Just coming out of Anymotion '24 I was engrossed with the idea of personal projects, lots of talks about how that's a way to express oneself and get some social media traction as well
But doing a personal project just for the sake of it never ticked me fancy, its weird. For me stuff has to have purpose, I need that job request, an KO or something to spring me into motion.
Now, my hiperfocus are videogames and one of my fav games was going to get an expansion DLC after almost 5 years since its launch that would double the content of it.
That is exciting by itself, but the game studio (Wube) are a small team with massive technical expertise, the game is beyond excellent, (has Overwhelmingly positive on steam, which is utterly rare) but as fantastic developers go, they lack a lot in communication skills, they have zero social posts on their IG and did just a couple of lukewarm trailers so far, those trailers are done in-house and show the complete product but hardly get  new people exited.
So I decided to make them a more commercial ad for them.
This was really exiting, I had to do everything from scratch, usually I get a script, arts, etc... now I have to come up with the briefing on.
I want to convey overall idea of the game and what you do and what's coming with the dlc.
Started laying down some ideas for the script. Then, make it short and simple enough to fit in 30 seconds
I had to get some footage, got their prev trailers and also they do a blog post every Friday since they launched the game, so I had roughly 430 pages to get content from.
Unfortunately they were mostly squared low-res footage so I had to workaround this.
Some of these footage I had to use bc the DLC wouldn't come out in time for me to grab the screens, so I had to film my own factorio gameplay for extra hi-res footage.
Also there are different factories in the splash screen, but the game and developer's logo are on the way, so I did some modding on the game files and managed to clear all the items I didn't want on screen, worked pretty well.
For the tittles, since there's a mod that add text plates to the game, I realized I could just put the supers on some screens, play a bit and while recording.
That is somewhat cool but I didn't want this trailer to be just edits, I wanted to animate something.
So I imported the images for the texts and started keyframing.
After some iterations the trailer was reasonably good, just needed some bells and whistles. it was Friday and the game wouldn't launch till Monday, so I got the weekend to set the trailer as I wanted.
Then the official trailer comes up Friday noon.

PANIC!

In hindsight It was meant to be, I just was planning to release mine first, oh well, at least they had some nicer high res footage that I took to overwrite the lame ones I had.
Found some epic free music on YT library.
I don't know if its fate or the way I time my animations but I barely have to re-time stuff when I put music on it, it just fits so well.
Send it to reddit, I spend more time there anyway.
People seemed to liked it, got some comments :)
"you spelled fight wrong".... 
oh man!
what a shame, but on the other hand half of the comments were about the misspelled "fight" I wonder if this could be a future strategy to get engagement haha.
The other half were compliments on the trailer, and how some people liked it better than the official, that was amazing.
That got me exited to fix my mistakes and add all the stuff that I didn't had time to do Friday.
Bullet holes, sparks and even got clanks and buzzes form the game audio to add to the text movement, it is now ready for a 'director's cut' release.
On Monday day I had half of the likes/comments of the official trailer, not to shabby at all.
Was it worth it? Absolutely
Will I ever get clients on the gaming industry because of it? 
Time will tell. 
But now I have crossed 2 items form my bucket list:
Did a personal project and a game trailer that I'm actually proud of.
Oh, I forgot to make a social media version! Here we go again...

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