Trailer Made: What Makes a Successful and Memorable Game Trailer

[Music] thank you everyone for coming this is trailer made how to make successful and minimal and memorable trailers for games my name is derek liu and also please turn off your cellphone's and don't forget to fill out your evaluations after this and just I'm curious who here is a game developer and who here specifically wants to edit trailers for games oh thanks cool alright so yeah my name is Derek Liu and I've been an editor for 15 years about a little bit over five has been specifically word games I've worked with some agencies in like Triple A games but last few years it's all been Indies and these are some of the games that I've worked on I work on both on kind of like very gamey games and also very story driven games which are lighter on game mechanics so today we're gonna talk first about kind of the

unique strengths of trailers some common pitfalls I just see people doing all the time with our game trailers talk a little bit about finding the hook for your game trailer a little bit about teaching the audience about your game a little bit about basic trailer structure and then we'll have a whole bunch of tips and takeaways at the end so first let's talk about the goals of a game trailer the goals are to teach to excite and to tease that's pretty much it you know one or two out of three isn't bad but if you can do all three of these things we were game trailer Stan that's fantastic first just a bit of advice just generally don't use a trailer to communicate ideas which are easily described with words because a trailer lets you show the game's mood the mechanics the experience and if well

done you can really like evoke feelings from the audience for example this is from untitled goose game and just a few seconds of this it tells you a whole lot it really just speaks for itself but for example what if instead it was like this you know in many cases just words aren't necessary but people just put them in anyway I feel things sometimes they feel a little worried that people won't get it but a lot of games really are good when they fake speak for themselves and also when you have a lot of text on a trailer I think it can feel very salesy any I think you can really turn people off if you kind of push a little bit too hard and the exciting thing I think about trailers is trailers use the language of film and you should really take advantage of all the unique strengths of film language for example basic tools of film visuals sound it also includes music and voice-over and

editing and another way to think about a game trailer is this is the most control you're ever gonna have over how people see your game and in fact it might be the only way a lot of people see your games so you know why just throw a whole bunch of capture over music and then call it a day it's a really unique opportunity another thing that I need to say is a trailer is not a montage of random clips the order that you put things in it really really matters you know each if you have two shots each of them will have their own individual meaning but you cut them together then you create a third meaning and that's really powerful for example editing can really highlight cause and effect which is something that you really want to teach people you know trailers so for example this is from quadrilateral cowboy which a lot of the game you spend typing on this computer and doing things like typing these commands so after you type this string

for like deactivating lasers somewhere in the level lasers turn off but in the actual shot of the moment you might not see them because maybe they're above you or something like that but in the trailer you can easily just put the shot of the keyboard and then do a close-up of lasers turning off you know you don't have to be totally adhering to exactly what the game looks like you can just do things like this to draw attention to how the game works and in games like it's really hard to direct the players I unless you just kind of take control from them but in a trailer you have all that freedom and people will accept that and also editing it can be simple if you don't have to be 2001 or Lawrence of Arabia with every single thing that you cut you could just be simply saying if this and then this and often that's enough to just sparked people's imagination when they can see the potential another thing I want to say is don't think of a trailer as a video of

bullet points or like a delivery system for bullet points which yes you can get the job done if you just say like weapons and then show shots of weapons and then boss battles then show boss battles and guns and show all the different guns but I think that format can get very predictable and the audience I think when they can I get keyed in to where you're going then it gets a little less interesting another way to put this is don't waste time telling people the way your game is similar to other games a lot of times when you use bullet points it tends to turn out that way because when people watch a trailer for a new game they're going in wanting something new they're not thinking like oh my god I'm gonna watch this trailer and I hope it's exactly like every other game I've played before this you know and they're looking for like what's a different thing about this one so you should try to give that to them I mean imagine if a restaurant opened in your town and they're like we have chicken and

vegetables and we use salt and pepper and we have utensils it'd be like mmm that's a little weird you know it only worked if they're lean people in town who serve chicken but other than that you little suspicious another way I think about it is just like familiar terms that you're used to can just really bogged down a unique game there are a lot of unique games which have a lot in common but if you focus on those things then it doesn't differentiate your game and again it's it can be a little bit weird that if you're focusing on these things that just are very familiar to the audience they'd be like is there nothing you know it could be like if you have ever read a resume which people put like knowledge of Windows and Google Chrome on it like okay it's a little bit weird that this is what you're focusing on there must be nothing special here or another way to think about it is it could be like the walk like most generic dating profile you could possibly imagine like if you've ever been unfortunate enough to be on dating apps

