A brief making of ...Part 1
Trailers for games you are working on yourself are always a topic for discussion in the studios.
That’s always the way it is.
As a rule, you encounter an enormous conflict in the planning: on the one hand, it has to rock, look great, and properly reflect the game; on the other hand, usually no one really has the time to devote to the matter over a longer period along with their own work on the game.
After all, game studios are not film studios.
Generally, the developers are involved in the design of the trailer, they prepare the in-game assets, and then the job is sent to an outside animation studio.
Risen is no exception.
We made two attempts to get the trailer ready in time for the GC – and it was only on the second try that we achieved the result you can see at http://risen.deepsilver.com/.
The first attempt to design the storyboard failed, because I (Ralf) suddenly got very sick (my job would have been the coordination and planning for the trailer) – and Mike Hoge bravely threw himself into the gap I left, but overloaded himself with way too much work in doing so.
And since there are only 24 hours in the day, he handed over the design and execution of this part of the project to our producer Michael Paeck.
Michael Paeck is very important to the project, because even if he mostly works in the background, he is responsible for monitoring the milestones, coordinating the cooperation between DS and PB, and of course the game testing phases.
In order to provide a closer look at his work and that of director Ettore Pizzetti, I asked Michael a couple of questions about the trailer:
1) Michael, you are the co-author of the story. What did you like best about working on the trailer, and how was the work divided up?
Work began around April: together with Ettore Pizzetti – the incredibly talented director of the trailer – I had been thinking about what the goal of the trailer should be.
We decided that we wanted to concentrate primarily on the story – and not on the features – and especially to create a desire for more. It should also raise a few questions that could then be discussed in the forum. Once the vision was clear, we started putting together the pieces from the story by Piranha Bytes that were interesting and important enough to be mentioned in the one minute we had as our target time. And then we wound up with the scenes that are in the final trailer. We came to an agreement on the structure of the overall trailer: first, action and mysterious events should grab the viewer’s attention (flight over the sea and the monster in the forest). Then we wanted to convey that the game told a profound and non-clichéd fantasy story (confinement on the island, Inquisition suppressing the islanders), and then we wanted to show there would be action and the player would be part of it (arrow in the woods, traps in the dungeon, etc.). With that, we had our direction, and we could get started.
Ettore created the “director’s script”. This is a complete script that contains all of the camera instructions along with the dialog. This is where his wealth of experience came in: how do we depict a certain point in the story in the most interesting and effective way? What are the right camera angles? How should we edit it? All of this was answered in the script.
Download Textfile: Script version
This script then made the rounds – Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes gave us valuable hints about what worked well for them and what we still needed to improve. Then, in version 13, we had the final script to turn into images. A company in Vienna called Lemonaut Creations provided us with the illustrations. Under Ettore’s direction, they not only created a colored storyboard, the camera settings, and the light effects, but they also put so much love of detail in the pictures that you could almost have made a graphic novel out of them. And with this colored storyboard, we went looking for a graphics studio that could translate the vision. We chose Virgin Lands.
To the storyboard gallery
