Capturing Great Footage for Game Trailers

[Music] uh so this talk it's all about capturing great footage for games and the title says it's for trailers but all of this will apply to any capture um this should be useful whether you're a developer or trailer editor or game capture artist and actually on that note who here is interested in being a capture artist okay a few trailer editor nice and who's a developer okay figured all right so um also no uh you can go to this link which I'm going to have a PDF of the slides with like the little tips and stuff you just download it so you don't have to worry too much about taking photos during this so just take a photo of that and then uh I'll have this link at the end too so if you don't get it um anyway so like I said um I'm a trail editor my

name is Derrik Lou I've been doing this for about 5 years now and I've worked on some games like firewatch ooblets dead cells battle block theater subnotica Tacoma and lots more um I've also worked at um agencies in Los Angeles where I've cut some trailers for AAA games like Mortal Kombat X Shadow of Mordor Mad Max and lots of Lego games um and I've worked on games from a wide variety of genres and they all have unique needs when it comes to capturing footage for them and the tools that make it easy and so I'm going to talk a lot about shot composition and how to make shots both aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand um I originally came up with the idea for this talk last year because um every developer I've worked with had different debug tools so I thought I'd aggregate all that information and share the best of everyone's tools that help me get the best possible shots for trailers I made all right

so why care about game capture game capture is simply video footage of the game you need it for trailers animated gifts Dev blogs uh b-roll for montages and press coverage but most importantly a good way to think about it is more people will see your game capture than play your game we' love to think that every trailer view turns into a sale but far more people will see footage of your game than actually play it and the game capture you release is the only time you ever have full control over how your game looks once it's released you have no idea what kind of footage will be someone's first impression of your game so you should want to make it look good uh also if you have friends parents or extended family who don't play games then game capture might be the only way you can show them what it is that you do uh but the main thing to think about is

successful game capture communicates effectively and this seems like an obvious thing to say but if someone watches a shot that you captured and they don't have any idea what's happening or what the shot is trying to say then it's not good capture all right here's a quick overview of software and hardware for capturing and editing um there a bunch of solutions for PC game capture but they all essentially do the same thing uh just make sure I can capture at the frame rate and resolution you want so for my Indie work I use Nvidia Shadow play which requires an Nvidia card but it's free and it's good because it uses the GPU instead of the CPU um and the same goes for a Bandy cam which you can buy for 50 bucks um and these both capture to h264 compressed video um but at high bit rates the quality is still very good uh I've had trailers on big screens at press shows and video quality has never been an issue

um on Mac I use screen flow which has lots of nice features and can be used for editing and that costs $129 there's also fraps and OBS but they can be a pain because the files need to be converted before I can edit with them and with fraps especially the files can get enormous so a lot of Hardware options there's devices by Elgato a media hot POG Razer and they all capture to h264 I got a little head there uh there's also a black magic intensity Pro and intensity shuttle which capture uncompressed video and right now you might be thinking well obviously I should get uh I should capture uncompressed video instead of h264 but really it doesn't matter that much um uncompressed video is way faster to edit with but the files are enormous and most people won't be able to tell the difference in quality unless maybe

they're played side by side and in the end they're all going to get filtered through YouTube compression and watched on someone's phone anyway so don't worry about it too much uh editing software I edit with Premiere Pro but I tell people just use whatever editing software you're most comfortable with as long as the software supports multiple tracks of video and audio at the resolution and frame rates you want doesn't matter uh especially if you're not sharing project files or working with someone else's equipment um I've also used Final Cup Pro and Avid media composer and Sony Vegas hit film and light works are others that I just know exist but I've never used them uh they all have different pricing structures so pick what's right for your budget uh they also all have trial versions too so check those out before dropping money on them and there's also a lot of good free editing software there's Avid uh media composer first there's D Vinci resolve there's hit film

Express and light works Express these are all worth looking into if you have a limited budget and they'll all have way more features than iMovie or Windows Movie Maker all right so lastly here's a few options for easily making animated gifts uh honeycam and gift Brewery all have lots of features like being able to convert video or just capture straight from your screen and you can adjust the resolution and lots of other things and gift gun is a great script for e making gifts straight out of After Effects okay so next I want to talk about capture difficulty factors these are four things that determine just how difficult it's going to be to make capture for a game and those are visual feedback camera distance number of objects on screen and audience familiarity if you look at your game through all four of these factors you can generally tell how hard a job you

have ahead of you uh visual feedback is simply how easy it is to see something changing or being affected on screen and understanding what happened uh without prior knowledge of the game and high visual feedback is usually great for capture at the highest end you have action-based games like uh Super Mario and Street Fighter you can clearly see something on screen being affected like enemies are defeated people are punched and they go flying in the air but action and hitting things doesn't necessarily mean High visual feedback for example in games like Clash Royale there are characters hitting things but their effect generally isn't apparent until something dies or blows up uh everything before then is just a health meter slowly going down then you have games like mobas which have very flashy animation and visual effects but they take while before anything seems to be

