Thoughts on one-shot game trailers

Last week, David O'Reilly released the trailer for his game, Everything. True to the title, the trailer tries to encapsulate all that the game has to offer in a single stretch — that's ten minutes long.

Ten minutes is a lifetime in trailer-terms, but something about it works.

Up until seven minutes into the trailer (or 'film' as the game's creator calls it), the shot is uninterrupted. Cuts start at the 7:35 mark, but before that, it's absorbing — immersive.

There's something about this peculiar choice, to show nearly eight minutes of uninterrupted gameplay... It goes against every convention for common game trailers — as developers are wanting shorter and shorter trailers — for shorter attention spans.

While I didn't linger around for the whole 10 minutes of Everything's trailer, I did see the coherent thread — which made me want the game.

Continuity is necessary for immersion.

I think this is the third or fourth edit for Everything's trailer. The original trailer seems to show up at 7:53. Watch that.

Notice the beautiful editing, the lovely cuts, the composed scenes. It's alluring and radiant, but completely betrays the spirit of the game if that's all you see. I'm so glad David decided it wasn't enough for the narration to talk about continuity — they had to show it — in long-form clarity. Somebody kiss the person who said, "let's just shoot an overlong-thread of continuous gameplay!"

Play Virginia (steam link) or 30 Flights of Loving (steam link) if you're looking for a fascinating case-study on harsh cuts from one scene to the next. For me, this mode of scene separation created an fascinating combination of closure and anxiety — I was left with a feeling of "what just happened?" instead of "I feel like I have enough tools to make sense of this."

"Making sense of things" should always be a trailer's highest ambition. This gets insanely difficult when you're trying to nail a sense of mystery, but "just enough sense" is the sweet-spot.

Man-oh-man is this more easily said than done.

I tried cutting some one-shot trailers. 

When Germán Cruz reached out to me for a trailer for 64.0 (steam link), I immediately saw an opportunity to ape the idea of Terry Cavanagh's one-shot Super Hexagon trailer (which holds-up well ). Because 64.0 isn't as visually dynamic as Super Hexagon, we had to edit scenes to make things 'one-shot.'

Feel free to try to spot my edits as you watch:

If I did my job right, you shouldn't be able to see any edits, but game devs are a sharp bunch. So I expect to get a few "ah-ha's." :)

Time is out of your control.

The biggest advantage for 64.0 is that its name refers to the length of a successful run: 64 seconds. Sounds like perfect length for a trailer, right? Right. Unfortunately, this didn't force me to think about how little control I had over time. 

When we tried using a similar approach on the online tabletop RPG, Conclave (steam link), we went way-over the typical trailer length.

Our three minutes may seem a bit long, but we still had to fight to make it that short. I'm convinced that the developers (Nick Branstator, Derek Bruneau) and I did the absolute best we could, but there's a decision one has to make when they make a one-shot game trailer:

Are you willing to sacrifice control over time?

I'm veering towards one-shot sequences.

One-shot trailers work really well — on rare occasion, but the concept of the practice is essential for addressing other trailers.

In our Early Access trailer for Dimension Drive (steam link), David Jimenez, Alejandro Santiago, and I focused on key "one-shot" sequences where we tried to apply this one-shot philosophy. I still had to rely on a lot of cuts to make the scenes fit, but I think the narrative thread is clear:

Look at the first 26 seconds. You'll see that we were able to encapsulate the game's philosophy in a single segment. Later in this trailer, we go for a bit of the standard action-montages that most trailers use, but the interest is always in creating a singular thread that links the story and action together.

The biggest takeaway I hope to offer is that when you cut the trailer for your game, look for continuous threads. Use smaller one-shot sequences to frame the action — or (if you're feeling lucky), make a full trailer with just one-shot.

~

This was originally posted on the author's blog. You can find M. Joshua's trailer production work at mjoshua.com, where he's available for production and consultation.