different areas of the game, and it ends with a hint of story.

What’s probably the best aspect of this trailer, is it leaves you wanting more. It’s such a short tease, and leaves more questions than answers, which helps pique the viewer’s interest.

Realistic Summer Sports Simulator

This is one of my favorite trailers that I’ve worked on over the past few months. But it actually took us a while to figure out what to do for the trailer. I figured it out when I sat down with some friends to play the game, and we were just laughing because we were constantly failing at every event. Justin Smith had the idea to make the trailer kind of like a tutorial, since it takes a while to figure out how to play each event. We sort of took that idea, and merged it with the fail blog compilation videos and we had our concept.

The one concept we wanted to get across is that RSSS is a parody, it’s really funny and fun to play.

Like the Super T.I.M.E. Force trailer, we zoomed in to specific areas to focus on the funny parts, and just break up the trailer visually, so we weren’t staring at the footage at the same zoom level the entire time. Having the same level of zoom of the game for a full minute is kind of boring, and cutting in for closeup helps break up the monotony. We also didn’t show all of the events, and teased the viewer with the few that you see.

Finally, there’s a call to action at the end to buy the damn game I wouldn’t really recommend doing this kind of blatant call to action in most trailers, but in this case, it kind of works, since the trailer is about “How to play realistic Summer Sports Simulator” and you do have to buy it to play the game. It also fits with the build and structure of the trailer, since we’re kind of building up to that final climax with all of the different steps. In this case, I think it works since it fits with the tone of the trailer and the game.

Super Meat Boy 90′s Commercial

The trailer for Super Meat Boy is one of my favourite game trailers of all time. It’s was created by none other than James ID, who also did the Binding of Issac trailers. This trailer is great on so many levels, but the one point I wanted to make with this video is that it basically focuses on the tone of the game, and says “hey, this game is like all those old, hard, awesome 16bit games you played back in the 90′s”. There really isn’t that much gameplay footage in the trailer, and what there is, is hard to decipher because they ran the video through a few VHS tapes to make it look super lo-fi. (As a little aside, we did the same thing for the Card Hunter trailer, but ultimately decided that it was best to go with the clean version).

So, what is this trailer focusing on? Again, like many of the other trailers we’ve discussed, it focuses on the tone of the game and not much else. It’s trying to evoke the feeling you got watching those awful 90′s game commercials (like the 90′s Yoshi’s Island commercial). The game is full of references to old 80′s & 90′s video games, so the tone of this trailer fits the game perfectly. This kind of trailer works great, and it definitely attracted a lot of attention when it was released.

Dead Island & Transformers Fall of Cybertron

I kind of hesitated to include these trailers here, but they’re two prominent AAA game trailers from the past few year, so I think they’re worth talking about.

There’s a great behind the scenes video which goes into some detail about how and why the trailer was put together like this. Here’s a few quick quotes from the video: “We wanted to make something that made you look twice” “We wanted to make you feel what they were going through” “If you’re worried we’ve shown you everything this game has to offer, you’re sorely mistaken” What does that mean? They wanted to make something entertaining, engaging, and teased the audience that what they’ve seen is only a glimpse of what’s to come.

The Dead Island trailer has been the subject of some controversy but I think it’s a fantastic trailer. It’s essentially a short film rather than a game trailer, and that’s why I think it works so well. It’s engaging, grabs your attention, and is a very entertaining.

People have complained about the trailer, since it deviates pretty far from the actual game. The action doesn’t take place in reverse, the game’s not in slow motion either, etc… The trailer sets up some false expectations there, and you have to be careful walking that fine line between showcasing what your game is about and just making a cool piece of entertainment.

“However different in plot, form and aesthetic, both imagine a picturesque vacation spoiled by a gaggle of reanimated corpses. And that, in the opinion of its creators, was the intention.” – EDGE Magazine

Edge has a great article that talks at length about this trailer, so I’m not going to beat a dead horse here. Essentially both of these trailers are short films with a story, and a beginning middle, and end. Yes, they have obscene budgets, and awesome VFX studios backing them, but that doesn’t mean that your trailers can’t have some sort of narrative as well.

Creating a Trailer with Story and Dramatic Structure

So, as we’ve seen, most of the trailers we’ve looked at focus on the tone of the game, and have some sort of dramatic structure to them. But what is dramatic structure? Basically, it’s having a story with a beginning, middle and end. That might sound complex, but it can be very simple, and makes all the difference.

Dramatic Structure keeps your viewer engaged!

In the Realistic Summer Sports Simulator trailer, we build up to a climax by having a bunch of steps, ending in a call to action to “BUY!” the game. In Super Time Force, they build up to a climax through the pacing and editing of the clips, and end with the guy screaming, which hints at a story. For the Canabalt: 2 Player trailer, we start off with some establishing shots of Winnipeg, introduce one character, then the 2nd, show some gameplay, and end showing where you can play the game.

If you just have a bunch of gameplay footage, slap it together, throw some text over top, that won’t necessarily engage the viewer. Try and think of your trailer as a story with a beginning middle and end, and structure it so that it’s constantly building towards some cool ending or payoff. There’s many ways to integrate this kind if thing into your trailer. You can add dramatic structure through your choice of gameplay footage and the way it’s edited, the music, pacing of your edit, etc etc… It’s really important to focus and spend a lot of time on this, since most game trailers don’t do this at all.

So the important question to ask yourself is:

Am I creating a Story with my Trailer?

This doesn’t necessarily mean starting your trailer off with “One man, on a mission” or “In a World…” or something cheesy like that. It just means having a bit of structure and a build to the way it’s put together. Your trailer should maintain a constant forward momentum and build towards some sort of climax or resolution.

Let’s look at some classic movie trailers

So, just for comparison, let’s take a look at two classic film trailers and see how they’re structured.

Alien 1979 Trailer

The Shining Trailer

These two movie trailers are awesome. The Trailer for Alien still gives me chills, and the trailer for The Shining is so intense, even though it’s just one shot for a minute and a half. Does that sound familiar? It’s kind of like the Long Screenshots for FEZ!

What both of these trailers do is set the tone of the films perfectly. They both build to a climax at the end and are put together in such a way that you can’t help be gripped by what’s going on on-screen. The trailer for Alien is beautiful edited, and as the music builds it also builds tension and suspense until all hell breaks loose around 1:30. Neither of these trailers talk about the plot, story, or characters. The core concept they’re trying to convey is that these movies are thrillers, they’re intense as hell, and they’re going to scare the crap out of you.

Capturing high quality gameplay footage

If you’re going to be making a game trailer, you’re most likely going to want to show off some gameplay footage. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to capture footage for your trailer, and we’re going to walk through a few of them here.

