Lucifer Within Us - Announce Trailer
I got this gig after meeting Victoria Tran and Xin Ran Liu of Kitfox Games at GDC 2019! I wish I could say it was due to my amazing networking skills, but Victoria is the one who reached out to me on Twitter about meeting, and later on Xin asked to join. Of course, we inevitably ended up talking a lot about trailers, and Xin mentioned they were working on an unannounced mystery detective game which has a timeline mechanic in it. I was immediately hoping I'd get to work on the game, but I pretty much just flat out told him how I'd approach the trailer (knowing it was entirely feasible they'd just take that advice and make it themselves). Later on they asked me to do the announce trailer!
As I said, Lucifer Within Us is a game where you play as a digital exorcist solving murders by exposing the lies of your witnesses. The unique timeline mechanic shows the characters' subjective retelling of the events before the murder and their alibis. Since this was an announce trailer, the game was still early in production; so we had to figure out how to make something using only what was available, or what could be made in the time before it was due. We had about a month and a half.
The first thing I do when making a trailer for a game very early in production is to ask what elements I'll have available to me.
For example:
Is the game playable?
Is there any music and/or is there a composer available?
Are there any sound effects made for the game?
Is there a script or spreadsheet of dialogue to read?
Does the game have any voiceover? Can we record voiceover?
For this project I had:
Playable build with freecam
3D characters detailed enough for close camera angles
Rudimentary animation (which could be tweaked)
Music composer available for custom music
Some sound design
Written dialogue
No voiceover
Time to fix up art, make graphics, and add debug options
The character icons were added to this for clarity. I also made sure to compose the shot so all the important parts weren't covered by the graphic.
The lack of voiceover was what I focused on first, because voiceover or lack thereof will make fundamentally differently structured trailers. Without voiceover, I'd have to either make the trailer entirely visual, or augment the message with title cards. The in-game freecam and detailed enough character art meant for the most part I wouldn't have to ask the team to custom make scenes for the trailer. A composer being available meant I didn't have to find one or look for royalty free music.
My other limitation was the trailer had to be 60 seconds long because that was the amount of time allotted to Kitfox for the Kinda Funny Showcase at E3.
First, I played as much of the game as I could, but since I knew I wouldn't be incorporating dialogue, I didn't focus too much on what was said, just the basic ideas for the premise of the game. I paid closest attention to the existing character animations, the props in the game, and how the characters moved in the space. The timeline in the game was still very much a work in progress, but the mechanic felt like one of the most unique parts of the game, so I knew we had to include it in the trailer somehow.
The basic ideas we wanted to communicate with this trailer:
You're a detective solving mysteries
There's a timeline of events in the game which the player uses
The game is set in a world which mixes both technology, and some sort of occult or supernatural elements.
Since I knew Kitfox was making the timeline graphics, I needed to figure out how the timeline would integrate into the trailer so I could make a mockup in After Effects for them to match.
I don't often storyboard my trailers, but I did for this project because it was the fastest way to build a sequence. Not a whole lot changed from the first animatic!
The action the character is currently in was the only part of the graphic displayed at full opacity so it would stand out from all the other items on the timeline.
I knew we needed to open on the murder simply because it was the most exciting way I could think of starting the trailer. The intent of the next shots around the open grave were to connect all the suspects together on the timeline, because finding the body is one part of the mystery where all three of them are together in one place. My hope was that seeing three icons on the timeline about finding the body would help the audience make the connection (later on, Kitfox added character icons to the to timeline in order to make this moment even clearer). From this scene, the scene rewinds as we see the playhead of the timeline moving backwards.
From here I wanted to show each character going about their business, and showing the audience how each moment fits into the timeline. This was to show how each character's story built up, and then how it fit relative to the other characters' actions. In this first cut I showed each moment, and finished each character's chunk with the timeline filling in.
Next, I wanted to tie all the character's actions together so the audience could see how they overlapped in some spots, but not the other. Then I wanted to show a wide view of the scene where the timeline's playhead scrubbed back and forth. The intent of this shot was to hopefully make it very clear the timeline shows the characters' actions in the scene, and how the player can move the timeline playhead back and forth through the timeline.
The trees behind the fence might never be seen in the final game, but were needed to make sure this shot looked good!
With this idea established, I put in a short montage to highlight pointy looking weapons. The weapons were to clue the audience into the murder mystery aspect of the game; I assumed the idea of finding a murder weapon is a pretty ingrained idea in both games, so all I would need to do is show a few of them.
