Hi everyone, we’re very happy to announce that our latest DLC, Fatal Falls, has just dropped on PlayStation, with two new levels and a boss adding novel, ignominious ways to die mid-run!
However, today I wanted to take a look at the way we pull together our animated trailers, as it seems that many of you are just as excited about the cartoon trailers as you are about the new game content. It's really nice to create a slick looking trailer that is equally enjoyable for watching in cinemas, and the Animators really pay attention to the multitude of elements that tell a connected story. I wanted to take a look at some of the processes that are taken for making the trailer, and at what common qualities we can identify that make such animations easy and enjoyable to watch – and hopefully that's an insight you'll have as you explore the game.
The schedule of videos releases we've recently put together looks like this:
The production process begins with a demonstration video, and:
The team then determines what is in the cinematic narrative one level at a time. Sometimes we'll run through the entire level line by line, or we'll pick one important interaction or boss to cover, then we repeat that process until our goals are met. Then the video team and I sit down and make sure that everything works properly in terms of flow between cinematics, and precise levels, and we smooth out any uneven sequences a little more than usual. Then we put the audio recording of the character voices, the effect tones, the main voiceover, and any dialogue we may have rang to all the in-game assets and audio, and shape that into a rough mix. After that we export the raw audio file out to fidelity resolutions and sound cards we have in the studio. Next we convert the video-quality files into refresh rate, screen info, and color transformation files that we consider fairly high quality, and then we trigger a time stutter loop for every room that contains encounter animals, and hot-rodders so we stay within the lab budget. We have to be aware of when tearing is happening in videos, and result in an emotional trigger for the player, so we check for it near each cinematic scene. Creative Director Millen has our Art Director run a pretty thorough de-griefing and assessment of the animation that we made instead of pasting in new digitally generated animations if possible, to help ensure we stay within budget. This step ensures consistency of animation with narrative with each of the levels, all the way back to the start in the story. Then our animators hit the noisy texture management stuff until our tutorial cinematics are featured well enough in the 'hot' videos. I can't tell you how many shades we look for in details like how protection lights flicker, how arrow noise about rocks shatters in the wind, how subtle rendering of rocks might annoy, how property damage rocks plumb holes in
However, today I wanted to take a look at the way we pull together our animated trailers, as it seems that many of you are just as excited about the cartoon trailers as you are about the new game content. It's really nice to create a slick looking trailer that is equally enjoyable for watching in cinemas, and the Animators really pay attention to the multitude of elements that tell a connected story. I wanted to take a look at some of the processes that are taken for making the trailer, and at what common qualities we can identify that make such animations easy and enjoyable to watch – and hopefully that's an insight you'll have as you explore the game.
The schedule of videos releases we've recently put together looks like this:
The production process begins with a demonstration video, and:
The team then determines what is in the cinematic narrative one level at a time. Sometimes we'll run through the entire level line by line, or we'll pick one important interaction or boss to cover, then we repeat that process until our goals are met. Then the video team and I sit down and make sure that everything works properly in terms of flow between cinematics, and precise levels, and we smooth out any uneven sequences a little more than usual. Then we put the audio recording of the character voices, the effect tones, the main voiceover, and any dialogue we may have rang to all the in-game assets and audio, and shape that into a rough mix. After that we export the raw audio file out to fidelity resolutions and sound cards we have in the studio. Next we convert the video-quality files into refresh rate, screen info, and color transformation files that we consider fairly high quality, and then we trigger a time stutter loop for every room that contains encounter animals, and hot-rodders so we stay within the lab budget. We have to be aware of when tearing is happening in videos, and result in an emotional trigger for the player, so we check for it near each cinematic scene. Creative Director Millen has our Art Director run a pretty thorough de-griefing and assessment of the animation that we made instead of pasting in new digitally generated animations if possible, to help ensure we stay within budget. This step ensures consistency of animation with narrative with each of the levels, all the way back to the start in the story. Then our animators hit the noisy texture management stuff until our tutorial cinematics are featured well enough in the 'hot' videos. I can't tell you how many shades we look for in details like how protection lights flicker, how arrow noise about rocks shatters in the wind, how subtle rendering of rocks might annoy, how property damage rocks plumb holes in
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