Game trailers

Hi, Im going to create a preview game trailer for the game i'm working on. However i don't have much experience in creating videos for this.
What i'm looking for is to create a video that looks like this:

So it's quite simple, a logo at the start, gameplay in the middle and a "coming soon on Google play and App store" at the end.

How does one create one of these? Do you guys know where to buy any templates for a video like this? How do you create videos/trailers for your games?

 

Adobe Premiere.

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere.html

 

Video editing software -
I prefer After Effects for my personal work. Some like Premiere, Final Cut, Sony Vegas and Pinnacle Studio. I use an Avid Video Editing suite at work - but it's pricey if your not doing video editing for at least 50% of your job.

I'm sure there are other inexpensive suites available as well iMovie, MovieMaker - but I have no experience with those.

All it takes is time - and a video editing suite. After Effects is great because it offers all (most) of the tools needed -

I'd shy away from a template (personally) - they look very canned and really REALLY want to be a TV commercial - but it's obvious they are templates with 'slots' defined to place your personal content.

 

That's a lot of work. The editing and stuff they did is excellent. You will not get such good results if you aren't paying someone who knows what they're doing.

I spent about a week and a half on mine. It's slow tedious work. You need to capture tons of footage from your game.

My experience involved getting the sound track and then editing the footage around the audio. You want those beats to hit exciting moments and solid synchronization.

 

All those are very expensive tools. DaVinci Resolve Free is free even for commercial use (notice it isn't a "personal edition") and on par with those tools. There is paid version available, but features it contains are pointless in the context of making a trailer.

 

Thanks for answering everyone!

I'm going to have to go with the cheaper alternatives since i don't have a lot of money to put in to the development yet
I'm aware of that a template would look a bit stiff. but it would probably make a better video than if i would create one from scratch myself

Do you know where i can get hold of someone to create a video, for a smaller amount of money? Working on a indie-budget here

Will check it out, thanks

 

Please fire me a PM with an offer. I am pretty good with vids and can make a trailer for you.

 

Bruh just get someone to do that for you man, there's just so much that one man can do.

 

MovieMaker is pretty limited. I use it for all my video tutorials. But it only covers the basics. You can cut up clips, stitch them together, and manage one channel of audio.

 

Sounds like a good introductory software for someone unfamiliar with video editing.
Does it also offer any prepacked transitions like fade, wipes and dissolve?

 

Yes. The main limitations for me are doing video in video, and mixing multiple audio tracks. Otherwise it suits all my needs.

 

you can get an un-restricted trial of premiere that will last about a month for free. usually long enough to make a trailer and decide if you want to buy/rent copy

 

So i've been looking around now for a bit. Before i'll ask anyone to do one for me ill try myself using a free trial on Adobe After Effects. I've found some free transitions that can be used between scenes. Stay tuned for a new preview gameplay video

 

It's not a bad trailer 0:13-0:23 is very good.. whats the tune? ...though honestly was expecting those voxel cars to start losing their blocks on impact .. was a little disappoint

edit... yeh I watched the trailer then replied anyway aftereffects is usually good for that sort of stuff.

 

Can't believe noone mentioned Blender.

 

I just used Imovie, and quicktime player to capture the footage and sound flower for the sound. You basically capture a bunch of raw footage, then edit it down to a 30 second trailer, dont record the music when your recording, add it later.

Although that trailer does look alot better then mine

 

I am personally using Movie Edit Pro 2016 Plus (comes with some extra stuff) Windows only, http://www.magix.com/us/movie-edit-pro/ I consider it one of the most noob friendly editing software out there apart from iMovie, but you can do more stuff with Movie Edit Pro.

A free alternative is Hitfilm 3 Express (Mac & PC) (a cut down version of Hitfilm Pro 4) I haven't used it yet, but you can Edit and do Adobe After Effects style FX (GUI is similar to After Effects). A lot of independent film makers are using this apparently, https://hitfilm.com/express

About DaVinci Resolve Free, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who has no video editing experience, as it is really complex to use.

 

Nah, this video:

explained it to me pretty well, rest I've figured out myself.

 

Of course you can learn it, but I still wouldn't recommend it for a beginner. And the guy's every other sentence was, "you can do this in real time, if you have a beefy system" lol.