like everyone says these things the last ones specifically for men because I've talked to some friends of mine like everyone mentions Princeton Tarantino is a favorite director so it might you might think like you're saying a lot but actually if you do your research you find out it's not very original but the best time to use kind of familiar game terms is maybe if your game has a unique combination of things so for example like spelunky combined platformer with rogue likes and dicey dungeons combined like dice rolling and dungeon crawler and puzzle quest had like match three combined with a story RPG so that was interesting and novel but if your game isn't kind of a combination of familiar genres you really need to focus on what is unique just you know one or two things what is something that can only be said about your game and it's really I think it's

better for people to remember one or two things about your game versus if you just kind of throw everything at them like a dozen different ideas and then they kind of don't retain any of that information the other thing I think I see a lot is a lot of games seem kind of afraid to put their best foot forward when they have something unique and novel I think that what it feels like showing something new they could be like okay here's my new idea and they're like haha they're really afraid they think it's risky but I really think it's the opposite is true I think it's riskier to say like oh it's an roguelike RPG and there's action and stuff so I think you shouldn't be coy about what is unique what you should do is just embrace what is unique about your game and just make it look as good as possible and if you're unsure about whether or not your trailer is working you should think about what

would someone tell a friend about your game after seeing your trailer you know people generally when they're sharing something like we watch a trailer they don't go to their friend and say oh yeah it has 50 hours of gameplay as 10 bosses it has 12 levels and it has you know 100 guns there they usually pick on something kind of like one little thing that they remember so if you can figure out what that is gonna be for your game then that's great so for example like you blitz you grow cute animals on a farm or fire watch your lonely middle-aged man in the woods also there's a turtle heavens vault you're a space archaeologists who deciphers an ancient language or Tokyo jungle like you're in Tokyo but it's a jungle in your Pomeranian took your uncle's awesome super hot you know the FPS where a time only moves when you do just these little

things that people just think about what you want people to say after watching the trailer and focus on making that work so when you have your hook you really need to consider the needs of the audience think about what the audience is looking for when they're gonna watch your trailer what do they need to know about your game in order to get excited about it because there's a really unique burden on game trailers which is that the audience needs to comprehend what they're seeing when they're watching it what I mean is when the audience hits play that usually they're immediately trying to understand okay how is this a game what does the player do they're looking for the gameplay the unique things or if it's not gameplay related maybe they're looking for a story hook or some really pretty art or music that they really like and just a lot of times people you can look at in YouTube comments are like where's the gameplay I don't understand and maybe it could just be right there but it's not Illustrated

in a way that they understand because game trailers they really need to teach how the player fits into the game because people just want to know what they're gonna do when they're playing the game and they want to decide for themselves if it's gonna be interesting or fun so for example like if we just showed just an environment in fire watch it's a little bit less clear than if you show the environments like holding the walkie-talkie it's like okay I'm walking around and have a walkie-talkie just gives you that much more information and this idea it's a little bit less important for announced trailers I would say I'd say kind of the closer you get to release the more people want to know but if you kind of start out early you just want to get kind of some buzz going then it's okay to be a little bit vague it's less important for them to understand like the how of the game versus like the what but it's also just good to think of a game trailer like a tutorial just like when you're playing a game the tutorial

doesn't start with the most complicated ideas you know you start simple and then you kind of escalate because again the trailer has to teach what's going on so then people can get excited about the potential of when the mechanic gets turned on its head and all that so for example like from super mario odyssey here in one of the trailers they first they show Cappy and then they show Mario just kind of throwing Cappy and just doing all this basic platforming stuff and then they kind of take this moment here where they make a really really big point of this one mechanic they spend all this time we like it goes into the Frog is this alternate dimension and then after this it's like oh man this is the thing you can do and then they start exploring all these different possibilities and then hopefully at this point you're like oh my god what could Mario throw his hat at you know it could be this it could be this and then you know so it's important for certain ideas to just get introduced early especially new and novel mechanics you really need

to build that knowledge because if they can't understand then that means that they're just trying to understand the entire time which means they're just missing everything you're trying to throw at them because they don't have the context to know what's going on but so like you know the way they did it then it's it works because they understand throw a copy at things and then you can possess things so now they're thinking oh my god I want to know what else I can do with and they're kind of the possibility space is just expanding which this sounds very very basic but I've seen a lot of trailers where they put this important information in the middle or late in the trailer so for example if all the first shots in this trailer were of animals with mustaches you might think to yourself like oh is this it see looks like Mario is this actually a Mario game and then later on they show Mario jumping into a thing then kind of all the shots that came before then would have been hard to remember at that point it sounds very basic but there are

a lot of trailers I see where this is a problem yes so just think about one or two pieces of information needed to kind of recon textual eyes all the rest of the footage that you want to show which is really exciting again because the audience this won't get excited or invested if they're just working spending all their mental energy to think about what is going on and then it will be much more exciting and engaging when they understand the basics like just think about imagine if there was a trailer for portal where all the first shots were walking and running and on jump platforms and going through doors and then later on they showed the portal it's like it doesn't really make sense because people don't need all that information beginning so they have the portal at the beginning and then after that they start thinking about oh my god like a shoot there I get you there and I could do this sort of thing basically you want the audience to see the game's

