Trailers - Sell Your Game

[Music] good morning everybody we will start without because it doesn't matter we will connect it later my name is Kosta and I'm a co-founder of banker be a fixed studio it is visual effects animation studio that is specialized in producing high-end game trailers for any type of games or any type of platforms and today we're here to talk a little bit about overall situation on game market with game trailers and water the what could be the

production steps in the elements that can make high and trailers available to everyone I hope you don't mind I will using my notes from last night a lot and we care picture first of all mobile gaming industry is literally the fast growing part of the gaming industry by statistic in last couple of years so accordingly the number of requests for high-end trailers from mobile games is higher every year as a matter of fact banker studio in last two years worked more on projects for mobile games than PC games or other platforms for Triple A games so why do you need a game trailer

that's a question a question with simple answer it helps selling your game now today differences between mobile games and PC games are less and less visible every month every every year in both creatively technically technical terms so it allows mobile game developers to decide between options for type of the trailer the most common type of trailer used for mobile games until now is the we say financial gameplay trail trailer it's usually produced by a game developer itself and basically it means somebody was playing and recording later editing adding some titles motion graphics and that's it the

most commonly used type of trailer for official trailer and we think that marketplace is already oversaturated with this type there's this second type of trailer that is also produced by game developers on their own it's trailers from game engine basically using some level of a game playing around with camera assets animation adding some ethics that would be some kind of directing the trailer inside your engine and your gameplay and it leaves a much better impression on the audience but still there are a lot of limits for this type of travel and finally there is a highly detailed post-production trailer

there are absolutely no limits in this type of trailer and they can be adjusted and modified for any type of game or any type of mobile studio developers so they are cost and time efficient this type of trailers basically helps mobile game to stand out in ocean of games being released constantly very important thing is to understand production elements time and budget wise what does this mean there are a lot of elements that can be carefully prepared in front so they can cut down the budget and time needed for trailer so quality

quality of provided assets is one of the most important things in this area because every trailer production starts with assets provided to us from from clients so accordingly to overall level of detail of those assets [Music] topology of models textures quality that leaves us with a simpler or more advanced and time-consuming and cost not efficient uprising and preparing those assets for high-end visual purposes let me show you some examples that could be interesting No okay hmm nice example

this is a model provided by client when we when we got it we were not sure what we are looking at definitely some kind of creature with wings after adding texture from bride by client also we start getting idea what what who is this character and what what is this about both models and textures are not even close to the quality that was requested from the clients so the first stage is to appraise everything in geometry to appraise everything every texture and at the end using loop

development techniques developing your own shader for here realistic look we end up with character the same character looks like this in the in on the final result in the video this is another example from the same game same projects and trailer also completely understandable with textures we get a clearer picture we appraise models on the level of detail that is required this is medium level of detail we very often go for high level make catches on our own go through Luke development phase again final result of the character in the individual so those examples were for low poly models that are not usable to us for these purposes

they are not even close to production quality that we need but they are usable as a references for scale as a references for proportion and very often we use them as proxy models with proxy rates so we can immediately start with some kind of animatic previous layouts and stuff like that in some cases we get high Pollock assets from developers that is not so common situation and it's usually when that developer was already preparing some kind of marketing material and started uprising characters buy them set themselves and when we get those characters for instance this is a soldier character for Don of Titans trailer and we were really pleasantly surprised with provided asset

after this model which is pretty good the rest of the work that was in our side is to make look development on our pipeline add some hair spores whatever displacement maps game assets never use displacement displacement maps and at the end this character final result from the video looks like this so another important stage is number of assets the name of this title explains the situation by itself basically as much as more as it's to build more time more budget we had a lot of situation that we

had to build like 2026 had a detailed character for for a trailer and it was bloody nightmare after we did it and working on animatic animatic and client was cutting I think changing the final result was basically we didn't have to build even half of those characters because the rest of photos are not visible or they're cut it out from final edits complexity of characters of assets did in this situation of characters really important face first of all less complex characters are usually connected with stylized games or stylized requests for trailers this means that they are simple in initial design so simple forms

geometry is less detailed textures and display are simple usually there are no displacements usually there are no request for cloth simulation or real looking here with simulation basically less work for us even if we are building all the assets from beginning let me try to show you one example of less complex character okay this character is for plant plants vs. zombies I think it was called captain brain as you can see it's very simple as I said before but it looks

interesting and the during animation everybody was like really happy about it and it was everybody's favorite character and this is the opposite situation where there's a request for complexity characters high complexity characters are usually connected with hyper real requests or like just realism like so like Witcher or something so many details design is complex by itself this is example 4 from one of our trailers the accent was an absolutely natural look on the face we need to use a huge amount of topology we had to use extremely high resolution 8k textures for face micro displacements

displacements we had to split movies into 16 you do deems by characters hyper realistic here there was a request for natural facial expressions which means very very advanced facial rig basically a lot of work next would be number of environments number of environments same as number of characters as many different type of environments somebody wants to share in its trailer interiors exteriors forest swamp waterfall river passing through