One of the things to keep in mind is that you’re going to want to capture your footage at the absolute best quality possible. That usually means capturing and saving the footage to some uncompressed or lightly compressed video codec. This means massive files and gigs and gigs of data.

One other thing to keep in mind, is it’s best to capture your footage with your in-game music turned off. Generally, you’re going to want to have a different soundtrack playing for your trailer, and you don’t want to accidentally capture your footage with the music baked in. Turn that off, and just capture the footage with the sound effects enabled, and that will give you the most flexibility when editing your trailer down the line…

Screenflow (OS X)

Let’s just start out with the best piece of software for the job, and that’s Screenflow. Unfortunately, it’s OS X only, which is a damn shame, considering how good it is.

Screenflow is super intuitive to use, and has an option to capture footage internally to an uncompressed format, and then save it out to an uncompressed Quicktime which you can bring in to any editing package. It’s a rock solid piece of software, and you can capture multiple streams at the same time. You can capture audio through a USB mic (or iSight) along with capturing footage from your screen, and from your iSight or webcam all at once, and it brings those in as multiple video tracks into Screenflow’s editor.

One of the awesome advantages, is that it allows you to remove or replace the mouse cursor with whatever you want. If you don’t want it showing up in your footage, a simple checkbox removes it. You can also edit your entire trailer inside of Screenflow if you want (I haven’t tried this) but the capability is there.

I like Screenflow so much, that I’ve installed Parallels and WINE on my Macbook Air, so I can capture some PC game footage using this software. It really beats everything out there for Windows and is the best option for capturing footage if your game can run in OS X or Windows.

CamStudio, Fraps & Camtasia (Windows)

If you’re running Windows, you’ve got quite a few more options:

Camstudio

Camstudio sounds great in theory. Free, open source screen capture application. I gave this a try back when I was trying to capture footage for the Serious Sam trailer, but had nothing but issues with it. One of my requirements was that it capture uncompressed footage, and I think I just gave up after an hour of trying to get it to work. They provide a lossless video codec, but I don’t think I could get it to install properly. All this being said, I know some people have had no problems with this, but it just didn’t work for me. It’s free, so I’d give it a shot first, and you might have better luck than me.

FRAPS

Again, I’ve heard people have no issues with FRAPS, but I just couldn’t get it to work for me. I think this tool was originally built as a benchmarking application, and the screencapture part feels kind of bolted on. You have to pay $37 for it to record as long as you want with no watermarks. Maybe it’s my crappy video card in my old 2008 PC or some other software issue, but I just couldn’t get this to work properly.

One of the issues I had with FRAPS is for some reason when I recorded the footage at 60fps, wrapped the footage in a 30fps container, which made the footage play back at 1/2 speed (but the audio was playing at normal speed) when I brought it into After Effects or Premiere. I ended up speeding up the footage 2X and then pitch shifting the audio sback down. It was an ugly solution, but it worked, and I never used the software again.

From the samples on their site, FRAPS seems like it would work pretty well, so I think it’s worth giving it a shot, before moving on to the next option:

Camtasia

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Camtasia. It works, captures uncompressed footage pretty well, but it’s a horribly designed piece of software. The UI is horrible, and exporting a movie out of it involves a 5 step process which involves digging through through various dialog boxes. It’s set up for easy sharing on social media sites like Youtube etc, but if you just want to get a bloody Quicktime or AVI out of it without the footage being resized or compressed all to hell, it’s like pulling teeth.

Once you’ve captured the footage, you have to suffer through Camtasia’s editing application which is useable in that all I’d want to do with it is just trim out the unnecessary gameplay footage, and have one movie with all the good parts. Doing anything more than that is likely to result in an aneurysm.

HDMI Out: Blackmagic capture cards & boxes

Now, Let’s say your game doesn’t run on OS X or Windows, and that it’s an Android or iOS game. Sometimes, you’re able to run these games in the simulator in OS X or Windows and capture the footage through one of the application I’ve listed above, but there’s times that just won’t work. Those situations generally revolve around the game not playing smoothly (or at all) in the simulator, or if you’re using special aspects of the hardware like the camera or the accelerometer/gyroscope.

In these situations, you’re going to have to run your game off of an iPad 2 or iPhone 4s, both of which mirror their displays out though an HDMI adapter that you can get from Apple. I honestly don’t know what you can do with Android phones since I haven’t run into that problem yet. I’m sure there’s a way to get HDMI out of those devices too.

That HDMI feed needs to go into something, and the place it’s going to go is one of Blackmagic’s capture cards/boxes. I don’t have any experience with these, but there’s lots of information listed on Blackmagic’s site about your various options. The one I’m most excited about is the Intensity Extreme which captures uncompressed video through Firewire to a Macbook Pro/Air. I’m going to be picking up one of those when it’s available.

The Intensity Pro card works on a Mac or PC, but you need a tower with PCI slots in it, and I don’t know too many people that have Mac Pro’s anymore. The Intensity Shuttle needs a really beefy PC that has onboard USB 3. It has to be a special kind of motherboard too, so that just wasn’t an option for me.

For the Hunger Games trailer, I did have to capture footage in this manner, and I had to go to a local production house to do it. It cost me about $75/h to capture the footage, but I was able to do it all in an hour or two, so it wasn’t that expensive. That might be your only option if you don’t have access to the necessary hardware.

HDSLR Video

Failing all of the above options, pretty much your last resort is to just shoot the screen of your device with a camera. This might not be as bad as it sounds, and for iOS/Touch devices, this is actually a pretty good option.

First the downsides: You need to know what you’re doing. If you’re not familiar with the whole HDSLR workflow, and how these cameras work, this can be a very frustrating experience, so I’d recommend finding a friend, or someone that has used these cameras in the past and knows how they work.

Canon cameras have a well documented and annoying moire issue, where if you shoot something like an iPad or iPhone screen up close, the image will look like absolute garbage because of the moire pattern. You have to shoot the screen a little bit out of focus, which makes the footage look blurrier than it needs to be. The Panasonic GH2 doesn’t have this issue, and is my current favourite HDSLR, because it’s produces the best quality video for the lowest price (compared to the Canon cameras).

Shooting video of your game being played is a great way to show off games that make unique use of the hardware (camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc) and to show off how the touch interface actually works and feels.

One of the reasons we chose to shoot the Aquaria for iPad trailer this way was that we wanted people to know that they were watching a new trailer for a new version of Aquaria. Aquaria has been out since 2008, and there’s tons of gameplay videos out there on Youtube. Had we just released a straight gameplay trailer, it wouldn’t have been totally obvious that this was a new trailer for a new version of the game, which is what we wanted to hit home.

