Planning

I began by deciding what approach to take to this trailer. I chose to do the Tell-Show-Repeat style as I thought this would work best for this type of game. Additionally, I would expect the retention rate and view duration to be higher with this style of trailer.

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From here, I broke Tropico 6 down to its most unique selling points:

Build on multiple islands

Develop through time periods

Transportation via bridges, busses and cable cars

Steal World Wonders

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These would be my key Tell moments. But Tropico has a nice satirical side to it, so instead of simply listing these selling points, I wanted to add a Tropico twist to them. Thus came the idea to cross out the first word of an intertitle and replace it with a more Tropican version of it - simultaneously creating a more engaging intertitle.

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Filming

All of the shots were achieved by removing the HUD and moving the camera with mouse and keyboard. With the selling points as guides, I mainly would experiment with different rotates, dollies and angles to find what was most visually interesting. The biggest thing I kept in mind when shooting was positioning to keep the viewer's eyes in relatively the same spot. The aim with this is to ensure they are retaining what they are watching and not lost looking around the frame.

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The most challenging shot to capture was the final pull away from the island before the flag flies (0:59-1:09). As there is no true free-cam in Tropico, the camera will always keep a fixed height from your focus point on the ground. Thus, when moving, the camera will "bounce" up and down as the focus point passes over higher or lower terrain. When going over a cliff, for example, the change in the camera's height is quite drastic and noticeable.  

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With this in mind, the final shot proved to be very difficult as I was moving my focus point over multiple sections of the map. This made the camera noticeably bumpy at certain points. To get around this, I had to plan a route using the smoothest terrain, then place the buildings to populate the frame and show off Tropico.

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The Eras 360* shot (0:22-0:29) took a while to do, but wasn't overly challenging. For this shot, I would always have the camera centered on the Palace then rotate the camera with E at a consistent speed. From here, I played through each stage of the game. As I knew what the camera would be looking at for each era, I would build or alter the landscape in a noticeable way for those sections. For how simple the shot is, I think this is my favorite from the trailer.

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Editing

First thing to do was set the baseline of the music in time with the beats of the script. With my rolling-editing style, I would focus on one section when recording, come back to Premiere and edit to find how well everything cuts and feels. Once I knew what was missing or needed to be redone, it was back to Tropico to record again.

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All of the intertitles were made in After Effects with animated paint strokes as the red lines and 4-color gradients on the text to make them look like the game's logo.

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As I was not able to rip the audio files from the game itself, very few of the sounds heard in the trailer originate from the game. I did find a bug where I could glitch out the ambience of the game to single out certain sounds, such as the building placement sound. I recorded ambience in game and used mainly the tropical ambience as the city had too much noise too it. Virtually everything else was taken from free online sound sites and mixed in.

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As for the short trailers, I took what I had for the main, singled out the more engaging segments, then added some shots better the visual diversity. I tried a few renditions of the music to find even more active versions. From here, I shortened quite a few clips to keep in time and hopefully keep the engagement up. From there, I copied and pasted the clips, boosted the scale then added some gaussian blur to get the blurred edges. I chose not to use the intertitles as I think the classic TikTok white-filled text brings more attention from a viewer as it is so familiar to those on the platform.

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All in all, I am pleased with how the trailers turned out. I think the Tell-Show-Repeat really worked for this project. By keeping the sections short and sweet, we move on to the next section before the viewer can get bored.