A Journey into Production: Part IV - Teaser Trailer

Catch up by reading my previous entry here:

A Journey into Production: Part III - http://gamasutra.com/blogs/SamyDib/20150727/249532/A_Journey_into_Production_Part_III__Personal_Leadership_Traits.php

Ascendance

Ascendance Website: http://www.gamerslifeproductions.com/ascendance/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AscendanceTeam

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ascendanceteam

Teaser Trailer

            So this week I decided to put in a lot of work towards the teaser trailer for Ascendance. If you’ve been keeping up with my journey, I’ve been working as a Producer for a UAT Games Studio project with fellow students from the University of Advancing Technology. I wanted this teaser to be short and sweet yet something attention grabbing as well. I didn’t want to cross that 1 minute barrier for something that was supposed to just tease something about the game. In order to create this trailer I needed to find some good tutorials and take use of a few powerful programs. The first one that I needed was Adobe After Effects. This is where I would be putting together a lot of the special effects that I wanted in the trailer.

            After spending quite a few hours messing with a few different things, I realized that I was really short on time and didn’t have the luxury of learning how to become an expert in After Effects this week. So I needed a little bit of help. I traveled across the inter webs and found a few premium templates that would suit my needs. I carefully studied each and had to cut a few as I began to weed out the ones that I didn’t think would fit well with the overall feeling for Ascendance. It came down to only two and then I had to begin imagining what in-game footage would look like with both templates. I ultimately picked the one that you see in the trailer and quickly got to work with purchasing the template and accompanying music.

            Next I needed to get some in-game footage. In the past, I was fond of using Camtasia Studio but was always limited by the free trial period. To buy a license, it would cost $300 and I wasn’t feeling like dropping that kind of cash right now. So I searched and realized something that I couldn’t believe I didn’t know about before. My GTX graphics card came with the GeForce Experience software that comes with a screen recorder. Needless to say, I was more than ecstatic about finding this out. I quickly got to work and began recording some gameplay footage from Ascendance and was pleased to see that every recording came out flawless. Thank you NVIDIA!

            After I got the gameplay footage down I began to throw everything together in After Effects. Earlier I had also hired a female voice actor from Fiverr.com to record a very short script for the teaser. It came out pretty good but I had to do some editing in Premiere Pro to get the sound just how I wanted it. But I digress. Back in After Effects I began to alter everything I needed to alter to get the video looking just how I wanted it to. The gameplay footage seemed to fit just perfect in there and at the end, I was very pleased. When it came to rendering however, I realized just how aged my custom PC that I built back in 2009 was. It was a beast in its prime but rendering this video took close to two and a half hours. The video was only one minute long so I’m pretty sure that with a newer rig, this rendering time would not be anywhere near this kind of duration.

            Sad to say it, but after the first render, I found a few errors in the video and even with the quality of the video itself. So we all know what that means, time to fix it up and redo the render. After another long and grueling rendering process, the video came out just how I wanted it to. I took the final render and threw it into Premiere Pro and mixed it with the female voice recording from earlier. I placed everything where I thought seemed to fit well together and exported the video into a more size friendly medium. The original render came out to be over 10gigs in size, and after the final mixing, the video ended up at 60MB. This was a much better size to deal with. Overall it was an 11 hour process to create a one minute teaser, but I’m very pleased with the outcome and think that it was definitely worth it. Time management is sometimes a difficult issue but beyond just text definitions of responsibilities, each individual’s approach to time management and task prioritization is vital. Knowing what to do and having the self-discipline to not get distracted is important for anyone in a leadership role (Spaulding, 2009).

            And with that, I will leave this week here and ask that everyone follows and likes Ascendance on social media to keep up to date with our development. Until next time, happy gaming everyone!

References

Spaulding, S. (2009). Team leadership in the game industry. Boston, MA: Course Technology, 

PTR/CRM.