Another great example is the trailer for Fingle for the iPad by Game Oven.

Fingle is really unique in that it’s almost more like a board game, or a version of Twister for the iPad. What’s going on on the screen isn’t really that important. The game is all about how the fingers and players are interacting with each other, so it doesn’t make any sense at all to just show gameplay. It needs to be a mixture of both in this case.

Tools to edit and assemble your trailer

There are literally dozens of different video editing packages out there, all of which are completely valid and good pieces of software, so it’s impossible for me to cover them all. So, I’m just going to touch on the two that I have some sort of experience with. This isn’t to say that the rest are bad, I just tend to stick to 2 main packages, and haven’t taken the time to learn or look into what everything else has to offer. I’m sure using Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and Windows Movie Maker all are valid solutions, but I have basically no experience with them, so I can’t really say if they’re a good tool one way or the other.

Adobe After Effects

If I had to pick one tool to suggest, I would say that the best tool for assembling a video game trailer would have to be Adobe After Effects. It’s more of a compositing/motion graphics/animation tool than a straight video editor, which means it’s way more flexible than something like Final Cut Pro or Premiere. It’s also got a bit of a steeper learning curve, and doesn’t behave exactly like an editing program. It’s more like Photoshop with layers and keyframes, which, if you’re familiar with Flash, you’ll probably feel right at home inside of AE.

Bilinear Filtering vs Nearest Neighbor in After Effects

The nice thing about AE is that it allows you to import all sorts of different kinds of files with different frame rates, sizes, aspect ratios etc, and it’ll keep everything straight, rather than trying to conform imported footage to whatever the timeline dictates like some other applications. Since you’ll likely be bringing in shot footage, gameplay footage, in-game assets, sound effects, music and all sorts of other elements, After Effects will handle them all, and lets you mix and match all of those kinds of things on the same timeline.

One of the other nice things is there’s a switch on layer in your timeline that allows you to specify if you want bi-linear or nearest neighbor filtering when scaling your footage up or down. I have to plead ignorance when it comes to the other software in this list, but I THINK AE is one of the only apps that allows you to set this nearest neighbor scaling method when adjusting the size of your clips. This is pretty critical when dealing with games that use pixel art since you always want those to be as crisp as possible instead of the muddy blurry mess that can happen if that’s not set properly.

Adobe actually allows you to rent After Effects for $75 a month, which isn’t that bad at all, especially if you only need to hammer out a trailer at the end of your dev cycle. 1 month should be more than enough to get up to speed and create something cool.

This isn’t really the place to talk about how I use AE to assemble my trailers, but I’ve got a bunch of blog posts, and a tutorial site where I talk about some of the shots I did for the more VFX intensive game trailers and you might be able to gleam some information there. There’s tons of training availble online for After Effects, and I think it’s the best tool for the job.

Adobe Premiere

Another weapon in your arsenal to make a game trailer is Adobe Premiere. Personally, I only use Premiere if I’m working with footage that I’ve shot with a DSLR, since it can play back footage real-time, unlike After Effects which has to render everything (either as a RAM preview or as a final Quicktime movie) before you can play it back. When going through hours of footage, it’s really the only way to go. That being said, once I’ve created my rough edit in Premiere, I always take it into After Effects for finishing.

That’s my personal workflow, and may not work for everyone, and it’s totally possible to create a trailer solely inside of Premiere, I just don’t like working that way. There’s a lot of gotchas like making sure your project settings are set up perfectly when you create it, otherwise it can lead to weird problems, like accidental filtering of your images, ghosting/doubled up frames, introducing interlacing, and other weird stuff that’s simple to avoid in After Effects.

Video Compression, and putting your Trailer online

Video Compression

This section could be a whole blog post in it’s self, but i’ll boil it down to the workflow that works for me. After you’re finished editing and putting the final touches on your trailer, I always export a full resolution, high quality version that has as little compression as possible. I usually never bother with a fully uncompressed version, since they take up way too much space, and generally don’t play back smoothly.

Final Audio Compression

What I like to do, is export my final version as a 99% PhotoJPG compressed Quicktime with full uncompressed audio. Why PhotoJPG at 99% and not 100%? Well, generally speaking, the file size difference between 100% and 99% is about 30-50%, depending on your movie, but the quality is pretty much indistinguishable. Doing a difference key between a 99% PhotoJPG Quicktime and the original source material shows that there’s essentially no perceptible quality loss, though of course there is some, because it is compressed ever so slightly.

I’ll then take that high quality master, and create my final compressed Quicktimes based on that. I like that workflow since it allows for some experimentation with compression settings without re-rendering the final movie over and over (and generating lower resolution versions for quick emailing/dropbox’ing if you need to share it quickly).

For final output, I always use Apple’s H264 codec set to max quality (see screenshot to see the settings) with Audio set to AAC encoding, at 320kbs. There are a variety of different H264 encoders, and after messing around with the free x264 codec, and Adobe’s Main Concept encoder, Apple’s always seems to spit out the best looking compression with reasonable file sizes.

H.264 Compression Settings

Now the downside to Apple’s encoder is that it costs money, but it’s cheap enough ($29.99). (Download: OSX/WIN OSX License/Win License) It’s a separate install for OS X users as well. Basically, you’re buying Quicktime 7 Pro, which is an older version of Quicktime since Quicktime X on OS X lacks the functionality to specify any sort of customizable H264 export settings. Sigh… Apple…

So why not use Adobe’s Main Concept H264 encoder exporting your final version right out of After Effects or Premiere? Well, the results I’ve seen from it are far from perfect. I found the file sizes were much larger than Quicktime’s exports, and there was more colour/gamma shifting going on with Adobe’s encoder.

Colour and Gamma shifts with H.264 compressed MOV files

Look at how H264 messes with your colours

I’m going to keep this section relatively short, since there’s two awesome blog posts (#1, #2) already written about this subject (and I might do my own down the line) but it doesn’t matter what you do, your colours will get tweaked when you export your Quicktime to H264. If you view the resulting movie in Quicktime Player on a PC, it’ll look totally washed out and horrible, but when you upload that video to Vimeo/YouTube, that gamma shift goes away. Open the same movie on a Mac, and it looks fine. WTF. This whole issue is a total disaster, but here’s the short version:

Export PhotoJPG master -> Create H.264 Versions using Quicktime Player 7 based on that Quicktime. Upload those H.264 Quicktimes to Vimeo/Youtube, and they’ll look as close as you can get to the original. I’ve tried about a dozen different iterations of Quicktmes, gamma stripping some, baking in a gamma shift into others, and the above workflow is what has generated the best results for me.