affected in a way that an uninformed person can understand and then there are games like everybody's gone to the Rapture where there are very few moving objects on screen um but to figure out how much visual feedback a game has just the question you need to ask is when a player does something would someone not at the controls see anything changing on screen uh next factor is number of objects it's going to change yes there it goes uh generally capture is more difficult when there are more objects on screen especially if they're all moving like they all have minds of their own and depending on the game it can be a lot of information to process uh for example again games like uh single screen multiplayer games strategy games mobas they all have a lot of stuff on screen at any given time so you have to kind of mitigate the confusion whereas games like like Lego games or the Batman

Arkham games and Super Mario have fewer moving parts and can be captured with their in-game camera with some debug camera shots mixed in and then games like Street Fighter limbo everybody's gone to the Rapture can often be captured with very few debug camera shots and the number of objects on screen is very closely related to camera distance uh pretty much further away the camera is in the game the more more difficult it's going to be to capture for because a farway camera makes it more likely that there are more objects on screen at any given time you can see that in games like League of Legends where camera's very far away uh but conversely limbo the camera is also far away but since there's only one character it's not as hard to capture for and same like Lego games kind of like a medium distance not as difficult and again like Street Fighter default camera's fine um the final thing that can make

your job either incredibly easy or incredibly hard is audience familiarity which is simply How likely it is the audience will already have some knowledge of what they're looking at when they see it like it's it's easier to capture for an informed audience than one you have to teach so for example we can generally assume that people understand real life objects like a car or a fishing rod or a gun and at this point Nintendo can pretty safely assume that people don't need to be taught that Mario jumps on enemies whereas most people aren't going to understand footage from am MOA if you show it to them so when capturing you have to think are you targeting people who have a familiarity with your game or are you trying to get people who aren't because it's very different uh when you can't assume a based level of Knowledge from the audience um all of this to say that's why Clash of Clans League of Legends Dota 2 World of Warcraft hearth Z and

strategy games tend to make fancy pre-rendered trailers instead of gameplay trailers there's a ton of objects on screen the camera's really far away it takes so much prior knowledge to know what's going on and even though there's lots of Animation it's hard to see what's changing uh but that said uh if there are a large number of objects and a far away camera but there's a way to create Focus then it'll be easier to watch uh I add did this slide after seeing kids at they the devs um or if you imagine in a real-time strategy game several copies of one unit attacking simultaneously like firebats or zerglings and Starcraft it' be easier to understand if a whole bunch of stuff is doing one thing uh but just anything that helps the audience see something other than random chaos I mean this doesn't to make a qualitative judgment about these games it's just that looking at these factors will help you know just how hard it is it's going to be to capture for um also

this exercise might help developers design their game because if they're finding that their game doesn't communicate well visually there might be a way to improve it and okay something that we need to clear up which is game capture isn't just playing the game and hoping that you get something good that's how you start the process but once you find a good moment that you want what you want to do is then FF that moment until it's the ideal version of what you want which doesn't necessarily mean perfectly played gameplay it's just getting a shot that shows what you want it to because game capture is film making you're communicating with film language not game language so you have to think purely visually since the audience doesn't have their hands on the controller so when you're a capture artist you're wearing multiple hats you're the director because you're deciding the purpose of the shot how to

frame the action and where and how the characters move and the tempo of all those things you're the camera person because obviously you move the camera uh and you're a puppeteer because when you capture you're not really playing the game like you normally would you're controlling the game and trying to create shots for a specific purpose and like a puppeteer you're trying to give a performance through the Avatar you're controlling so with that in mind here are three things to focus on when you're capturing composition readability and performance composition is simply deciding how to frame the characters objects or environment uh depending on the game the default camera will be different third person games tend to be Center framed and centering is a good safe way to compose your shots if you want to keep things simple just keep the focus of the shot to the center at all

times um 2D games like Platformers and uh sometimes need some reframing in post because either the character jumps all over the screen or favors the left or the right in like in a point click adventure game next tip use the rule of thirds to help your shot composition simply just dividing the shot into a 3X3 grid and composing your shot so the subject or subjects generally fall in the lines or in the thirds and when you do this the shots tend to look very aesthetically pleasing uh if you're not going to set or frame things this is a good way to do it which brings me to my next tip which is create a 3X3 grid for your monitor with string and tape or whatever else you have available this is a photo of my TV um when I'm capturing which has my makeshift grid I just made out of string and some blue painters tape uh when I'm setting up I just open a JPEG of a 3X3