makes everybody life miserable and a lot of time and work and money etc etc and complexity of environment this is a similar situation as correct character complexity it's also pretty much connected with the stylized type of game since I last type of trailers but it doesn't have to be there is one one trick with it is that client often doesn't understand a request for huge environments those are usually exteriors and the typical situation would be they think it's one environment exterior but if you if you look on that environment again you understand that on the left side there is a forest on the right side

there is a swamp with a river or something then there is a field of grass and this and that and that makes it so complex that it's almost the same as we are building like ten different environments so there are some examples for this also this is good example for simple environment it's also from plants vs. zombies this is a Coliseum for from the their game basically 360 building Coliseum around us one house of plants one house of zombies couple of lanes and stuff between and two and a half minutes of trailer is located in this environment and basically whatever you do however you directed wherever character ease and camera type of camera is you always have

already prepared environments so you're not thinking about that and example for high high complex environment is environment for dawn of titans again and this is a little bit situations I was mentioning before huge environment these parties with rocks this part is desert we want to see mountains on this side volcano on that side that's it nightmare again another important would be visual style visual style is let's let's talk about it this way there is a

hyper realistic visual style the good example for from very known trailers would be cyberpunk so this is the style that is the most complicated because we need a completely realistic final look but again we are usually somewhere in future or sci-fi so everything is different there is no ordinary building or vehicle everything needs to be [Music] built from scratch before that unit concept art for each asset so I would say most most most complicated style for any studio to do there is the this standards really realistic style like Witcher metaphor I don't know there are a lot of them this is also this is our

territory mostly basically realistic look we with very well-known and historically accurate or in present that they accurate assets environments and stuff like that there is Judy or 3d cartoony look which is the most simple way of building the trailer and the stylized look this is something I would like to do to show you how stylized the Luke can change production costs and timeline and overall overall look let's take a quick look on okay so this is also plants vs. zombies garden warfare 2 it's a cut from the original

trailer this this trailer had a lot of characters so number of characters was big but they're stylized forms and stylized design helped us build those characters easily and not lose too much time and and money on that and also this is also one of the rare situations when provided acid from client were really good another stylized would be some summoners war so trailer for games some other sort of things it's the name this is a little bit extreme situation because it's a combination of live action and and CG

these are the characters from the beginning of the talk that were really really really low poly and had to be built from scratch we didn't want to want to mention this type of trailers when it's combination with live-action because a shooting of trailer is a lot more expensive than building the trailer in CG so if somebody decides to do it this way it may be it means that its budget unlimited budget and okay there's one more thing overall stylists do a look that we showed you basically simplifies production processes in all stages and allows us to use visual tricks both in 3d and compositing in order to have the

same result final result in last time visual effects and simulations affected simulations well we consider two types realistic simulations whatever you can imagine destructions liquid simulations plot or here simulations realistic weather simulations or sci-fi fantasy simulations like character effects all these types of we fix our enemy number one for a budget and timeline for everybody they require top art direction because nobody knows how they should look at the end and they require time-consuming

research and development but creatively and technically and it's hard to simulate complex effects like earthquake and buildings going down and stuff like that it's hard to render those things and in order to be able actually to do that you have to you need to own really really explains expensive technical infrastructure and artists for the most expensive artists in our industry so let me show you one example here this is travel for mobile game heroic magic duel probably the most complex trailer we ever did originally it's three and a half minutes it has five hero characters

each character has his own spells each character has its own army army will is clashing with each other the request was we want a huge environment we won't Massif I it's a lot of effects everywhere so while you're watching this is like third of the trailer maybe less each shot is completely covered with some kind of effects and this was six months really really interesting six months crazy and fun at the end everybody everybody was really happy with this trailer at the end and this is the first time that bonkers stand stand

out between other Studios with this trailer the same as as the good trailer will stand out game from from other games duration as another element it's very very important it's the most common confusing element on the client side because when talking about budget of course so by default usual thought is shorter duration less money right well it's true and it's not true let me let me try to explain for instance there is a regional brief we would like two and a half minutes

trailer and here are the 50 shots and we make our estimate and they don't have budgets for it and then they think that if they leave 50 shots in the trailer but cut down the length of each shot from three second to one second that it's going to be three times cheaper well that's not true because if if we already have to build those scenes and those characters to cover those 50 shots it's pretty much the same for us this is going to be one second or 30 seconds so if you if you want to cut the budget you just don't do it with cutting the duration so the time is up I will skip some parts and what what what I would like to tell you that it's all

it's all about idea here as you can see it's all about the deer you know the drill since you were born everybody was repeating the same thing to you it's all about idea and they were right what's important do not get into the process with too high expectations meaning this trailer will be like no other before it's very very hard to do it it's hardly possible where budget and time are limited idea is a tool and with that with this tool we can both creatively and technically optimized but accomplish initial project idea if you have about just there is a budget a time spend it wisely make content rich rich and diverse use motion capture studio use a lot of character assets but never never never

forget about most important thing and that is idea and at the end finally chef fun and savvy game thank you that's it for me for today [Applause] you [Music]