YouTube Vs. Vimeo

So, you’ve got your final H264 compressed Quicktime, now it’s time to upload it to YouTube. That’s a pretty straightforward process, and is your best option since it’s easy to share the video, and tons of people have google/youtube accounts, so you’ll likely get some comments & feedback, for better or worse.

That being said, one issue I have with YouTube is its compression. YouTube re-encodes your video, and creates separate versions from your Quicktime’s native resolution, down to 240p. By default, videos play back at 360p and that version generally looks like crap compared to the 720p or 1080p versions that you’re uploading. I’m not sure what the stats are on users setting their default playback to HD, or how many people click the button to bump to the res to 720p or more, but I bet it’s pretty slim. So, the net result of this is that your viewers are going to see a version of the video that’s of questionable quality. In some cases. I have seen 360p versions that look just fine, but generally speaking, I’ve never been thrilled with the 360p encode.

That really bugs me and that’s one reason I always upload my videos to Vimeo. The difference with Vimeo, is that when you upload a 1080p or 720p video, the version that’s displayed is simply re-sized to fit the embedded size, not down-sampled. What this means, is that Vimeo is simply resizing the high quality/resolution video down to whatever the embedded size is. That’s why when you click on full screen in Vimeo, it doesn’t stop/start like YouTube does since it’s streaming the same file to you, rather than grabbing a totally different stream like YouTube and a bunch of other customization options.

The one big caveat to Vimeo? It costs money. $59.95 a year. But that does get you higher quality HD encoding on your video.

YouTube Vs. Vimeo – Custom Thumbnails

I haven’t done too much research into this, but I’m willing to bet that a cool thumbnail for your video results in more plays than something that’s bland. Unfortunately, the only way you can upload a custom thumbnail to YouTube is by being a YouTube Partner. So you’re kind of stuck with the three choices that YouTube picks for you. The reason for this (from what I gather after a few minutes of googling) is so everyone doesn’t upload a video of a big ol’ pair of titties as their thumbnail which would likely generate tons of clicks. Sadly, I kind of agree with their reasoning here.

Of course, there are workarounds for this problem, but I’ve never really taken the time to give this a try.

Vimeo, thankfully, will let you upload a custom thumbnail, and it generally displays it at a really high quality. One caveat, don’t upload a PNG thumbnail. It will compress it all to hell and it’ll look like crap. Save a high quality JPG out of Photoshop (I always set it to max quality, since Vimeo re-compresses it) and that turns out much better.

Does Vimeo hate game developers?

If you take a look at this article on Kotaku, and these tweets, yeah, I’d say they do. But the reality is a bit more grey than this. Vimeo states in their user agreement that “gameplay videos are not allowed on Vimeo Basic or Plus accounts”. It’s pretty stupid, and basically, if you upload a gameplay video, and it starts to generate a lot of traffic, there’s a chance that someone at Vimeo will notice, and they’ll remove your whole account.

I have tons of game videos hosted on my Vimeo account, and Polytron has a bunch of videos there for FEZ, and neither of us have had any issues, but it’s kind of like playing Russian roulette… These videos technically could be removed at any time, which is really shitty.

What happened to Alec is that he was using Vimeo to host videos about his game Alone, and they were embedded in a whole bunch of different sites that were covering the announcement of the game. Shortly afterwards, his account was suspended, and all of his videos were blocked on all of the different sites. That’s pretty much a worst case scenario, and he had to contact every site to get them to change the video to the YouTube version.

So what should I use? Vimeo or YouTube?

This would be my strategy:

Upload your trailer to both Vimeo and YouTube, but send the YouTube version around to all the different gaming and social media sites. Then, embed the higher quality Vimeo version on the game’s official site. This way, your site will have the highest quality encoded version, which you can customize with a special thumbnail. Vimeo also has a lot more options for customizing the player which is really handy if your site has a cool layout. If for some reason Vimeo decides to kill your account, you don’t have to worry about all of your embedded videos disappearing or being unavailable, since all of those SHOULD be using the YouTube version. You can disable embedding of the vimeo video too, which will force people to use the YouTube link if they’re looking for a copy for their site.

Bombs away! Sending out the mail blast & Working with the press

Alright, so everything’s done, you’ve uploaded your trailer to YouTube and Vimeo, and now you just need to let people know about it. I don’t claim to be an expert in marketing or be a social media wizard by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a couple of simple techniques and tips I’ve picked up that I think can help make a difference in helping to get the word out.

If you’re going to email every blog on the internet about your game, make sure that you send an email that’s short, simple and gets straight to the point. If you’ve got a contact at Kotaku or whatever, of course email them first, but failing that, send it to their generic email addresses or contact forum on their site.

Don’t send a PDF. Don’t attach a video. Always send a plain text email, with simple copy/pastable chunks of information. Send a link to the video on YouTube and even include the embed code to save them a step. Send a few quotes about your game, and a simple 1-3 sentence write up about it. Include the link to the appstore or wherever they can go directly to get your game. Do you have a Facebook Fan page, or twitter account for your game? Send them a link to it. Have a link to a .zip press kit with more info, higher res screenshots and maybe a full quality version of your trailer (if it’s small enough).

If you’ve released games before, and have some press coverage under your belt, have a simple line that says “Hey, I’m the guy that made that game you guys covered before (link to it) I thought you might want to check out this new project I’m working on…” and go from there.

Basically, just like your trailer, keep things short, simple and to the point. I can’t say that this is going to work 100% of the time, but it’s worked for us when we’ve tried to get coverage of the Winnitron 1000.

Another not so obvious tip is in the YouTube description for your trailer, always make sure to make the App Store link or website the first line of the description so it appears right below the video without people having to expand the info section.

What day of the week is best to send out an announcement about your game? I’ve heard various theories about this, but the one I’ve heard the most is that Tuesdays are generally good, and the 2nd last Tuesday of the month is best. Why that is, is anyone’s guess… I think it has to do with the fact that most people get paid on the preceding Friday, so they have money to spend, and people have more time on Tuesday to look at stuff online, since they’re not bombarded with as much work as they might be on Monday.

Of course, there’s many paths to the same goal here, and everyone has a different take, so do whatever works best for you.

Promoter App & The perfect video game press kit

I literally just became aware of this cool web app called Promoter, developed by Andreas Zecher. “Promoter is a web-based tool for game developers that tracks press, manages promocodes and reminds you of festival deadlines.” Every hour Promoter automatically finds and archives new press mentions of your games from 600+ gaming sites. I haven’t used this tool before, but it seems like a fantastic tool for indie developers.