 

That's a bit overkill. A good game trailer knows:

1) What to show
2) When to show it
3) How long to show it
4) Keep the atmosphere going through the fitting music
5) Present what your game has to offer to the player

In other words, it could be Windows Movie Maker, Vegas Pro, Adobe Premiere (although some of them are overkill as well).

 

Windows Movie Maker sucks. All the other are expensive.

 

I guess I went too far saying that Movie Maker is good.

But costs can be expressed in other ways apart from money. E.g time spent on learning Da Vinci, which has tons of features that are used for filmmaking and not needed for such use

 

Just published what i could accomplish(with help) in after effects.

Constructive criticism is always welcome.

 

It looks very nice.

I would cut the length to 20 seconds. There is way, way too much 'dead time'. The trailer ends up feeling quite repetitive, which makes the game feel a bit empty. Even if the game is empty the trailer should present it as if it's full and exciting. By repeating almost identical gameplay during fairly long cuts - it feels off.

Every shot involves 2 sheep and 1-2 clovers on screen.

I love the transitions and stuff, thematically it fits together very well and the art is quite nice. But the content of the trailer feels very repetitive.

Maybe some text during the transition cuts that explain why the next scene differs from the last scene?

As a viewer, I don't understand why the last clover killed the sheep - which gives me the impression that game play itself is kind of arbitrary. I would not end the video on this note - I would end it on a fireworks display leading into a high scores list or something.

The music kicks ass and works perfectly with the theme and the transition cuts. The music is absolutely pitch perfect.

Sorry if the criticism was worded a little harshly, I think it's quite good - I would just either show more varied footage of the game or just clip it down to 20 seconds.

 

Thanks for replying!
Your criticism did not come across harshly, i got very useful information out of it!

I will shorten down the video and end with the player reaching the leaderboard!
It's quite fun that you mention fireworks, because that's exactly what shows up when making it to the leaderboard

 

Just remember, the viewer will almost certainly not get that the clovers are color coded to the sheep. So to them, they just see 1 or 2 clovers and 2 sheep. One of the sheep isn't doing anything most of the time, so he's having a boring game.

Although not hitting a clover might make for fun game play moments, its boring to watch.

I imagine the game is two player, so try to show more clips where both sheep are active. It will make the raw visuals more complex and exciting, and it will present more active engaging gameplay.

Also - I may drop the quote in the intro. I think to most gamers the word "frustrating" is one of the worst words you can possibly describe a game with. Even if the player meant it as a "challenging" - it's a very bad word to use for promotion.

 

I will make sure to use clips where the both sheeps are collecting the points as well.
(The game is actually for one player. You add force to the right sheep by tapping on the right side of the screen, and add force to the left by tapping on the left side of the screen.)

 

Maybe add some text explaining that. It really adds a dimension to the game and could certainly add to fun. But watching the trailer - very few people would probably guess that you control both sheep (?). At least, i didn't!

 

I love blender but i would never use it for video editing, it just makes the workflow way too slow

I personally use shotcut, which is open source

 

Fraps on high end machine > photoshop/after effects > compressing > youtube?

I skimmed through the posts, but to add to the list of possible pipelines, and sum things up:

After effects is a powerful video editing and effects tool. Perhaps even overkill. You can code in it. If you want, you can go nuts with transitions, transformations, and fades, warps, 3d text overlay, so on...

 

whoaa! blender can do video editing? like whaaat? thats cool, maybe not great but holy crap blender is insane lol

Cyberlink Powerdirector seems cool
but iam not a video editor or anything, just i know how to use it, idk what else you'd need thats not in it

 

I must say I am impressed that you used After Effects as your first video editing software, especially that it is not really meant for editing. But you got a nice video out of it. I do however agree with frosted, and I didn't understand that you actually control both sheep at the same time, you should show how that works.

 

Yeah I just discovered it a few weeks back, and was wooah, blender really is the all in one tool. See example for adjusting colour balance. It's essentially the same for animation, in that you press 'i' to insert a keyframe on the effect. You can also crank up the volume, layer two sounds on top of the other. Incredible. I do have after effects lying around but as soon as I new blender was capable of video editing that was that.

 

I've created a new video. Do you think this one works better? Instead of shortening it down i added explaining texts between the clips.

