Sound Design Driven Game Trailers

If you've seen a trailer for a first person shooter game like Call of Duty or Battlefieldthen you've seen a trailer like this:

These trailers where the gunshots, explosions and other mayhem serve as a percussion track are incredibly fun to watch because it's very satisfying to see and hear things sync up. Last week I talked about trailers being effective when they make us feel things; these trailers make us physically feel things via sound and music. Sound is a physical force that affects our bodies (as one of my college sound professors liked to tell us)

What games does this approach work for, and how do you even begin making a trailer like this?

I think these trailers are most effective when there's absolutely no ambiguity about how the game is played. This is a key reason why they're so prevalent with first person shooter games. When we see a gun pointing forward in a shot, we understand this is a game where you shoot people and things. Shooting a gun is about as fundamental and distilled as video game mechanics get, which means no time needs to be spent in the trailer teaching the audience the hook of the game.

If the game you're making a trailer for has a unique hook or unique mix of mechanics then this sort of flashy editing might obscure or confuse the audience. They might even think there's a rhythm mechanic to the game where you HAVE to do things on the beat in order to play it. That said, the trailer for BPM: Bullets Per Minute is probably the only game trailer I've ever seen with this editing style which is completely justified because in the game you have to shoot to the beat of the music:

So once you've decided this is the style of trailer you want to make, how do you start? The first thing is to find a really good music track. If you haven't read it, this article I wrote dives into what to look for in a good track. Once you have a track which you think will be good for the trailer, it's time to look a little silly at your editing station, because I encourage you to get your body into the music as much as possible. By which I mean you should dance and move to the music, tap your feet, clap your hands, move your arms around, and just see what happens when you try to move to the music. 

I think if you get really into it, the movements of your body will be the guide for where things should hit, the direction objects on the screen should move, and more. If you're having trouble getting into it, watch a conductor like Gustavo Dudamel who is an incredibly animated personality. Or watch this behind-the-scenes segment with Jackie Chan trying to articulate his sense of rhythm for his fight scenes. Another thing which you might try is to listen to really good freestyle drummingbecause you'll notice in a lot of these trailers the gunshots and sound effects don't land on beats, they occur in the spaces in between. 

The next thing to do is to find the rhythm of the things which exist in the game. For example, whether a shooter or hacky-slashy game with swords, the weapons will have a different rhythm. A semi-automatic rifle will have a different "beat" than a fully automatic one. Or in a game like Dead Cells, a spear will have different timing than a broadsword. If I'm really thinking of syncing to the beat then I'll create an inventory of weapon rhythms so I can listen to them and match to the moments in the music they fit best.

In this trailer I made for Dead Cells you can see moments where the weapons' patterns sync up to the music.

If you can't match things up to the natural rhythm of the objects in the game, then it's time to "force" the rhythm via editing. You'll notice a lot of the shots in the Battlefield trailers are quite short because they're only there for a few beats at most. It's also pretty easy to nudge the sound effects a bit if their natural rhythm doesn't sync up 100%. In at least a few of the Dead Cells trailers I made, I'd move a sound effect over just a few frames so they'd sync to the music better. The sound designer might've noticed, but I'm guessing no one else really noticed because they were (hopefully) just paying attention to the sync.

A common refrain of editing is that it's all about feel, and I think this style of trailer editing is hugely about feel more than it is looking at music waveforms, marking off the beats, and then putting cuts or sync points directly on the beats. Marking off beats is a good place to start, but I think the more feeling you put into the editing and sync, the more enjoyable it will be to watch!