Stray Gods - Release Date Trailer
How do you take a musical game, and make a trailer which sums up the story and characters while simultaneously showcasing a variety of songs and intercutting it with dialogue? This was one of the most challenging trailers I've ever made and I was nervous as heck I wouldn't be able to pull it off. But once I accepted the job, I knew what I wanted to make was a trailer people would want to watch and listen to over and over from beginning to end.
Stray Gods is an interactive roleplaying musical game written by Dragon Age writer David Gaider, with musical direction by Austin Wintory, and an all-star cast of voice actors which would be the envy of any AAA game. I got this project via Summerfall Studios' Marketing Director Meredith Hall who before this project I'd had Twitter interactions with over the years, but never met in real life. It was great to finally have a project to work on together, never mind one with such an amazing group of developers, musicians, and voice talent.
It’s not often I have to fit in so many “pedigree” cards, but this trailer was certainly one of them!
It's really hard to make a trailer for a musical. The golden age of Hollywood musicals is long over. Movie trailers for modern musicals almost overwhelmingly attempt to hide the fact they're musicals at all. It's sort of like how for a time, trailers for all films in non-English languages never featured dialogue (but they all fit in a shot of people laughing together) In my observation, modern trailers for musicals either:
Hide the musical aspects and use one song as the music for the climax of the trailer (but don't show anyone singing it)
The musical bits peek through, but if you're not paying close attention you still might not know it's a musical
Multiple songs are featured in a montage style which doesn't make a very cohesive story, but you hear an assortment of songs
Dialogue and songs are fit together in a way which is cohesive, compelling, and make it very clear it's a musical
I think type #1 is by far the most common. When you watch one of these trailers, you don't even know the movie is a musical. The Color Purple did this and the only indicator is their repeated use of "A BOLD NEW TAKE" which in this case means it's a musical. The original adaptation was the 1985 film by Steven Spielberg, and in 2005 it became a Broadway musical. The Greatest Showman does the same thing using one of the signature songs as background music, but otherwise sticking to spoken dialogue. La La Land also did this, sticking to dialogue. There is at least a title card saying it's a musical, and you can see some dancing, but otherwise you couldn't be blamed for not really knowing it was a musical until you saw it.
In moments like this I feel like I’m editing anime music videos again taking lyrics like “I’m in the dark too as you’re hearing this.” and cutting in b-roll which matches in a very literal way.
#2 is also pretty common, where a song will peek through during the trailer, but otherwise they'll stick to spoken dialogue. This happens in Sweeney Todd where there's one segment of Johnny Depp singing. Chicago has Velma singing on stage, but that song is diegetic (meaning it happens in the story), so it could conceivably just be that scene (even though Chicago is known first and foremost as one of Broadway's longest running musicals). The full trailer for West Side Story starts with singing, but otherwise avoids it. Cats uses "Memory" as its climactic song which we see Jennifer Hudson singing, but otherwise it sticks to dialogue. Dear Evan Hansen is mostly dialogue except about halfway through we see him singing on stage.
The trailer for Les Miserables starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway fits into type #3 with a compilation of songs with dialogue, and the teaser is entirely centered around Anne Hathaway's rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream." In my research, a lot of trailers for Broadway musicals were edited in this style like in this one for Beetlejuice.
I recreated the dialogue selection wheel in After Effects so I could overlay it whenever I wanted in the trailer. It was important to me that people see how the game is played.
#4 is by far the least common. And that gets into the crux of why making trailers for musicals is so damn hard. The reason is: musicals tell story through their songs, but typically the songs have an eclectic range of styles which don't flow easily into each other. Movie trailers typically either stitch together multiple music cues by stopping down the music with a dramatic cut to black and then starting a new one, or using one cue which fits the whole trailer.
The other problem is, even if the sounds of the songs "match" the lyrics you want to cut into the trailer might occur at a part of the song which is difficult to cut into another song.
Some of the best trailers which integrate song and dialogue are A Star is Born(which isn't technically a musical, but the integration is beautiful and won a Golden Trailer Award). Across the Universe is a favorite of mine (though it actually falls more into category #2 because while it starts with a character singing), it mostly lives in spoken dialogue. In the Heights is another good example of a trailer which mostly uses spoken dialogue but is unequivocally a musical.
Because the characters are not fully animated, it was important to show as much dynamic change in the images as possible
My lofty goal was to make a trailer that fell more in line with the type #4 trailers. First thing I did was go through all of the music I had available. If I was working on a movie musical that would be at most over an hour of music, but for an interactive roleplaying musical there can be forty minutes of music or more for ONE song alone! This is because during each song you have to make choices for things like which character to side with, or choose the sort of character you're playing.
The first thing I did was select the music which had the best story exposition. This ended up being the "Teaching" song where Pan explains Grace's new powers. Next most important was what song to use for the big finish. I chose Aphrodite's song for its soaring vocals and because the iterations feature a wide cast of characters. At the time, I imagined we'd gradually incorporate more and more cast members to make a big bombastic ensemble finish.
The cue for the middle of the trailer was more difficult to select because after the initial exposition of the "Teaching Song" there wasn't really much more story I felt I needed to tell via the songs. The constraint that helped me find the answer was I knew we wanted to feature as many cast members as possible (especially big stars like Troy Baker). So I looked at the songs he sang and ended up on his confrontation with Persephone. His other songs didn't have the right amount of energy and would've brought the pace down.