potential and understand the possibilities and then they get when they get really excited like oh my god and then when I get the game I could do this I could do this I want to play it you know so let's talk a little bit about basic trailer structure this is all about pacing pacing is hard but so here we have this graph where the bottom is time and the other is intensity and intensity could mean several things but I just generally mean like how exciting is the trailer at that moment the thing is you know if the intensity is low the entire time of course that's boring but by the conversely if it's high all the time that also gets kind of boring kind of like the Michael Bay effect where when everything's exploding all the time then it kind of getting your to it and you'd think that maybe this is the best where it kind of increases and gets more and more exciting as you go along but even that is almost kind of boring because it

becomes kind of predictable it's like counting one two three four or five so the curve that I like is this one so basically you have a cold open which starts very exciting and they kind of just to kind of hook the audience and then after that you hopefully you have their attention then you start introducing some new ideas and then you kind of escalate maybe they turn them on their head and then hopefully by the end you have put the most exciting footage and then maybe every title card and if you want sometimes you put a button which is kind of like this one last little tease so to give you some more specifics about each act cold-open is to hook the audience whether it's exciting editing or pretty visuals or action or humor you just want to get them in kind of like a stamp comedians they always have to have like the first

joke be the best because if it isn't then the audience doesn't want to laugh with them it's also why a lot of times on YouTube you see like movie trailers they put a little teaser before the trailer which is really annoying but it works apparently unfortunately but you know the better thing to do is if you just make the beginning exciting and have that be part of the trailer but if you want to do the mini teaser thing too it's proven to work so then in the introduction you just kind of educate the audience kind of where the chess pieces are and then escalations like there's something going on here you got to introduce some complexity into the story and then get the climax it's really really exciting and then you have a title and then there's a button for little thing to delight the audience at the end and then also don't forget your call to action you're in Slate there's all these different things maybe you don't want to do them all maybe pick the ones that are most important because I feel like when you have a ton of stuff then people are less likely to want to do any of it

but it's light it's very important okay so best and worst thing about GameTrailers is you get to create all your own shots and I did talk before about Game Capture if you go to a game trailer debug tools comm I have really in-depth thing about Game Capture but just something to help you right now is questions you can help you can use to help ask your you can ask yourself to evaluate your shots for your trailers basically these all build up on top of each other so first ask yourself is it clear it's no point in having a shot if you can't tell what's going on is it interesting it could be clear but it could be really boring so then that's no that's no good is it new you always want to have a lot of variety in your trailer because once you start repeating yourself people will start thinking oh I guess there was nothing new to show and then last is is it pretty if you can call them fantastic if you don't get all of them then your game just better be like incredibly

pretty or have amazing music which if you have that Yahtzee how do you decide the order of shots this is also really hard but here's a kind of basic way to think about things so this is something I do is first inventory the games objects like player verbs enemies environments obstacles power-ups all those things just think about what's in the game what that we could show and then I like to rate my clips so for example this first shot it's like a one star it's kind of really basic part of Super Mario then this other ones too because there's some enemies there and then this one's three because it's a boss battle and then you can just look at the curve here and then you can say okay we'll start with a three-star shot and then we'll go down to one and then we'll do two and then three you can think about that way just as a starting point but even that can be kind of predictable and then you you could end up with like a

lot of boring shots in the beginning so actually what I like to do is kind of do things in waves sofas for Splunk II - I would have kind of mini montages within the montage so this is like a one star shot where they're just running then there's a shopkeeper moment then there's this mini boss and then after that we go back down to something less interesting which is like this crossbow thing and then there's these traps and there's other shot with this kind of flying gray snake thingy and then you could imagine like on the the graph in waves you know one two three one two three it's like music all right let's get into some tips and takeaways again focus on what's unique find the hook and really focus on the hook if there's time then I'd say it's fine to put in other things that people will find familiar but not at the expense of showing what's unique and let

the game speak for itself you know a narrator that says like this is a cool game doesn't make the game seem cool and it just is it's like a car salesman basically in the trailer saying if you do want to have a narrator something I like when people do is when they put the narrator's kind of in universe where it's like their character in the game so it feels a little bit more like the game is talking for itself instead of like they hired a trailer person to be like I'm the height man you know again is it clear is it interesting is it new and is it pretty next get good music music and art style or is most important part of the trailer but music especially like I've seen a lot of trailers where I can see that they really didn't mind just mixing the music way down until it was completely inaudible which means the music wasn't good enough so why they use it if you