grid and that I have on my computer and display it it full screen and then just align the string to the lines and it helps me compose uh similarly create a 3X3 grid image to Overlay in your editing software uh this helps give you nice some nice guides if you ever need to zoom in and reframe your shots next tip is uh put a sticky or piece of tape or whatever on your monitor to replace the crosshairs if there's one in your game uh first person third person cuz when you're capturing you usually don't want to have the in-game crosshairs on so putting a sticky on the monitor allows you to know where the center is even when it's turned off just a simple little thing uh capture at higher resolution than your final output uh you don't have to do this with all your capture but for shots that you know you're going to reframe and post uh this let you avoid

um blurriness if you scale the image up or alternately if you're working on a pixel art game here's a tip that I learned from fellow trailer maker Kurt Gartner which is to upscale video of pixel art in After Effects um simply when you put a video clip into After Effects you can set the quality to draft which enables nearest neighbor scaling so the pixels won't get as blurry when you scale it up and then you pre-m that so if you had like a 1080p clip scale it up to 4K pre-m it and then edit in a 1080 sequence and this will let the pixel art Stay sharper when you want to zoom in and that said I frequently scale up footage to like 150% and it doesn't really cause that much visual degradation and again all getting recompressed and put on YouTube and watched on the phone anyway uh and another very important consideration for shot composition and editing in trailers is ey

Trace eye Trace is simply being aware of what the audience's eyes are looking at and making sure that when you cut to a shot uh you're not forcing them to reorient their eyes too much this is especially important for games where the camera doesn't move too much but the characters do but most of the games I've worked on the actions pretty centered so here's an example from Kurt Gartner's trailer for Celeste which has very good eye Trace overlaid a little pink circle and shows you how the subject moves from Cut to cut and you can see what I'm talking about it doesn't you don't have to move your eyes around too much to keep following what's going on and can get cut very fast because of that um just to give you an idea of how bad eye Trace can affect the trailer I cut together this reel which while watching it just try to keep track of the action and pay attention to sorry pay attention to how much more work it is to just do that and trailers are generally cut pretty

fast so if you have bad eye Trace forces the audience to work really hard to watch the trailer and the thing is when the audience's eyes get lost they stop retaining information so you just have to make your footage as easy to watch as possible and to this point I have some recommended viewing which first is why is it so hard to remember what happens in Transformers by Lindsay Ellis and madmax Center framed by vashi nansy these are very good video essays uh also uh Jackie Chan my stunts is this great documentary it's really hard to find a DVD for but it's on YouTube um this documentary is great first because it's amazing and it's very inspiring and mostly because at the end of it he choreographs a fight scene then shows you both the good takes and the bad takes and why a shot was rejected or put

into the final edit so like here he's trying to get the bottle in the center of the frames so that last one was the best take um it's really very instructional okay moving on to readability which is related to composition but it has more to do with simplifying your shot so that it's very easy to digest very quickly um you can see each of these photos has two cats in them but the one on the left takes you ever so slightly longer to be sure of it because I have a shirt on the floor and there's my shoulder bag there whereas the photo on the right has nothing else dark in the frame so it's much easier to read because sometimes games can be very chaotic there's numbers and visual effects and explosions everywhere it's easy to understand when you're playing and being selective about your focus but when the game is being shown to you as a series of rapid images the simpler the

frame the better you might want to show as much as possible but the goal is to make sure the audience remembers what they see otherwise it's all useless for example in most of my dead cells capture I made sure to kill all the extraneous enemies that would have been competing for attention and the thing that I say is that a shot that says too much communicates nothing if I just flash this photo of cats onto the screen the only only only information you could retain is probably that's a whole lot of cats but if what I wanted you to know was how many gray tabies there are then there's no way you'd be able to figure it out in a short period of time um it's much better if you show the audience one thing and they remember it than showing them multiple and they just forget them all and it can be something as simple as oop sorry forgot to advance that

uh it's something as simple as just zooming in on the frame especially with 2D Platformers these are both the same shot but the right ones zoomed in you can see that there's so much more information on the left screen than the right it takes longer to read and by the time the audience finds the subject the shot might be over uh and there's a simple thing you can do to test how readable shot is and that is to once it advances anytime now oops uh squint at your shots to check their readability uh this blurs your vision and then instantly shows you what stands out when you can't pay attention to the details so take a look at these shots again if I blur them out like you're squinting you can tell right away that there are a lot of things competing for your attention on the left uh if the thing that your eye gravitates to in the shot when it's blurry isn't what you