I tried to give every character their little moment (barring some I avoided for spoiler reasons)
With the songs chosen, I had to select the right bits of exposition and somehow fit the three songs together. One thing I did was use iZotope RX to remove the vocals from the songs so I could fit dialogue on top and lead into the lyrics only when necessary (Later, Austin would provide me with the pertinent music sections without vocals). After finding the song bits I wanted, my dialogue editing process was my typical workflow. It was just a different way of finding the tentpole lines I had to work around.
When I say "tentpoles" here I mean the things which are the mandates or components of the trailer which I have to work around. It's useful to put those roughly in place because those will add constraints to what dialogue you can put in, where to cut to music, etc.
Some tentpoles for this trailer were the pedigree and messaging cards we needed to include.
Writer David Gaider
Music Director Austin Wintory
The song writers
The voice cast (spread across two cards)
I’ve never had to include two full cards just to fit the star-studded cast of actors O_O
I also decided we needed to spell out the game's mix of genres to make it absolutely unequivocally clear. This is what lead to the title cards:
An Interactive Roleplaying Musical
An Epic Tale
of GODS and Magic
I stole these from the game's official marketing channels like the website and Steam page. I didn't want anyone to finish watching this trailer without knowing this is an interactive musical game.
The cold open went through a few different iterations. At one point we tried incorporating Calliope's singing with Grace, but it didn't quite work. Eventually I settled on Calliope stumbling into Grace's apartment on the verge of death. It was important to get this key plot point out of the way as soon as possible. I also think it's easy to understand without context, and prompts questions. One small change I made to this scene was the rhythm of the door knocks. In the version of the game I had they were very evenly spaced, which didn't feel right to me for someone who's dying, so I made them more uneven (they're a totally different pace in the finished version of the game).
This shot is to show some clear moments where you have to choose between characters
After the cold open there's the lyric from Pan: "Grace, you know that you're lost now. You've been given powers you don't understand" which I used to cut to some shots which either tenuously or directly match the visuals I cut to. Very fortunate for me that this key bit of exposition happens at the beginning of the song, which works well for the beginning of the trailer. After this, I use a section of the music with removed vocals to fit in some spoken dialogue exposition where Athena tells Grace she has a week to prove her innocence.
Grace is prompted to start singing, which leads to the second bit of song lyrics. I'm not 100% happy with this lyric: "So sorry you had to be here for this. I'm in the dark too as you're hearing this." because we don't know who Grace is talking to, but it reiterates Grace's predicament and leads into the "This is my time... time to shine..." section of the song which I really liked.
This cuts into the next song (but without vocals). I lack the musical vocabulary to describe why these seemed to cut together well, but I think it's because both are sort of sing-songy where lyrics feel like they exist in chunks of beats rather than part of a soaring melody where it's difficult to extract pieces. This has some exposition from Apollo saying it's hard to kill an idol, and Persephone puts out a challenge to Grace to fight for her answers.
This admittedly doesn't have good continuity because here Persephone is talking to Grace, but then Apollo responds. But it's how I got these two key characters into the trailer in a heated moment which I think has good drama. I cut out some song lyrics between "You abandoned me to a terrible fate" and "This is not about you..." for brevity and because the lyrics between them are not so easily understood out of context. When Apollo says "ENOUGH!" this is a gentle music stop down which allowed me to cut to the final piece of music.
With such high profile and talented voice cast members, it’s important to give them their time in the sun! (No pun intended, haha)
"True magic is a different and older power" is a sort of deep-sounding line which I usually save for the end of the trailer. "Ready to face the music?" is a segue line to lead into the final song lyrics. Fortunately for me, there were some nice gaps in between the "Lost in a moment, lost in a song..." lyrics which I used to fit in some more dialogue to develop Grace's friendship with Freddie, Grace feeling uncertain about her life, and Athena's ominous statement about the idols being no more.
The final version of the music was done by Austin based off my edit. One of my proudest moments in this project was when Meredith messaged me on Slack saying Austin's reaction to the cut was something to the effect of: "Who did this? This isn't bad." to which I took as a TREMENDOUS compliment (and she said I should take as such). Austin did the final version based off my edit and I sent the elements to my sound mixer Michael Cardillo who brought it all together.
An ominous and mysterious ending?
The graphics for this were done by William Eklof who I knew from /r/fantrailers on reddit. I'd just happen to see he was looking for work and knew I needed someone to do graphics to match the caliber of this project. He took inspiration from the key art and made the trailer look so much more expensive than I ever could've done on my own.
The trailer ended up debuting at the end of the live performance in Los Angeleswhere the actors performed a selection of the songs, and they demonstrated a small fraction of what it was like recording all the music during production. The trailer ended up doing really well on YouTube (currently 285,000 views) which in the grand scheme of YouTube videos is not astronomical, but in my experience very very good for an indie game trailer which isn't some mega viral thing like Untitled Goose Game.
I’m extremely happy with this YouTube replay graph which shows people rewatched the end of the trailer a lot!
I'm super happy with how this trailer turned out. I think I always say that whenever I write a case study, but I feel it especially for this one because I felt so much pressure to match the caliber of talent on this project. I feel like I held up my end well, in no small part because of the support of the people who did the things I couldn't do as well on my own.