look at a lot of top 10 game trailer lists a lot of them like they're not really reinventing the wheel but they all have amazing music so people say the best trailer ever like mad world in years of war another thing is listen to trailer music for inspiration there's a lot of companies that work with like movie trailer companies that make music specifically for trailers and I mean it's not royalty-free it's always like individual license peruse but a lot of people upload it to YouTube and if you just look up trailer music you'll find a lot where they basically build in the pacing of a trailer into those tracks or they like build in like the stop down moment and then the resume it is it's like a second climax so it's a good kind of cheat sheet for thinking about trailer structure put things in sync people like when stuff is cut on the beat it's just fun to watch how you do it is up to you some people like to put the cuts on the beat I like to put the

actions on the beat it kind of goes back and forth but it's all personal preference but it's fun next is read your trailer dialogue from beginning to end so if you have a very narrative focused game you have a lot dialogue or even if it's a text-based just put all your dialogue on a notepad or something like that and just read it through and see if from beginning to end you can kind of chart the through line of the story because a lot of times in trailers you can tell they just took random scenes and they I they don't they don't tell a story within the trailer yes and it ends up just kind of going in one of your at the end out the other because nothing connects so it's good to read it all through shot shots should end once their main idea is expressed so just don't overstay your welcome as soon as you get to the point just just cut and everything will be nice and tight

logos if people won't recognize your logo don't show it in the opening okay just just swallow your pride there are very very few companies especially Indies who when they see the logo they're like yes and even some they're well-known people don't know their names so you're just wasting time in some cases people might think that's the name of your game and it's just you're just giving more time for people to stop watching because people get very impatient when they're watching stuff on YouTube but and especially if you're like fading in and out to black so just put it on your end slate it's fine if you have a very good track record then someday you can put your logo at the beginning and people will cheer for it turn off the HUD most games don't need the HUD turned on in the trailer I basically say to people it's kind of like when you're driving and a leaf shows up on your windshield or if you ever tried to watch a movie with subtitles on and not read the subtitles

this is basically what height is like in a game trailer how does information that's needed for the player to play the game not for people watching a trailer but like just some exceptions ish is like a real-time strategy games which a lot of the game is HUD but in those situations I usually tell people if you can maybe only show the parts of the HUD relevant to that particular shot and then get rid of everything else which it is extra work but it makes things much clearer and then just really consider the HUD as just anything else that's in the trailer is this necessary for this shot to communicate the idea that I want let's you don't get hung up on editing style worried about the trailers goals I see a lot of YouTube tutorials for people like oh try cutting too black and then try flashing too black and white and that sort of thing or you know everything should be cut really fast at the end but it's all kind of arbitrary

unless it's for a particular feeling or something like that so think more about what your trailer is trying to achieve and find the best way to do that show your trailer to someone who doesn't know anything about your game other people will notice things that you don't see and even sometimes you just have a person with you while you're watching the trailer you'll immediately kind of see it through their eyes and there's this thing there that I didn't realize was there I got to fix that and the other thing is that especially if your game developer making your own trailer it can be really easy to kind of get what was special about your game and at the same time you can have things that you think are really special that other people are like I don't really care about like to you like it took months to implement this one thing or something like that so you want to put it in so it's good to have a another person again don't show everything got a tease the audience it's just enough to get them interested but not enough for them to really understand fully

especially with announced trailers because like I mean a game that can be really summed up completely in a trailer it won't seem like it has a lot to it more information can be less interesting like my I have my cats here all the time sometimes I was waving the toy in front of them and they're like yeah whatever and then I put it underneath the blanket like ah I need to get the toy I think people are like that with trailers too and I think if you'd go past if you say too much you can kind of go past the sale and turn people off I like I have this friend he gets really excited about movies and he'll be like Oh Derek there's a movie called inception and you like they go into people's dreams like oh that sounds cool and they just keeps going he's like and then they have his heist and then ice goes wrong and then they have to go even deeper and then the snow like whoa whoa whoa okay I'm already interested just just stop you know don't rob people that sense of discovery and again start the trailer with the most important unique or exciting idea and you might blow

people's minds the more they watch the trailer because you think about it a lot of games are about like exploring this one idea and turning ups on its head and exploring it you're basically you want to kind of give that feeling for the trailer and also just think about trailers as early as possible it could even be before you design a game or while you're doing it because it's really really important to have a good trailer and if you find out your game is really hard to make a trailer for then maybe that could be an opportunity to think about its visuals or its design in a way that would make it better for that and it's really important too because you know it's gonna you're gonna make animated gifts and then people gonna make youtube videos and stream on Twitch so you want the visual communication be really good and that's it thank you for coming this is my website I also have a website game trailer specs where like all those

little nitty-gritty console things like the bitrate I just put them on one site and like ESRB II sort of regulation stuff and then again I've a bunch of like debug tools that I listed that are good to implement your games specifically for our trailers and do we have time for questions okay I think we do not but I'll stick around if you have questions everyone thank you for coming [Applause]