want it to be then consider how you can change it uh zooming in is just one possible solution uh it could be something as simple as just removing the items or enemies from the screen for example if I removed all the yetis and the gold on the shot on the left it'd be way easier to understand and a Twitter account that I recommend is uh at microt trailers this is a bot that just takes six random seconds for the trailer of every single steam release and it's just like a good way to see which games look good in very short video clips it's very educational and amusing uh moving on to Performance like I said before when you're capturing you're essentially puppeting the game character and creating a performance but what you need to think about is are you performing as the character in the game or are you capturing the player interacting with the game

so here's some capture for Uncharted Lost Legacy that I got from atsun he Legend who posts amazing animated gifts on Twitter uh this is captured like Chloe Fraser is just the most amazing Adventurer in the world whereas in this version it looks like it's by a person messing around on the couch in front of their TV uh each of these approaches are valid it just depends on the context that the capture is being used every game has different capture needs so games focused on character and story it usually makes most sense to perform according to what's happening in the scene and play like you're a character in the game whereas games focused on the player like multiplayer and competitive games are all about the people at the controls so the capture is about showing the audience what they'll literally be doing in the game and then some games tread the line line because they can both be about the characters in the game

or the player expressing themselves through the game so you have to capture accordingly so how the heck can you give a performance with a keyboard or a controller the thing that you need to remember is that movement is character you might not have much control over character animation but how you move a character or the camera conveys so much personality whether it's a 2d platform third person game or first first person game or others and even just like how a mouse moves uh a mouse cursor moves can just show character and personality uh think about this like when you look at a car driving you make assumptions about them that are usually not based at looking at the driver it's just how the car moves so like what do you think about this driver um in first person games how you move uh the camera and what you look at

communicates the thoughts of the character this is from one of my firewatch trailers where I wanted to put you in Henry's head as he decides whether or not to throw the fireworks in the fire pit um here's another example I made where um Henry just kind of he just walks to the lake and then he picks up the boom box and then he looks at the teenagers and just walks to the side then he kind of thinks for a second then he throws the box in the water and he just kind of backs away without breaking eye contact which like based on this what kind of person do you think this Henry is whereas in this version this Henry is just like a total spaz who just runs in and then grabs the boom box and then throws it in the water doesn't even wait for it to fall in and just runs away so you can see how different the capture is just from changing the speed that the player moves and performs their actions here's another example from spunky here

I'm just playing quickly and recklessly and get into some very typical spunky moments and in this version I just played very slowly as if I didn't have much experience playing it and the game looks very different depending on how you play it these two uh approaches communicate very differently to the audience and here's another example from firewatch um in the game you can easily select dialog options while uh walking but in this clip which I'll play in a sec uh it changed up my movement to just give the performance a little more character yeah I'm not sure I got a lot of choice in getting struck down especially not with your electric personality I see my joke did not spark your sense of humor what you're not enjoying are current

conversation oh my God lady the the Arc of our budding friendship they put the entire Wilderness in the hands of an insane person how exactly are you in charge ah charge Henry you get the point um this isn't to say that you need to think of character and emotion for every single thing that you capture sometimes you just want to show competently done gameplay um but if you're just even just doing that Capture One idea at a time and then build on that you know you pick one action intent or emotion find the best way to show it and then I have some more recommended viewing which is uh this episode of Every frame of painting by Tony Joe called the Spielberg Warner which is about how Steven Spielberg does long shots that are essentially multiple shots in one which game capture can be like that sometimes here another tip which is controllers

are best for slow movement uh I have an Xbox Xbox Elite controller for the games where I want to be constantly adjusting the camera with my thumbs but I still need to press the face buttons so for example it's useful in shots like this one for the wild Eternal trailer where I'm moving alongside this marker and I wanted to activate it while I was moving it um and then the downside of a controller of course is that it's difficult to do fast camera movements which is what what uh keyboard and mouse is good for because sometimes you want quick and fast movements for example I used a keyboard and mouse in the opening shot of firewatches trailer because I really wanted to be able to spin around very quickly uh for when Henry says seriously it's totally fine in here um just to make it funnier uh hopefully uh these are just a lot of the takes that I did in the process of making the trailer um and then the downside of keyboard and mouse is that you can't vary your walking speed unless you have

speed settings for movement next performance tip use a metronome or metronome app when timing and choreographing multiple actions this is especially good when you want to synchronize movements to the beat of your music this is something I did for my Cosmic Trip trailer by using a metronome set to the tempo of the trailer's music I could just add some visual interest by having the capture and music in sync which I'll play right now [Music] [Music] um another solution I've used is just Loop the trailer music in the background while I'm capturing all right moving on to debug tools for capture um a lot of these are about saving time