After the weapons, I showed the characters looking at each other to indicate how the characters' line of sight is another part of the game's mystery solving mechanics. I wasn't 100% sure this would come across, but it wasn't as integral an idea to the trailer, so I wouldn't be terribly upset if this short section didn't come across.
The last section I described as the "Mind Palace" shot (in reference to the infamous scene of Benedict Cumberbatch's depiction of Sherlock Holmes) where the protagonist parses available clues in order to come to a conclusion. This shot was necessary to show how the main character and player fit into the game. I think the biggest self critique I'd give this trailer is I would've liked to establish the main character more clearly, but I let it go because I don't think it's essential to understanding the game's mechanics.
The final shot depicting the digital exorcism was an existing element Kitfox made for their first teaser idea before hiring me. The only thing I did to the final shot was to make it shorter for time. My hope was this sudden burst of animation along with the chromatic aberration and skull head image would add flavor to the mystery. It's one thing to have a game which has certain mechanics, but it's another to have the same game with its own unique setting and visual trappings!
Shortly after sending this first animatic is when I found out we only had 40 seconds for the trailer, not 60!
Strictly speaking, the character positions in this shot don't match these items on the timeline. I picked the part of the scenario where characters were visible so you'd see them moving about as the playhead moved back and forth.
Reducing a trailer's length by a third is usually never a good feeling, but in this case it really forced me to make the trailer very tight, and efficient. The biggest difference between the 60 and 40 sec versions is in the 40 sec version's character montage, I put the timeline graphics on top of the game footage instead of making it a separate shot at the end of each character montage. This saved me time, and made the connection between the actions and the timeline more explicit.
With this solid animatic, I then mocked up the timeline animation in After Effects for Kitfox to reference, while they got to work creating the opening murder scene. I also asked that a trail of blood be added to the grave scene to make it more explicit that a murder occurred, and the body was dragged to the grave; I didn't want it to look like they were just attending some sort of open grave funeral.
Everything after this was about refining the capture for clarity, and making final capture using the build with all the added art and animation needed to make each shot look good. There were a lot of little polishes which went into the final version like turning off things like props in the game sparkling, making sure objects' collision looked correct, and also composing my shots so the gameplay wasn't obstructed by the timeline graphics which were layered on top. Big thanks to Alex Bull for keeping us all coordinated, setting milestones, and making everything go nice and smoothly!
I also suggested the timeline graphics in the character montage to be mostly translucent except for the block appearing in each shot. This was to help focus the eye on the pertinent information; I think it would've been too overwhelming for all of the timeline to be at full opacity. Some final touches included adding in some more glitching effects to add more of a science fiction element to the look of the game.
Sometimes build change requests I make for the trailer seem like things which can just get rolled over into the final game, but in this case I shot at a lot of angles which the player will likely never see in the game, so I appreciate everyone's hard work on assets which may never be seen anywhere outside of this 40 second teaser!
The background shots for this were captured specifically so the important parts wouldn't be blocked by the protagonist's body in the center of the screen.
For the final tweaks of the trailer, Kitfox co-founder Tanya X. Short sent out versions of the trailer to some trusted colleagues for feedback in order to make sure we were communicating what we wanted. The main feedback was it wasn't clear who the protagonist was, and it was a little unclear how the timeline connected to the gameplay. A lot of the issues were fixed by new capture, character icons on the timeline, and a tighter relationship between the gameplay camera movement and the timeline playhead.
My years of experience addressing change notes I feel like I can look at a list, and intuit how difficult the fixes will be without reading a single word. Generally, the long lists are good news because they're small tweaks which are easily addressed. Short lists are usually bad news because it means there's something so fundamentally wrong, the person giving feedback decided it's not worth nit-picking just yet because the trailer will be so drastically different by the time the one or two notes are addressed.
The team at Kitfox loved the finished trailer, and I was happy with the reactions I saw during the Kinda Funny Games Showcase! Most people seemed to pick up on the murder mystery aspect of the game, so I was very satisfied. Any comments I read where people said something to the effect of: "I need to know more" I didn't worry about because by design, this trailer doesn't say a lot. My hope is the "I need to know more" comments have some amount of "I'll take another look if/when I see it again." That way, when they see the game again in the future they won't be coming to it totally cold.
My hope with announce trailers is to at the very least plant a seed of interest so it may grow if properly cultivated by future trailers or other marketing efforts made by the team!