Andreas asked a bunch of game journalists what makes up the perfect video game press kit. This list is pretty bang on as far as I’m concerned and mirrors a lot of what I’ve listed above (and adds some things I’ve missed too), so I would check it out on his site.

TL;DR What makes a Successful Game Trailer?

Capture High Quality Gameplay Footage

• Set aside at least a full day to capture your footage.
• It takes a long time to capture good gameplay “moments”.
• Use High quality software and capture with as little video compression as possible.

Engage and Entertain your Audience

• Don’t think of your trailer as an ad, because you’ll focus on too many things
• Make something entertaining, and focus on one core aspect of your game
• Resist the urge to show off every feature and aspect of the game
• Ensure the quality level and tone of your trailer matches your game

Tease the viewer that what they’ve seen is only a glimpse of what’s to come

• Don’t overwhelm the viewer with information
• Don’t give too much away
• Keep your trailer Short (under 90 seconds), Simple, To the point.

Create a story with your trailer

• Give it a beginning, middle and end.
• Try to treat your trailer like a very short film.
• Give your trailer structure, and build to some sort of payoff or resolution at the end.

Solography at Lake of the Woods, Ontario, Canada

I can’t remember how I originally came across solography.org, but I knew I had seen these images somewhere before. They were so cool and dreamy looking, and had that awesome, signature pinhole camera look. Little did I know that there was a whole project behind collecting these kinds of images from all over the world called the “The Global Art Project of Pinhole Solargraphy“.

Pinhole Camera for Photo #2

The project is being run by Tarja Trygg and the the goal of the project is to create pinhole solargraphs all over the world and build a World Map of Solargraphs. AWEEEEESOMMEEE!

There’s shots from all over the world, and very few from Canada. Surprisingly enough, there was none anywhere near central Canada/USA, so I really wanted to take a few images of my own to contribute to the project.

There are instructions on how to make your own camera, but better yet, if you wanted, Tarja will send you some cameras and save you the hassle of making them yourself.

Solography shot #2

The coolest part of the image is the huge thick band of light streaking across the sky. This is from the sun streaking across the sky slowly raising or lowering in its relative position over the weeks and months. It kind of reminds me of tracks of data floating in the sky, or some sort of weird solar data defragging.

The best time to start/stop the exposures is at each equinox, so for this first experiment, I set up the cameras mid November, and ended a few days after the winter solstice (Dec 21st) where the sun would be at its lowest.

I loved how the top image turned out, and though the 2nd image is a little bland, it’s still cool. So, after taking these cameras down, and scanning them in, I set up the two remaining cameras, and will be exposing them for 6 months, for pick up around the beginning of July 2012

Pinhole Setup for 6-Month Exposure!

One thing I always loved about shooting film was the anticipation of waiting a few days to see what you’re going to get. When I was shooting BMX photos on slide film back in the day, I’d drop off a roll or two every Monday, and it was like a little mini Christmas every week.

There would inevitably be a lot of disappointment, mixed with extreme happiness when I got an awesome shot or two. Sometimes that never happened, and you threw an entire roll of 36 slides in the trash, but that’s all part of the learning process.

These pinhole cameras are kind of taking that patience and anticipation to a new level. I don’t think I’ve ever waited 6 months for 2 photos, but basing it on the quick 1-month experiments above, I think and hope it’ll be worth it

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to ask!

Thanks!

A-Team Visual Effects Notes

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been purging and cleaning our house of lots of odd junk that’s been accumulated over the years. At the bottom of an old filing cabinet, I came across some of my old notebooks that I used to keep track of shot tasks and notes while working at Frantic Films. I guess I threw out the majority of them, but I kept notes for Superman Returns, Across The Universe, Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, and A-Team.

I’m not really sure if anyone is going to find the contents of these interesting, but it’s a peek into the insane and nit-picky details and decisions that get made on a daily basis. Most of the information is kind of cryptic, since I’m guessing nobody, including myself remembers what shot 219_024 was, and I write a lot of stuff in shorthand (like CC for colour correction etc)

Superman Returns Notes

In any case, It’s kind of cool look down memory lane, at least for myself… My favourite gem in here? the BIG BOLD “FILM IS LIES @ 24fps!” written on the side of one page in obvious frustration If anyone is considering getting into Visual Effects, this is a good glimpse into the attention to detail that’s needed to bring a shot to final. Pages and Pages of “tweak this” “Test this” “Fix this” “This is broken”… I also kept track of my hours on some shots in there, which is a bit revealing.

They’re all saved as PDF’s for your viewing pleasure If anyone has any questions, let me know, and I’ll do my best to answer.

A few months ago, The guys at Devolver Digital approached me about making a cool trailer for the new Serious Sam: The Random Encounter game that Vlambeer was working on. This game was part of the new Serious Sam Indie series, where three indie game studios got to take a stab at making a new game based on the Serious Sam franchise. It’s a pretty cool idea, and I’ve worked with the Vlambeer guys in the past on their Super Crate Box iOS and Winnitron trailer, so it was a great fit.

I was super pumped to help these guys out, and all we needed was a good idea… I was sent an early build of the game, and one thing immediately came to mind. It would be really cool to shoot this in a desert, since a good chunk of the game takes place in that kind of environment. The only problem is, I’m in the middle of central Canada, and the closest desert is a few 1000 miles away…

Spirit Sands at Spruce Woods Provincial Park

Spirit Sands Desert

I remember reading about this cool place in Manitoba called the Spirit Sands. People have told me that it’s like a little mini desert in the middle of the province, but I’d never been out there to check it out. There were some massive floods in Manitoba this year, and unfortunately, Spruce Woods was one of the provincial parks that was majorly affected. It was totally shut down, and the access road to Spirit Sands was completely washed away. It totally sucked, so I tried to come up with some other ideas, but nothing really stuck. I really wanted to shoot there if I could. So, since I had some time, I waited it out, literally until the last possible moment to see if they would rebuild the road and open it up for the summer.

Serious Sam Shot List

A few weeks later, I noticed a few awesome shots on my friend Ian’s instagram feed of Spirit sands! It was finally open and the place looked great! I was really excited, but I still didn’t really have a plan… This was the last weekend I had to shoot, so I hopped on skype with Rami from Vlambeer, and after about 5 minutes of discussion, this was the idea:

Simple, but hopefully effective. Now the hard part is turning those 27 words into an engaging trailer that I would shoot the next morning… I kind of let it stew overnight and the next morning I storyboarded out some shots in my brain and sketched out a rough shot list.

