methodology

Planning

I had edited a ~45 second rendition of Jack Trammell's "Exiled" a while ago with the intent of finding a game that fit the mood of the song. I had recently been playing Everspace and found the two matched. Thus, I had a promising sub-1 minute outline.

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Below are the core selling points for EVERSPACE:

Fast-paced Spaceship Combat

Roguelike Elements

Beautiful Spacescapes and Overall Graphics

Engaging Story 

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I decided early on to leave the story out of this trailer as it is not deep enough to hint at without spoiling.

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I wanted this trailer to be an eye catcher by highlighting the graphics and combat a player could expect to experience when playing the game. It was necessary to show some of the roguelike elements too as without it, EVERSPACE would seem to be a simple arena shooter.

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With music on my timeline, I blocked out what I wanted to show and when using text graphics in Premiere Pro. From here, I wrote up a basic shot list and got to recording.

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Filming

NVIDIA's Ansel doesn't work with EVERSPACE so I only had first and third person camera angles to work with. Not a huge problem as this will be the only camera view the player themselves have.

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As much of the game is based on RNG (random number generation), I played the game more or less like usual but without a HUD. I would record for each sub-sector and attempt to create interesting battles and movement when the opportunities presented themselves. Dogfighting sequences were easy to come by which gave me a large variation of shots to work with.

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The only shots that have me real issue were when I was trying to cleanly match shots of the gatling gun and missiles with the music (specifically at 0:09). Going HUD-less meant many more aiming errors and I was unable to tell if the enemy had low health. This resulted in many botched shots where the enemy did not die at the right moment.

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Editing

Slotting shots into the timeline was easy with the blocking I had done before. This time around, I was much better at predicting how long each shot would take. This meant the final video almost exactly lines up with my blocking from the beginning.

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Using UModel Export, I ripped the audio files from the game files with the intent of weaving the sound effects with the music more than I have in the past. This was mainly done with speed ramping certain shots. 

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This trailer only took me a week from concept to final render (while balancing work). 

I am pleased with how it turned out. The fast pace of the trailer gives the viewer a good idea of what to expect from the gameplay and shows them just enough to warrant a purchase. I'd like to focus on getting "more" out of my trailer in the future. By this, I mean keep in mind multiple variations of the trailer as well as short form content to save time on capture and editing.

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