Here is a little explanation on what tools i used to make the video:
I used quicktime player to record the screen while playing the game. I cut out the pieces of video i wanted to the correct length in imovie. I downloaded a pack of transitions for after effects and assembled the transitions and video-pieces and added text to the video in after effects.

 

Nah it doesn't work, the four green bars, the rightmost green bar is too bright making the white text on the RHS unreadable.

If you're gonna do the text thing put it on a solid green background that is slightly darker.

Also remove the, 'as you progress levels get harder' this is kinda assumed of any game.

Hope that helped.

 

Yikes! Too much text!

Think more like "CONTROL BOTH SHEEP IN A FRIENDSHEEP DANCE"

Next cut:
"LEFT TAP BLUE SHEEP, RIGHT TAP RED SHEEP"

Next cut:
"DONT GET MIXED UP!"

etc.

The word "Force" makes sense to Unity devs but maybe not so much to guys browsing games in the mobile store.

 

I found THIS to be a very informative read concerning game trailers. The article also states that It takes a long time to capture good gameplay “moments”, which I can confirm. It's a good indicator of the game's quality: the longer it takes, the S***tier the game is.

 

Ah ok. Yeah, that sounds a lot better. i will fix these issues.

Thanks, i will check it out!

 

Also 'very frustrating but fun game' is not the greatest review. I mean you don't want to associate your game as being frustrating... It might be an honest review, but you can be a bit colorful with the truth as you intention is to sell.

 

I hear what you say, but I think it can be something that can be used to sell a game. Flappy Bird became viral by people talking about how bad and how frustrating it was that the colliderboxes around the bird that hit the pipes all the time.

 

Maybe use 'challenging' instead it has at least a positive spin off.

 

You've should have kept the previous transitions actually, (they were cool) but only show one part of the text while showing the game play footage, and fade between text elements either after every transition fx (doesn't have to be every transition) or what ever feels good. You can make the text angled or in any other way really, just don't let it cover up the action that you are trying to show.

Another way to edit it, (there are millions of ways one can do it lol) is to remove the transitions totally, and only show game play with plain cuts and text fading/tumbling etc. for the duration of the trailer, this way the trailer could become shorter as the game play looks pretty much the same throughout.

Other users gave you some good advice about how to rewrite some of the text, and I agree with them.

Just one last thing, I didn't understand at first that each sheep have to collect the corresponding colored clover in order to not die.

Side note: Not sure if the beta testers input is good or not.

 

Here is todays version of the video. The changes are:
Shortened down the text.
Removing quote.
Using the first type of transitions.
Changing to bebas font, using larger text, and adding a drop shadow on text.

Should I change/add anything?

 

I laughed watching this version.

100x better!

I think you're good to go!

The little "baaah" after he hit the platform and they both fell down made losing feel silly and fun instead of frustrating. Those little things can make a big difference!

And cutting to the leaderboard at the end also feels fun.

Huge difference from where you started. I love seeing people make progress like this.

EDIT: It's really interesting how 'losing' can shift from being frustrating to fun and how little things can have such a big effect on how that feels. If you don't have that little "ba-aah" sound when your sheep hits something in game, I'd really suggest adding it.

 

Sweet!
Thanks everyone for helping out.

I have the sheep sound when a round ends. But i will add it when hitting things as well!

 

You are making excellent progress with the video. Good job.

 

Looks great! My only criticism would be tune down the game audio? it just feels a little overwhelming personally, but your choice

 

I works, but I feel that after the "control two sheep..." title card, you should not put the other text on a separate backgrounds, just let the game be the background for your text until "you made it to the leader boards". Usually you want show as much of your product as possible within the shortest amount time, and I feel that you "lose" around half of your game simply because you cut away to static backgrounds with some text. The overall length is good though, and sorry for giving you even more things to consider.

 

Thanks, will have a look at the game audio. I agree that it gets a bit overwhelming. specially when the fireworks start.

You are probably right but the transitions are there to make the cuts to another video clip a bit nicer. I need some kind of transitions, but maybe they could be shorter.

 

You can try this if you like, use regular cross fades between your clips and fade in your text as well (different timings), the text will distract your audience, so same style of game footage shouldn't be an issue, you just have to time it so it feels natural.