Videos & Trailers
Through my career I've had some great opportunities to create all types of content. Looking back some of the coolest content and most fun has been the times I've got to create video assets. Check out some of the videos I have created through the years.
Daylight was a fun project, but had its challenges because we were pretty limited in content and resources when we needed to deliver a trailer. Having been watching a lot of Hitchcock I figured I'd do something along the lines of an invisible cut and have the camera pan through walls ending by showing off the more supernatural aspects to the game and the sting with the cell phone ringing. I work with a level artist to setup the shot and we worked out the pacing with the audio director who created custom music. Once we had the matinee sequence locked down we just had to do a frame render dump to get sequence frames and then assemble and edit in After Effects. While not a complicated trailer, I think we were able to finish it in just a couple days.
The first Blacklight Retribution trailer I created was for the Playstation 4 announcement. We were invited to the GDC showcase and wanted to make sure we had an asset, so we knocked this one out. It was largely built on B-Roll footage with action transitions built in After Effects. Audio provided the polish level that really amped it up.
The second Blacklight Retribution Trailer for E3 2013 was probably the most complex trailer we built while I was at Zombie. This trailer had a lot going on including custom animations in Unreal and camera tracking in After Effects to give the 3D space text. To get the HRV effect we had to be creative with lots of composite layers to show off the weapon transitions.
One of the assets that I built back at Microsoft was a Games with Gold promotional video. I built all the motion graphics in After Effects including the gold dust background and transitions with Trapcode Particular. Editing was pretty straight forward with a solid script with voice talent of Kristina Horner.
I was lucky enough to attend Gamescom 2015 to help with the re-announcement of Quantum Break. Since I was there for the entire length of the convention I figured it would be fun to do a booth tour. With help from my co-worker Kieffer, we walked around the Xbox booth checking out everything that it had to offer including Forza, Scalebound, Quantum Break and Rare Replay. I do have to say that the German Event staff was so nice. Editing was pretty straight forward with simple motion graphics lower thirds and info popups created in After Effects. It is interesting editing yourself.
This next video was actually a team effort as I got to work with the amazing video department in the larger game organization. We worked on a show sheet, what were the themes we wanted to go after, type of people we are interested in talking with and then spend a good four hours walking around the floor at PAX Prime talking with people. It was great to collaborate with such a talented team and the final video ended up great!
It has been extremely rewarding to be able to create assets like this. Getting your hands dirty and learning how to get an idea in your head to actually materialize on screen was extremely rewarding, but also being able to work with a variety of great people. I'll talk about the video series including Blacklight Patch Minute and Killer Instinct's Combo Break in another post since those were their own beast. I hope to continue to be able to create more assets like this in the future.