Trailer Plan

Format

MP4 small file size along with animation and sound.

cel animation + motion film + Machinima

I am using this because I got the inspiration from a trailer made by Pop cap, the trailer is for Peggle. I like the use of the moving text, flashing images and part of the game included. I want a catchy tune to make the trailer catchy, and make it want the viewers want to play the game.

The type of animation I will use is Machinima, this animation consists of having some form of game play which is captured using a recording device. Another part of Machinima is the art of editing, using a program such as After Effects or Sony Vegas, you can edit the video adding: fading text, key frames, audio, video. I will use all of these somewhere throughout my trailer to portray my understanding of animation and the different types of animation out there.

Click Here To visit a page where it breaks down: Machinima, Digital Puppetry and Motion Capture. Out of these three I choose Machinima because its one of the easiest, this article done by Terry Hancock, explains in more detail what Machinima is and what you could also do with it, the summarized version is gameplay footage with animation either on top or intertwined with it.

Ideas

Idea 1
Have text in between 3 second game play clips. Flashing text, quick snappy content, text being bold - orange and with a black stroke.

Idea 2
Have pyramids in the beginning, with sunlight rising, then having game play with text, then leaving with the sun setting and destroyed pyramids.

Idea 3
Have slow spotlight in the shape of a pyramid which will be white and the background black, slowly moving from the left to the middle then stopping, pulling out a gun that shoots gold. A (destroys the camera) B (makes it rain gold)

Idea 4
Have the word KAIJU and have the minotaur walk in and jump on the I and crushing it to make Kaiju with the minotaur as the I then panning over to some game play. This idea comes from Pixar, Pixar uses this and I would like to reinvent it.

Audience

My audience is going to be male and females aged 11-65, who find indie games interesting.

The Final Idea

My final idea consists of  three of my smaller ideas. The trailer will start of with the Pixar idea with the word Kaiju along the background and the Minotaur from the game will jump in from the right to about central stage where it will begin jumping on the 'I' until it falls flat into the floor. Once this has happened the background will darken and the Minotaur's red eyes will remain then a red lens flare coming from the left to the right at the Minotaur's eye level, then fading to black.

Next we have the game play mixed with bold text which flys in and lands on a black background, this will occur for about 10 seconds, this idea came from the Peggle trailer. This will have some interesting music which will hopefully engage you viewer. At then end it will then fade to black.

Finally there will be the James Bond idea, there will be white circles moving from the right to the left, once it reached the far left of the screen, a single circle will follow my character from the left to the center which then he will hold up some gold, all this time the old James Bond theme will be playing (because its copy right free) then the Minotaur will fall from the top of the screen crushing the character then to have a "BUY IT NOW" appear at the bottom with some devilish laughing occurring.

This is some of my planning, its a dope sheet, this shows the timing of the effects and what the camera is doing.

Dope Sheet

This dope sheet will help me with the production of the trailer, if I need inspiration I will refer to my ideas and my dope sheet, now I have made a dope sheet, the next step is to make a story board. The making of the story board will bring my ideas together for a paper version of my trailer.

I made a paper story board, to give me a rough idea of what I was going to create on the computer. This helped on getting an initial design, this also helped me get a better understanding of my idea.

Storyboard Image 1
Storyboard Image 2

Now I have to plan when I am going to make my trailer. I need to make a production plan
 to help me plan how long I should roughly spend on a piece of animation at a time.

Link to production schedule

My character was not created for the trailer, it was made for the Kaiju Puzzle Pyramid game. I used the same asset from my game and then saved it as a .PNG and implemented it into my After Effects project.

 

 

The Background was an idea I got from the Pixar trailer, I made it by literally using the same colours and the gradient tool.

Website Banner (P2)

Just like my trailer, I wanted my banner to have the same representation, I wanted people to know after looking at my trailer that my banner was for the same game. Machinima animation is my entire banner, my banner literally contains game footage with animated text over it. This animation portrays everything that is needed to know about my game and the simplicity of it. Was Machinima animation my first idea? No, I intended on doing sequential photography first, where I might start my character from the left like done below, then every few frames Id retake the snapshot and continue doing that until the character jumped onto the floating platform, then I would have added the images together and slowly faded each new character on one after each other to look something like this:

I started my animation of by recording a small clip from my game, once I did that i zoomed in on the character and part of the level, once I reached the edge of the screen I wanted text to appear that displayed my game name.

Here is the first draft:

Then I added sound and a white fade out screen at the end to finish the whole animation of. Although the animation was short and simple, I believe the whole banner displays that my game is a platformer and it shows evidence of puzzles due to the name which appears. 

This is my final version:

GIF version

Timeline (P1, M1, D1)

In this timeline it will display all the different techniques and the development for 2D animation.

Link to timeline