but they're also about the ability to capture a wide variety of shots and I'm not saying you must Implement all of these because obviously time and resources are a finite thing but I just want to show you what's worked best for me and why uh think about this stuff early especially if you're planning on lots of developer updates or having someone else do your own capture or trailer work hint hint uh just to give you an idea of what a difference a nice debug REM makes here's a trailer I made for obletz and a version I made without using the debug camera [Music]

w also the one on the left was an older build and you you will not be able to get that many ooblets at one time uh next to you I think it's like 10 um anyway so I'm going to start with what I consider the essential time-saving debug tools some of these might already be implemented for making the game but just in case number one thing you need is the ability to turn off the HUD onc screen text or any overlays I'm still surprised at how many trailers out there have the HUD on it's very distracting especially

anything with text like you ever try not reading subtitles this is especially important for button prompts because if you have a cross crossplatform game you don't want to have to capture multiple times or digitally adding button prompts which yes I worked at places that had to do that and sometimes motion track it um the way I think of the HUD in game capture is it's like when you're in a car and suddenly there's something on your windshield it's so distracting it feels invasive because you just can't look at it this is what I feel like you're doing to the audience when the Hud's on so just have an option to turn it off and it'll everything will be good uh music toggle seems like an obvious thing but I've worked on several games which didn't have have an option to turn off the music this saves time because when making trailers if the music is mixed in you can't use any of the sound effects from that capture which means manually adding them in which can get very tedious and time consuming also if the game has nice

audio panning this is an easy way to have it tied to the footage whereas doing it in post requires extra work uh level skip just saves a ton of time going from place to place if you can just skip around to different levels just by the Press of a button uh related an option to teleport which is especially useful for big games uh even when like flying around takes a long time um subnotica has a coordinate system that you can use to display your current position and then use a warp command to just go straight there uh level number display I'm working on the Adventure Pals right now and in their menu they have a Dev mode and one thing it turns on is the level number on the top right hand corner uh it's super useful because I did a first passive capture just to see what was in the game and because of this label combined with the level skip ability it's super easy to just go back and redo a shot uh Inventory management this is really

important for games like oblets and dead cells which have lots of objects in them it meant I could do a lot of customizing and also tailor Mak scenarios to capture for the trailer uh dead cells in particular had a really good system because it let me spawn any item in the game in any iteration and change its modifiers uh spawn enemy another nice tool for dead cells uh sometimes I wanted to do this because I just found a very aesthetically pleasing part of a level and then needed to do multiple takes to get the shot right without reloading the game every single time uh and if the game has a procedurally generated levels it might be even harder to redo a shot uh invincibility this is just to avoid having to restart the game all the time if it has a health system simple uh fast mode this is another mode I had for octogeddon just the ability to make everything go super fast this let me skip to different parts of level very quickly I also had that for thimbleweed

Park Tourist mode another thing from dead cells similar fashion just lets me walk past all the enemies which is great for saving time and scouting out a level to see which parts I want to capture uh cursor visibility especially important for Point and- click adventure games there's really no reason in those trailers to ever see the cursor but of course in your capture you still need to be able to activate objects and move around but so need an option to make it invisible in fact when uh in W Jed eyes unavowed I was working on that trailer there was no option to hide the cursor so I wanted this shot where you're choosing your party members so I had to erase the cursor in After Effects by using a patchwork of clips and if I just had the ability to turn off the cursor it would have saved me hours uh I put this gift in my blog post about the trailer and Dave Gilbert the Creator felt really bad when he found out he found out I had to do all this uh object highlights these are distracting because by their

nature they draw attention and unless you're capturing for showcasing UI there's really no reason to have it on time of day uh if your game has a day night cycle this option makes it very easy to get a variety of shots very quickly uh with subnautica's time of day system I could speed up the rate that the day went by and then just slow it down when I found the pattern of light that I liked all right on to some genre specifics firsters games uh have their own unique needs first thing you need specific to firstperson games is headbob toggle this is a very exaggerated example from quadr Cowboy uh sometimes you want to use headbob to show the point of view of the protagonist but other times you just want a smooth camera movement showing the environment so put a toggle for head Bop other essal thing is a free cam which can fly around freely get shots of

the environment and close-ups on objects or just to get from one area to another just really quickly this is especially important for trailers because it adds to the variety of possible shots which opens up the ways you can tell the story which uh standard first-person game controls are typically How Free Cams are mapped uh usually requests the ability to move up and down with the triggers since since they're the only other analog controls available in addition to thumb sticks but the most important thing about a free cam is that you optimize it for smooth movement you basically want the camera controls to be the exact opposite of High Fidelity One to1 super precise controls and this means things like uh adjustable camera speed um this isn't first-person game but at a good system in oblets which is uh most of the time I want camera moves but sometimes it helps to be able to move really fast um for

example on subnotica I could trigger an event and then press five make the free cam move really quickly and just get into position and then press a lower number to make the camera move slow as it captured the shot and in terms of how to adjust these settings sliders and hot keys are the most userfriendly way to adjust camera speed and sensitivity console commands are difficult because a setting of say one can be totally different game to game you know could be fast in one and slow in another next free cam tip is that dead zones are great if you don't know dead zones are just how far the thumb stick has to move before the input is read this is to prevent sudden jerky movements like um and allows for smoother camera transitions another thing that helps is camera smoothing I worked with Scott Goodrow on the wild

