Three Great Trailers From E3 2021
Phew, another E3 season has come and gone. Congrats to all the game developers and game trailer makers who revealed their hard work; you all deserve a break! Three trailers of mine were shown during the live streaming extravaganza. The first was the Among Us Roadmap Trailer which I briefly discussed in the previous post about making trailers for an existing fanbase.
The second was another trailer for Among Us to formally announce the release date of the 15 player game update. That was a lot of fun because I got to make a trailer which used a sound motif for an increasingly intense build. This idea came about from a mix of time constraints and the fact that Among Us doesn't have much in the way of game music, so I immediately latched onto the idea of a heavily sound design driven trailer.
The third trailer was for The Anacrusis, the debut 4-player co-op multiplayer game from Stray Bombay headed up by Chet Faliszek formerly of Valve who co-wrote Portal and was lead on Left 4 Dead, and Kimberly Voll who used to work at Riot Games. This was a HUGE challenge because it's a multiplayer game and getting AI to do what you want for the sake of cool trailer shots is very very difficult. I think the setting and music especially really make this one stand out. I didn't get to play the game much for "real" while making this trailer so I'm eager to get my hands on it later! The Stray Bombay team helped out IMMENSELY with capture, digital acting, AI wrangling, sound design and more. The title graphic was done by Caitlin Cadieuxand sound mix by Michael Cardillo.
Speaking of multiplayer games and capture, that brings me to the first trailer I wanted to highlight which is the Halo Infinite Multiplayer Trailer!
Let me start by just saying WOW! I already had a lot of respect for people capturing and editing multiplayer game trailers, but this one is seriously amazingly well done. The action is all clear and easy to follow, there's a great sense of the space at all times, the camera movement and choreography is super smooth and it's exciting as heck to watch.
I don't know the particulars of the capture situation, but I know Halo for a while has had a "theater mode" where the game records gameplay while in campaign or multiplayer. This function allows the player to go back into a game, move the camera around and get different shots. If this is what they had at their disposal it makes a lot of sense how they were able to get a lot of the shots and especially the match cuts on action.
For example, at about 1:01 there's a shot of a warthog getting shot and flipping over. This looks like two shots: one where the player holds the rocket launcher, zooms in, shoots and hits the warthog, then zooms back out and grapples to a ship flying by; this shot is bisected by a closeup insert of the warthog getting hit on the side.
Now, this could've been done just by take after take (and I'm sure even if they had a replay mode they did A LOT OF TAKES) because every time there's a cut, that means the capture artists have to do fewer coordinated moves in quick succession. As a general rule, the longer a shot in a gameplay trailer goes without cutting away, the more likely it is there's some sort of customized scripting happening behind the scenes. The more a trailer is pieced together by a lot of quick shots, the more likely it's captured from "live" gameplay. For the sake of the capture artists I hope they had that replay function.
Either way, it's still a colossal achievement and I appreciate every match cut, insert, grenade throw, no-scope shot, flying camera shot and shot composition. Every single moment flows well into the next and it's just stunning. I really appreciate the relative restraint of the camera movements. Each camera move feels grounded in "real life" movement whereas in game capture it can be very easy to do camera moves which feel very video game-y. I'm certainly guilty of capturing lots and lots of rotating dolly shots, aggressive track-in shots and other things which feel kind of floaty because they're not tied down by real world physical cameras. I would LOVE to talk to the team of people who made this trailer and pick their brains.
Next up let's bring things down a bit with the great story trailer for We Are OFK.
This is a great story trailer with well selected and edited dialogue which fleshes out these characters and their situation in just a handful of lines. This has strong vibes of a movie trailer for some sort of small indie film. It starts with the character Itsumi introducing themselves as a struggling musician. Itsumi then introduces their friends Luca and Carter by comparing them to Saturn and a shooting star. Then Luca introduces the character Jey who is: "Scary, but in a hot way, and is also a genius, but for your ears."
What works great about this dialogue is despite its abstract feel, it gives you a sense of not only each character, but the person who is describing them. That means each line fleshes out the characters with great efficiency. It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition documentary interviews where each actor was asked to describe their co-stars. In a lot of movie press, actors are asked questions about themselves and their own characters which can be very very boring, especially after that actor has been asked the same question over and over again. But by having the co-stars talk about a specific person and their character it was far more interesting to watch.
After Luca talks about Jey's musical ability, of course the music then really kicks in. Throughout the trailer we get little gameplay snippets in the form of texting and dialogue choices. The other story dialogue moments tell us a bit about the character's situation and a very big sounding thought: "Everyone in Los Angeles is mourning something. Glad to have you with us." The last bit of dialogue is:
"I don't really know what even want to say with music, And you gotta have something to say."
"If anything, you're honest and when you're honest, saying anything is something special."
This heartfelt dialogue intercut with concert visuals and some dramatic montage makes for a really beautiful trailer which made me feel warm, fuzzy and made me really want to be with these characters to see their journey. This is a really stellar trailer all around as far as editing, music, character, story, art, animation and just enough gameplay.
Last but not least is the amazingly well done trailer for The Outer Worlds 2 which is CALLING OUT GAME TRAILER MAKERS.
The cinematic trailer about cinematic trailers and why cinematic trailers do the things they do. It's a trailer describing the visual and audio tropes of cinematic game trailers which gets to have its cake and eat it too. That is, it gets to not show "real gameplay" but also satisfy the people who hate cinematic trailers because they don't show "real gameplay." And yet, even people who do like cinematic game trailers will be amused because it's all so very true, and people really really appreciate honest marketing!
There's so much distrust around game trailers "faking" things around E3 despite non-malicious intent, that a trailer coming out and saying "Yeah, we released a cinematic trailer because the game doesn't look good enough to show yet" is addressing the elephant in the room by just focusing on the elephant. By the way, this is a great blog post about how to spot a fake gameplay trailer by AAA game animation developer Jonathan Cooper.
I don't feel like I really need to break down what is happening in this trailer because the narrator does all of that for me. The only thing they didn't mention were the gunshots synced to the beat. My one worry with the trailer when I initially watched it was that its comedic tone wouldn't fit the vibe of the game. I think marketing works best when it matches its source material, not just when it does something clever for the sake of it. But since The Outer Worlds is known for its satirical humor, it fits perfectly!
Those are but a few of the many great game trailers from E3 2021. If you'd like to see more of my favorites, I compiled them into this Twitter thread. I think I got in a nice mix of very small to very big games; all of which are well done and inspirational in their own way. There were so many more well made trailers, but I highlighted these because they just stood out to me in particular.
Congrats to everyone again!