Shooting at the Spirit Sands Desert

The Desert it’s self is awesome! It’s about a 2 hour or so drive from Winnipeg, just outside of Brandon. It’s another 20 minute hike to the desert from the parking lot… Not bad, but I had a ton of camera gear with me So, having never been to Spirit Sands before, I hunted around for about 30 minutes for a good location to shoot, and eventually settled on this little valley that seemed to fit the bill. I plunked down my gear, and started exploring the area, looking for cool shots.

Shooting something like this is honestly, kind of terrifying, since I’m literally pointing my camera at nothing, and triyng to imagine what it looks like with a bunch of characters and enemies running through. There’s nothing to pull focus on, and nothing to frame up against, so as I was shooting, I was literally saying crap like “OH MY GOD, LOOK AT ALL THE ENEMIES COMING OVER FROM LEFT OF SCREEN! HOLY CRAP, THERE’S SO MANY EXPLOSIONS, I CAN’T BELIEVE IT, AHHH!” and so forth, lol.

Screaming this nonsense at the top of my lungs helped in 2 important ways. First off, it helped keep my energy and excitement level up, since I was in the middle of nowhere, spending a few hours shooting spastic camera moves of orange sand. The other nice side effect is that when I captured the footage, it was great audio reference for which shot I was actually shooting. After a while, every shot I was doing started to look the same, and I was having a hard time keeping them straight in my head. I started crossing them off my list as I felt I had something decent to work with for each individual shot.

As the sun started to set, I walked around a bit more to try and capture a few of the opening/closing establishing shots with the slidr. These were pretty fun, and I managed to completely fill my shoes and any small hole in my tripod with tons of sand After all was said and done, I was shooting our there for about 5 hours.

Assembling the Trailer with Premiere and Adobe After Effects

When people ask me how I make these videos, I tell them it’s like assembling a puzzle where you don’t know what the end result is supposed to look like, and you’re responsible for making all of the different pieces. It’s a little daunting staring at an empty timeline, but slowly, after going over every single shot multiple times, things start to take shape.

I generally try and get a really rough edit going in Premiere first, and then fine tune things in After effects, but after spending a few hours hammering on it, that workflow just wasn’t working for this trailer. The problem was, that I was basically editing shots of nothing. No context, no timing, no characters. It was really frustrating. So, I just took the whole project into After Effects, and started cranking on some of the shots.

The guys at Vlambeer are super awesome, and they provided me with animated GIF’s of every character’s animation in the game. So, after some fixes in Photoshop, I took those elements into AE, and just started throwing them into the shots. I kind of made a previz version of most trailer, and that’s when, finally, things felt like they were coming together. I sent a few stills and shots to Devlover and Rami, and they loved it. Now it was just a matter of hammering out the rest of the shots and tightening it up.

Compositing and Visual Effects with After Effects, Fusion and PFTrack 2011

The techniques I used to composite the characters in this trailer aren’t really any different than what I’ve done in the past on my Super Crate Box trailer or Canabalt: 2 Player trailer. The only difference here, is that there’s about 20x more elements to deal with.

The basic technique involved getting a good solid 2D track of each shot, and parenting each character to that tracking information. Some shots have some pretty crazy camera moves, so they needed a lot of love, and some shots were basically hand tracked frame by frame. Once the characters are attached to the track, they’re relatively locked into the shot, and it’s just a matter of tweaking the crap out of it, and creating animations for each of the characters. There are so many different enemies in this game, it was super fun to start layering them in and creating these cool battle shots. There’s tons of elements like the gunfire from both Sam and the enemies, muzzle flashes, bullet hits, shadows etc etc etc…

One of the funnest parts was adding some live action elements into the shots to help sit the 2D sprites into the live action footage. I’ve had a copy of Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 kicking around for a while, but I’d never had the chance to use it until now. I used a bunch of the dirt hit/explosion movies and sound effects that are provided in that set. I really think that’s one of the things that helped push this over the top. I can’t recommend them enough!

Speaking of sound effects, Freesound.org was an awesome resource for this project. I’m not a sound engineer by any stretch of the imagination, so having some good high quality effects available for free was a huge help. They just updated their site too, so it’s a lot easier to find good samples.

In the end, basically every shot was composited inside of Adobe After Effects, except for two. The two boss battle shots at the end were run through Eyeon Fusion. The reason I had to use a different application is I’m way more comfortable keying with Primatte inside of Fusion rather than Keylight in After Effects. I wanted to put the boss behind the hill, so I’m using the blue sky as a makeshift bluescreen. I had to do a lot of massaging to the key, and do some interesting lightwrap and colour correction to the ground to make the shots feel right, and Fusion’s node based workflow just works so much better for this kind of stuff. What would have been a complicated mess of comps and precomps inside of After Effects was a (relatively) simple composite in Fusion.

The other minor anomaly was there was one shot that needed to be 3D tracked, rather than doing a simple 2D track. The shot where Sam’s friends Bim and Bam run into screen has a ton of parallax and camera moment, so it needed to be stabilized first, using After Effect’s new warp stabilizer. That tool is pretty slick, but one side effect is you can’t do a 3D camera track of the result afterwards since the pixels are literally being warped all over the shot. Fortunately, there’s an option to simply do a rotation and transform stabilization based upon the tracking data it extracts. I brought the shot into PFMatchit, and it tracked the shot with no problems at all. The 3D tracking data was brought back into AE and bob’s you’re uncle!

For colour correction and grading, I used a combination of Magic Bullet Looks, Mojo and Colourista II. While I was shooting I was dealing with pretty varying lighting conditions, and the sun was going behind the clouds every few minutes which made things a little frustrating. In the end, the colour looked pretty different from shot to shot, and some shots needed some major adjustments to make them sit in with the rest of the sequence. A couple of shots had to be pushed really far, and the limited bitrate of the AVCHD codec on the GH2 started to rear it’s ugly head. There’s some nasty macro-blocks on a few shots, but I don’t think most people will notice. I was going to try and hack my GH2 and apply the new 48+mbit hacks, but in the end, I chose to play it safe this time around. I’m going to give it a shot, but not without some testing first.

After all was said and done, I’m really happy with the way this trailer turned out! I’d like to thank the guys at Devolver Digital and Vlambeer for being awesome collaborators, and basically allowing me free reign with the project

So after delivering this trailer to Devolver and Vlambeer (It was actually finished mid September) they liked it so much they decided to hold off releasing this trailer until launch, and have me make another gameplay based teaser trailer to release ahead of time. The gameplay trailer was released on the 7th of October and was covered on a bunch of sites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Indie Game Blog, and Destructoid!

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to leave a comment, shoot me a note on twitter or send me an email.

Thanks!

My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side passed away many years ago, and I’ve been sitting on this film ever since then. I took a look at it about 5 years ago, and I captured some with my old DV cam, but I never did anything with it, and it sat in storage at our apartment.