Eternal and on that game they had an option for camera smoothing where the game averaged out the inputs within a certain time frame and that made it easier for me to get nice smooth movements and the hardest thing in this shot was transitioning from using both sticks at the same time to only one for when I track in at the end and Camera smoothing helped a bunch and the other thing I had for that game was uh thumbstick sensitivity based on the stick's position um basically on in the center of the radius of the movement that the stick can go in it's less sensitive and further out it's more sensitive um all this just to say that I just want to be able to start the camera and move it start it gradually and then end the movement gradually where is usually just very sudden moving on to third person games camera controls here can get more complicated because you have a character on screen and here's where I tell you

just copy the tools that I had for oblets because has the best options I've used for a third person game so far so in obletz the camera is always in a fixed position and follows the player character positionally H so moving left stick moves the character and the camera follows along and then when the free cam mode is activated the camera is still following the character positionally but the triggers bumpers face buttons and right thumb stick can offset the position of the camera and this let me get some great wide shots and like steady cam shots and then like side angle shots and I could even adjust the camera while moving so for example in this shot I'm moving with the left thumb stick and tracking in at the same time by holding the right trigger and I could also rotate around the character while moving and since the camera is always attached I didn't have

to worry about keeping track of them and like I showed earlier I could change the speed of the camera using hotkeys and there were some nice popups there that told me how much higher or lower the speed was and then the other great camera option was the ability to detach the camera from the character by pressing y this Manda could lock the camera in place and move the character freely which for example is what let me get these montages of the character decorating the house or planting crops and another good option for third person games is a toggle for player visibility this is good for when you need to capture shots of the environment or NPCs and so one caveat to all this is that these camera controls worked great for oblets because the player controls are just movement and interacting with the a button uh this setup wouldn't work with a game like Uncharted where you're just using all the buttons to control

the character which the ideal scenario would be the ability to say offset the camera position lock in those new settings and then control the character from that position like normal but actually another great example of a third person game with a great debug camera is the Mad Max game from 2015 which I worked on at an agency in Los Angeles uh the capture team there actually captured everything in the trailer that I worked on using the retail version which shipped with a video mode if you hook up a second controller uh that becomes the camera controls which have all these additional options when the first person control first controller uh plays as Max so just like in obletz the camera follows positionally and you can reposition it then just walk around you can uh change the field of view which

zoom and then you can move the camera up and down and then you could also detach the camera and then there's also a button for um slow motion which we'll get to in a sec come on there you go um and then there's an option to like tilt the camera uh and then you could also set up like multiple camera angles which are switchable back and forth and they're also toggle for like depth of field and focus and all this you can either do by yourself or uh by like moving the camera with one controller then switch the other one and playing or you could just do it with a partner so

the second person's the camera person um and the only thing that would have made this mode better are speed settings for the camera because the default sensitivity was quite High um but there are a lot of games now that have a photo mode but this is the only triaa game that I can think of that has a video mode which I'd love to see the sort of feature in more AAA games especially if they find an elegant way to do it without requiring a second controller all right debug tools for 2D games which aren't as complicated since you're only dealing with X and Y axes but here are a couple things first is free cam mode which not as important as in 3D games but sometimes it's useful for example in a trailer I made for dead cells the free cam let me show off the new levels and this one here is more of an idea of mine which would only really work if the game assets scale better in game than in editing software but if there was a way to have a debug Bug Camera that allowed zooming in position offsetting that would be a great thing

to have uh again only if the asset scale uh I'm guessing this would work best with pixel art and lastly here are some debug tool extras not essential but they're handy tools to have I mean kittens are essential but anyway just an excuse to have another kitten photo uh NPC control W Jedi's game unavowed had a nice debug option where I could switch control to other characters just move them around this helped for when I wanted the characters in a certain Arrangement on screen to make the composition better and like I said with M Mad Max uh camera attached to a second controller is great to have for a third person game just allows for much more Dynamic shots uh in the second trailer for uetz I was able to move a camera via the keyboard and mouse while controlling the character with a Gamepad which would have been easier with a second set of hands but for this shot I was literally just holding the game pad and then with a free finger just press in forward to move the camera uh having a separate controller

