Īnd I used wipes (with a little bit of cutting on the action) for a section where I showed off closeups of different zones while panning the camera. I used jump cuts (with a slight fade in) specifically for the section of the trailer where I wanted to show the school being built up. In my case, I ended up using wipes, jump cuts, and the generic fade in/out from scene to scene. Depending on the kind of game you’re making, only some of these transitions will be very useful to you, but it’s important to keep them in mind in case they affect the kind of recordings you want to make. This video of cuts and transitions 101 is a great watch and explains a lot about transitions in just 12 minutes. Mostly, transitions exist to smoothen or make more natural the transition from one scene to another. I certainly didn’t have in-depth knowledge of transitions until I experimented with making an alternate trailer for our game Political Animals. I wanted to detour a little bit into talking about transitions because I think while they’re well known to anyone with interest in film, developers aren’t aware of them. Another thing that’s important when making trailers is deciding what kind of transitions to use in the trailers. In our case, it helped me identify that I needed to make a background image, some custom sprite art, and locked down the list of videos that I needed to record. Storyboards help you plot out the action of the trailer very quickly allowing you to figure out exactly what assets you’ll need to create for the trailer. If it helps you can think of storyboards as like a comic book of your trailer. Storyboards are your trailer in following drawings. Now that I had my music ready, it was time to take my initial concept and prepare some storyboards. I do this for everything from booking hotels to buying royalty free music, and in this case, I got a sweet 15% discount from a random coupon site. Pro tip: before buying ANYTHING online, make sure to do a cursory google search for discount coupons. I couldn’t find anything else that called out to me, and after sharing with the team and getting the signal from them, I bought the track. Shutterstock makes this easier by showing the track’s waveform, so I could immediately see if any other tracks I was checking out had the similar “building up” phase at the beginning. When I first heard the track “Keep Riding” my ears instantly perked up, and I thought “this is it!” I did my due diligence by searching for other tracks. To my surprise, I found the trailer music on Shutterstock, which apparently now also licenses music tracks apart from photos. I couldn’t find what I wanted so I did a google search for royalty free music and searched “educational” or “education” to see what would turn up. I initially checked out Nash music, which is where we found the background music for our game (which we also use in our devlogs). Luckily, there’s a surplus of good royalty free music out there. But coming up with a great composition takes both time and money, which we had in short supply. There are lots of great composers out there, and you can approach one if you want a custom piece of trailer music. With this in mind, the next step for me was to find some good music. I envisioned a student dreaming of building their school, with the music starting quiet and then building up in complexity as the school gets built out. A basic idea for the Academia trailer was now forming in my mind. My main takeaway from these trailers is that they all showed elements of construction and showed the games’ complexity. Since we’re working on an Early Access game that has simulation/management aspects, I chose to watch trailers by games like Sim Airport, Another Brick in the Mall, Production Line, and Oxygen Not Included. This part is the easiest, just watch and absorb a bunch of trailers. Below you will find a guide to making indie game trailers as written by Ryan Sumo (the lead artist/CEO of Squeaky Wheel) Making a trailer may sound like a daunting task to the average indie, but it’s not that complicated to make a simple one, and it can be a worthwhile creative exercise in itself.
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