This past year, my grandmother on my father’s side passed away, and she had her own vault of old 8mm film. This film was in MUCH worse condition, and there was tons of water damage, scratches, etc… I wasn’t even sure if the film would thread though a projector without shredding into a million pieces.

I’ve been in a purge mode lately, trying to get rid of a lot of old crap I’ve got kicking around, so I figured now was as good a time as any to transfer it and get rid of it. I had 2 days free and basically spent the whole weekend capturing, compressing, and uploading all of this old 8mm film to youtube. James Swirsky was kind enough to lend me his personal projector for the weekend, so I was basically set.

There’s some interesting footage here intermixed with a lot of boring crap… If you’re into Mexican Bull fights, Disney Ice Capades, dancing bears wearing tutus, or shots of cities and clouds from airplanes, we’ve got you covered. If you’re from The Pas, Manitoba, there’s some shots from around town in the 1970′s. Some of the more interesting footage I think has to be the old footage of Winnipeg and the Red River Ex from the late 1960′s. It’s pretty amazing to see downtown Winnipeg back in the day… There’s tons of foot traffic everywhere, and it really looks like a vibrant place, unlike the somewhat desolate and depressing downtown of 2011.

There’s a lot of footage of my Dad and his brother as young teenagers, hanging out at my Grandma’s cabin at Lester beach and other typical family life stuff. The 1960′s Halloween costume party at my Grandma’s house is pretty interesting…

Film Damage Elements

There was one roll that looked like it was completely over exposed, so was basically a full reel of “film gunk”. I’ve seen this kind of stuff before on artbeats and other stock footage sites, and it usually goes for extremely exorbitant prices, so I’m giving this one away for free. Yaay!

The file is the raw 1920X1080 24fps .MTS file right from my GH2. This format is a pain in the ass to work with, but I figured I’d provide the raw file right out of the camera, and you guys can decide what format you want to convert it into. If you want to make it into an uncompressed TGA sequence, or something that works, but my general workflow is to re-render all of my .MTS files as 99% compressed PhotoJPG quicktimes. This bloats the files up pretty bad, but they’re easy to scrub, and work with in After Effects. If you want to, you can drop the .MTS file right into After Effects and start using it, but I would highly recommend re-compressing it as something a little more edit friendly before using.

Anyways, I hope someone comes across this some day and finds a good use for it. If you do anything cool with it, shoot me an email or drop a note in the comments.

Thanks!

Aquaria for iPad has been in the works for quite a while now, and Alec and I had originally discussed making a trailer for it way back in March at GDC. Over the last few months, as development was wrapping up, we were discussing how to best get the word out about the new version of the game. One of the ideas was doing a short teaser trailer to talk about the development of Aquaria for iPad and talk about the new features that were integrated into the game. We didn’t really know what sort of form the video would take, but that was the general idea.

A few weeks went by, and I remembered the awesome World of Goo iPad video that James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot (from Indie Game the Movie) put together. It was basically exactly what we wanted to do, so I used that as a template for our own video. Thanks guys!! XOXOX

I’ve never done an ‘interview style’ video before, so I was a little nervous about botching the whole thing up, but I figured, the worst case, we could just re-shoot it, since it wasn’t going to take that long to do. I watched a few interview videos, wrote down a few questions, and got a rough idea of what kind of B-Roll I’d need, and that was it.

We shot the whole thing in about 2 hours in the corner of Alec’s Winnipeg Apartment.

This was the first time I’d also used a Lav Mic to pick up better audio than was was going to be captured through the VideoMic Pro I had hooked up to my camera. I fed that audio feed into Audacity on my laptop, and just let it record as we shot the interviews. Afterwards, i’d simply line up the two audio files, and replace the bad audio with the good audio captured from the mic.

Since I only had one camera, capturing multiple angles of the interview was going to be a challenge So the solution to that was to do the whole interview 3 times, to capture a closeup, medium and wide angle shots. It actually worked out really well, because after the last interview, things started to flow a lot better, and we got into a nice groove.

Aquaria For iPad Video Premiere Timeline Screenshot

Cutting the interview was a lot of fun too. Basically, I went through the whole thing, and found as many little sound bites as I could, and did my best to find pieces from all three angles to merge together into something coherent. I was a little concerned, because after watching the whole video with just the interview sections in place, the whole thing felt a bit disjointed, but after covering all of the weird edits with B-Roll, it smoothed over the whole thing really nicely.

I shot this video on my GH2 and only used two lenses: The Voigtlander 25mm F0.95, and a Canon FD 50mm 1.8. I’ve mentioned this before, but I love the EXT feature on the GH2 that doubles the focal length on any lens. It’s so handy becase it allows you to quickly zoom in for a closeup without having to change lenses. It’s really a killer feature and I use it all the time.

Speaking of closeups, one thing I didn’t expect is how much dust and fingerprints would show up in HD. After looking at the footage, I was a little shocked that I didn’t notice how much dust there was on the screen in some shots. I just wasn’t able to pick up that kind of detail from the LCD on the camera. I painted out the dust and fingerprints in a few shots, but I left it in some others because it was too much of a pain to paint out, and I didn’t think most people would notice since they’ll be viewing it at a smaller size on the web. But that being said, next time I do a video like this, i’m bringing wetwipes, cloths, and a can of compressed air, and we’re cleaning that thing after every shot.

Anyways, I finished the video up by doing a small amount of colour grading with Magic Bullet looks, and that was that. I’m really happy with the way this video turned out, and there’s so many slider shots of the iPad it kind of looks like Apple/iPad porn, hehe.

After release, this trailer was covered on: Kotaku, TouchArcade, TAUW, IGN, Joystiq, IndieGames Blog, Gamepro, Destructoid, Pocket Gamer and 4Players.de!

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to shoot me an email or leave a comment!

Thanks!

Considering the tight turnaround, we didn’t have time to shoot any new live action footage… I thought about using some old live action footage I had kicking around from Data Dance Level 3 and a few other events the Winnitron had been at recently, but Rami wanted to keep it even simpler than that. Logos, Gameplay, iPad, Coming Sept 2011. That was the plan.

Rami shot me the logos that night, and early the next morning, I started cranking away on it. All told, we went through 4 versions, and tweaked things a bit here and there till we came to the final version. I was pretty happy that I finally got to use a bit of Cinema 4D in this spot, and used the free iPad and iPhone models rather than trying to model them from scratch. I think I worked on it for about 6 hours, and most of that was spent capturing good gameplay footage.