act as a camera also helps immensely for 3D games that have co-op play I worked on games where getting shots of two players moving at once required some very hacky Solutions in that case having a third controller be the camera would be great and another handy tool for 3D games is time freeze this is really useful for 3D games with lots of action it's just button to freeze the action let me reposition the camera to a new angle and then resume the action this saves a lot of time for when it might be hard to control a game at a certain angle and then it's great for creating match cuts and then uh slow motion sometimes nice to have but I'm usually wary of using it because if the game doesn't have some sort of slow motion bullet time mode I don't want to misrepresent the game but it can help make some cool shots or make it easier to perform a succession of shots and then maybe speed up back up to normal speed um for example uh sun he Legend does a lot of

these Uncharted capture in slow motion so it's easier to queue up things one after another and react and then later spit it back to normal speed and some games I've worked on let me control the time scale down to like a third or fourth decimal but it's really not necessary to be that granular if adding options for multiple time scales just whole numbers are better so then that when you would set it back to normal speed in editing software it's simple to do and next I'm just going to talk that's a good one um going to talk a little bit about VR uh just briefly because really what you should do is go to fellow trailer maker Kurt Gartner's website he has an entire talk that he did earlier this week about capturing footage for VR games and um his website has an in-depth article about virtual cinematography for VR trailers and in his talk he has a slide where he says your head is not a camera because using footage of only the first person view isn't the best way to show VR

games uh and I agree that having the option to show an avatar playing the games in VR is the best way to go because just like having a free cam for first-person games in alternate angle just gives you more options for interesting shots especially in VR uh all that said if you have to do firstperson VR capture here are some tips Implement motion smoothing on the external monitor I'm still amazed at how many trailers for VR don't have motion smoothing it looks terrible it's shaky and it might make your audience sick just from looking at it I once had to work on a VR game where there's no motion smoothing and I just got nauseated just from going through footage so if the footage is smooth then the audience can simply focus on what's happening in the shot and everything will just look much better and also with a motion smooth camera just uh make sure it doesn't break all your filters and effects which is something I've noticed uh next tip is use the eye that corresponds to the PC monitor window the window that

displays on your PC when in VR usually is signal from the right or left eye so naturally you should only be using that eye when capturing otherwise the footage might be at a slight angle when you're lining it up which is especially obvious when you're trying to do something like aim down the side of a gun so that's with the the right eye not the left one uh next is find the center of your view if you're just capturing by yourself you have to do some extra work to make sure everything is composed well and in VR a lot of the time you can feel like you've you're centered something in your view but you're actually looking too high or too low or too much to the side uh in this capture I didn't have any guide for the center but it felt like things were centered but it turns out I'm mostly looking a little bit too high and the best way I found to Center my view is to put a sticky on the lens of the monor ey uh I just start by putting it on the eye and then just do some test capture I look at

something and if it's not centered then I just adjust the position until it's good takes some trial and error but makes things way easier once you do it next be aware of hand position uh most you can play most VR games with your hands in a position that an external monitor will just never see uh so if you want the controllers to be visible you have to test to see how high they are how high they should be uh most of the time it will feel really unnatural to hold your hands so high but it'll look better if you want the audience to see the controllers whereas like you seen the right screen I was just holding my hands in a very comfortable position and you can see I can play the game just fine but everything isn't as clear as on the left version and uh capture with a partner uh all the previous tips were capturing alone but having a capture partner is ideal because they can tell you if you're on looking at the right thing or not uh also M the mouse cursor

uh it's uh just make sure the the mouse is in a place that it's not on the Monitor and maybe it isn't a place where it can be nudged by cats because that can happen uh yeah just save you some time there also uh hire someone with physical training to do your capture like a professional dancer or a martial artist or someone who's just very good with their hands it's easier for them to repeat choreography make graceful motions and they probably won't get tired very quickly um performance in VR is just so much more important because every little head and hand movement seen one to one it's very easy for the performance to have no energy or flow so get a dancer or a martial artist makes a big difference and make a free cam for your VR game more shot variety makes the footage just much more fun to watch so whatever you can do to create more shots that aren't from the first person perspective uh do it all right so capture practice here's some great games if you want to practice capturing uh

disclaimer not being paid by anyone here but I did work on trailers for all these games uh like I said before the Mad Max game great for third person game capture practice so get this if you want to practice for that uh first person Games quadrat cowboy great because uh using a free cam is part of the game you have to enter some commands to be able to use a controller but since it's a game about hacking the debug console is still in the game as an option in the settings because of course it is um these are the instructions for what you need to set up the free cam it's just some things you have to punch into the console and then you can use the controller uh also in the console you can just type find and find lots of other commands which I'm sure the creator of the game would love for you to do I actually mean that uh but yeah so then the game you just press F1 and you got a free cam you can just turn it on and off and you can practice uh also Tacoma fantastic for practicing

framing NPCs in a first-person camera because the game is all about having these scenes that play out and then just rewinding them so you can just easily try different angles over and over and over and over again this is just some of my raw capture from when I was trying to get this shot for the trailer um next to oetz and quadril cowboy Tacoma is just the easiest game to capture for another fun thing until she right um I thought I turned the volume down on that one oh another fun thing you can do in Tacoma is like treat it like a virtual film set and practice editing scenes together this is just one I made just very quickly for this talk but made me want to do more all right uh capture inspiration some good examples of video game and film resources for inspiration uh other places by Andy

