Hello, hello. This is Susana, the video producer of VrKiwi and I’ll be talking to you about filmmaking for video games with some examples of the Cave Digger’s trailers projection.

There are many techniques that can be applied to the production of a videogame trailer,  from good old real life footage and animation to mixed reality. But I consider two things are essential to the video games filmmaking process and they are both very enjoyable. I will introduce them here :

  • “Feeling like playing Sims forever” a.k.a. filming in a game engine:

The advantage here is that, with the support of the developers,  you can control everything that happens and no rainy day will force you to cancel a filming day . Who doesn’t like the sound of that? The results are obtained almost instantly which is very rewarding and you can correct any mistakes easily. In engine filming  saves loads of hours and resources. All good things!  I will  show you an example. Let’s travel to a nostalgic time with one of the first shots we took for Cave Digger’s  first trailer:

  • “Playing the game and showing off some cool moves” a.k.a. filming game play: 

In-game footage is crucial because the user, apart from getting the vibe, in the end,  wants to understand what the game experience is gonna be like and therefore we should never forget to include a decent amount of gameplay in our trailer. It’s an honest and powerful tool.

There are a couple of tips that I could give you about this process:

  • Make sure that you play the game and you are aware of all of the unique and fun mechanics to represent them in the final cut.
  • On the filming day there is no space for noobs. Gameplay filming requires a player that will be our actor. Make sure that this person knows the game well and is comfortable with it so the results present a smooth experience with graceful moves.
  • FPS, or “shit, here we go again”. You always want to use the highest quality of graphics possible to not let down the artists and their sleepless nights’ sacrifice to the coffee gods but you also want the footage to look smooth and with a decently high frame rate. This problem affects specially the VR productions since the experience uses lot’s of resources of your poor pc. Make sure that you have a powerful enough machine, close any other processes, focus on the filming  and discuss with the developers about the possibilities of optimisation if necessary.

 

  • Cheats for life. Yes, everyone! I shall confess, we do cheat quite often to make sure we get the best shots. This doesn’t mean that the situations cannot happen in game but it simply saves us time so we don’t need to play the entire game all over again every time a shot fails to happen.  Ask your friendly developer to provide you with some extra cash, immortality, time travelling or anything you dream of to make the filming process smoother. .

 

 

“DPS is cool but we need tanks and healers” a.k.a. communicate with the developers. This is very linked to the previous two tips. Coming from very different expertises, when producing a video game trailer,  developer and filmmaker will have to work together. The developer team is an incredible source of solutions and problem solving  that will support and ease the filmmaking process. Make a list of the needs and requests for the trailer and discuss with them the possibilities for an optimal end result.

 

 

As any other, a VR game uses these resources but what is really outstanding of this sort of production is the immersion and first person aspects of the experience. The headset becomes the camera and the player role and acting are more important than ever. But we can talk about that in another episode, now I’ ll go to write a script for Cave Digger 2 ‘s demo on Steam Next Fest.

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest_2021_june_preview?tab=17
See you in the Frontier!
-Susana

 

Random development quote: “Pitäis ruveta karpalonviljelijäksi“.