I wrestled with trying to get my gamepad working with OSX Lion for a bit, but couldn’t get it to work, so I had to use the keyboard, which was pretty punishing, lol! After I captured all the footage and put it all together, Rami noticed that all of the footage had the same character in it. Total fluke, but we needed to show more diversity, so back to capturing more footage I went!

Capturing gameplay footage is pretty easy, but capturing GOOD gameplay footage takes a hell of a long time. Especially in a game where you die every 30 seconds or so. Finding good ‘moments’ is really tough, and you can play for 10 minutes to capture a small 1-2 second clip.

Fortunately, I had an archive of the old Super Crate Box Versus trailer, so I was able to resurrect some of the elements I used for that like the particle smoke effect. I tweaked it a little from the old version to work with the trailer, basically adding more smoke particles and a bit more velocity to them to help them spread out over the screen a bit more.

One little trick I like to use to make gameplay footage look a little cooler is to always colour grade it just a tad. For whatever reason, using Magic Bullet Mojo on the SCB footage looks just great. It seems to give it a bit more of a cinematic feel and make the game feel a bit larger than life.

After releasing the trailer, it looks like the news was picked up by Touch Arcade, Indiegames.com, Kotaku, Joystiq and Gamepro.com!

Thanks again to Rami for thinking of me and letting me make this trailer for them! I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, considering the quick turnaround. Let me know what you think!

Planning the Promo!

Farbs introduced me to the other members of the team, The Art Director Benjamin Lee, and the project lead, Jonathan Chey. We discusses some ideas on Skype over a short meeting, and eventually settled on the idea of making a parody of the old 80′s Dungeons and Dragon’s commercials. The idea was to not give too much away about the game, and have it act more as a teaser trailer, to try and drive traffic to http://cardhunter.com

We threw around the idea of maybe doing some stop motion animation with the game pieces, but this idea was throw out mainly to keep things relatively simple. Most of the previous videos I’d made were more VFX based, and a bit smaller scope. This video, though really light on the VFX side of things, was really heavy on the live action side. It had to hit just the right tone, ie. not being ridiculous, but at the same time being funny and entertaining.

After a bit of back and forth with Jonathan and the rest of the guys involved with the project, we decided to give it a shot, and see what happens!

Card Hunter Promo Storyboard Page 2

Card Hunter Promo Storyboard Page 1

Ben lee whipped up some amazing storyboards, which set the blueprint for the whole shoot. These storyboards were pretty crucial, and ended up helping a TON. I took these storyboards, and cut them into a rough animatic, where we laid down the voice over and some temporary music. This really helped everyone get a feel for what the final product would be like, and more importantly get a sense of timing for the promo.

The music was ripped from a youtube video and I did the horrible voice acting myself . For the final product, we were able to get none other than the amazing Danny Baranowsky
to create the soundtrack. As for the voice over, with a bit of digging, I was able to track down the guy that did the voice over for the 80′s Super Meat Boy promo. The guy goes by the name of Wiggly, and he sent over a whole bunch of different takes to use for the announcer.

So, with these pieces in place, the next thing on the list was that we needed to make a physical copy of some of the game pieces and the game board for the shoot. Ben Lee took care of that on his end and shipped them to Winnipeg.

The Case of the Missing Package!

That lead to our first wrinkle in the project… After waiting about a week for the package, one of the two parcels showed up, but the other was nowhere to be found! Ben called ParcelForce in the UK, and asked if they could trace down the 2nd parcel. They had no record of it, and when I called FedEx in Winnipeg, they showed the received package being 1/2 but they claimed the 2nd package was never shipped! D’OH!

Card Hunter game pieces

So, with the shoot date a few days away, we had to make the decision to postpone the shoot, and wait for Ben to make new game pieces and ship them to Winnipeg. What a pain the ass! Anyways, a few days more go by, and after we’ve rescheduled everything, the 2nd package FINALLY shows up on my doorstep! When it arrived, it was pretty clear what had happened. The first package was shipped FedEx, and the 2nd was sent via Canada Post!! I guess it was cheaper for ParcelForce in the UK to ship them via different shipping methods to save a few bucks. What a clusterfuck. In any case, I was relieved that Ben didn’t have to make new pieces, and that everything arrived safely.

Our shoot date was set, and now all I had to do was make a quick shot list (basically put all the shot in the shooting order) and we’d be all set.

Shooting the Promo!

Earlier in May, Marlon Weibe and I scouted out this cool place in the Exchange District in Winnipeg called Absurd machine. They had a really awesome looking room with high ceilings and access to all the lighting equipment I’d need for the shoot. The other thing I needed was actors! All the people that have helped with the Winnitron 1000 videos were happy to help, so that was super awesome. They were gracious enough to go to Value Village and get some retro looking clothing so that was one other detail I didn’t have to worry about

The shoot went really well, and everyone performed super awesome under the hot light hovering a few inches from the tops of their heads Thanks again to Alec, Chrissy, Eileen, Marlon and Noel for helping out and making it so awesome

I shot the whole promo with the Panasonic GH2 and the Voigtlander f/0.95 lens, except for the opening and closing shot which were shot with the 14mm pancake lens. One thing I absolutely love about the GH2 is it has an teleconvert mode on it, which essentially doubles the focal length of any lens you have. What it does, is rather than use the whole sensor to take an image, it crops out a full 1920×1080 pixels from the center of the sensor. This essentially turns the 25mm (50mm on the GH2) lens I had on the camera into a 50mm and 100mm lens at the push of a button. It’s super slick. So to get the wide shots and closeups, I was able to use the same lens. The quality of the 1:1 crop from the center of the sensor is flawless as well. No other camera has this feature, and for filmmakers on a budget, it’s a great advantage of the GH2.

The blooper reel!

The Retro 80′s version!

One of the other ideas we had was once the promo was finished, we could solidify the ’80′s commercial feel’ by giving the promo the worn out VHS look. We eventually decided against using this version as the main release, since there’s a certain demographic that won’t even get it, having never seen VHS. God, that makes me feel old, LOL Anyways, I thought it looked kind of cool, and I love the way the audio gets distorted when the tracking is off on a VHS tape. So, even though we didn’t end up using it, I think it’s a fun little special version…

After all was said and done, I’m really happy with the way the promo turned out! I think it has just enough of a cheesy feel without going over the top. If you guys have any comments or questions about anything, let me know! Thanks!

UPDATE: Since release, this trailer has been covered on a tons of sites, including Gametrailers.com, sevelina.co.uk, mcvuk.com, Cheat masters, Dark Side of Gaming No High Scores, GameSpot.com, Gamasutra, Gamespy, Kotaku, Shack News, Joystiq, Rock Paper Shotgun, GamePro and a bunch of others