Kelly which is all about showing pretty environments in video games uh unfortunately he doesn't update anymore but there's still a lot of great videos on his YouTube channel uh at soon he Legend on Twitter posts amazing animated gifts I already showed a whole bunch in this talk and right now he's on Monster Hunter next and Rebecca C is Twitter for uetz gifts she's nplayer cat her development gifts are always lots of fun to look at uh composition cam is a Instagram account also not updated anymore but they overlay grids and lines to show how a lot of great shots from films are composed and at one perfect shot tweets shots from films and articles about film Okay so so in summary think about capture early the

sooner you think about how your game looks in video the better helps you Market your game and it might even help you with a game's design watch films great cinematography good visual flow and Camera moves not saying your shots have to rival Hollywood directors but might inspire you to or give you some good ideas watch films with great framing there are a lot of great directors but just start with kurasawa like just just watch all the kosol films it's amazing um watch films with well-shot action U you know good blocking good spatial awareness and editing so watch Jackie Chan films watch uh Yan woing choreographed films John Wick uh Edgar Wright films gam Del Toro uh give yourself the tools to Great create great shots without good tools just making it harder for everyone uh think of yourself as a puppeteer again game capture isn't simply playing it's a

performance capture with intention think about what the intent of each shot is and how to best achieve that visually and really simplify your shots it makes them much more readable so strip away anything in essential and I'll leave you with some good advice from Jackie Chan the most difficult thing is when I throw the fan and coming back for one shot more than 120 tick when you see it in 2 minute or 1 second if oh Jackie good it's not good you can do it except do you have the patient or not and that's it thank you for coming uh can follow me on Twitter talk about trailers and post lots of cat photos on my website I write about trailers I make I also have a page with trailer submission specs for all the consoles and a Weekly Newsletter where I talk about movie and game trailers and also please fill out your session evaluation forms do we have time for

questions five four all right if anyone has questions hello hi um can you talk a little bit about uh interesting trailers for UI driven games like maybe card games or like visual novels things like that right they're really they're what I what I try to do so I did a trailer for um Lady Killer a bind which is a visual novel and what I did was I actually kind of recreated the game's UI in After Effects in that case just so then I can take out the parts that I didn't want which so if you can find a way to take out the parts that aren't important in the shot that's something I would recommend um yeah just just taking stuff out usually and then if there's like text just really stripping down the text rewriting it whatever uh just make it so them that the reading is part of the trailer it's not like text that you can tell that just not meant to be read when you're watching it yes hello uh I also do trailers and

it was great to see your talk and thank you validated a lot of the stuff that we do as well um but I just want to ask you talk a lot about capturing but not so much on the editing side uh if you were starting a blank canvas you made a whole new trailer from scratch what's your first step do you do music first do you do narrative stuff first so question is about um first step to start eding a trailer it depends if it's like dialogue driven I'll start with a dialogue like give me the whole crap ton of the dialogue and then I'll figure out that for do the dialogue and then next is music and then the shots so usually the but music first is usually what I want I I want it to sound like a trailer as soon as possible otherwise it's just agonizing to work on absolutely all right thank you MH yes hey um so obviously I'm sure debug tools are one of the things you ask for but what's like a list of assets or do you ask for specific images in a certain way the original audio the original dialogue or do you just get into the game and take

what you get from there yeah the question so what assets you need for a trailer to get started um usually say like a build uh the music files sometimes sound effects if it's like a very if it's a game with a lot of sound effects that are playing all at the same time and I want to be able to just pick specific ones I'll usually ask for sound effects and then maybe like graphic design stuff and then we have time for one more question uh is there a rule of thumb for the length the trailer should be like a lot of them to be 30 seconds but yeah I mean generally game trailers tend to be 90 seconds um or fewer okay but really it's a lot of it's just the editing too like you can make a trailer that is 30 seconds long but if the editing is bad it just feels like forever whereas you can have one that could be very Snappy but it's a minute and a half so I I usually just say it's just as long as it needs to be but everything is better when it's shorter usually thank you all right uh I if anyone has more questions I can meet you outside uh thank you for coming again