For many gamers, the build of anticipation for a big game is just as exciting as actually playing the game. But do you ever wonder who decided what images you'd see on Gametrailers, what footage would make it into the trailer itself, and how a story can evoke so much emotion a 30 second spot? We did.
So we went to LA to visit the offices of the FAILSAFE Creative Group. FAILSAFE is one of the biggest video production agencies to mainly serve the interactive entertainment market: chances are you seen one of their trailers before, whether produced for Konami, Activision or Capcom. Join us as we sit down with Simon Miller, head of FAILSAFE, to find out what goes into producing a high-profile game trailer.
One 30 second trailer represents intense work behind the scenes - and a single trailer, no matter how finessed, won't do the job alone. It's about viral marketing, teasing information, giving gamers just enough to whet their appetite. When The Kartel met with FAILSAFE Creative Group, they treated us to a look at an upcoming promo. In their raw footage, an actor stands in front of a green screen and mimes attacking unseen creatures, the increasingly-recognizable solitude of the color-key performer. Our guy is in the action, fighting off a new horror title’s legions of in-game undead. It’s a neat little metaphor for what developers are always aiming to do: put the player in the center of the game. When the game hits shelves, players will be in the action. But for now, this little piece of shorthand is all the promise audiences have to go on. And it’s the sort of image FAILSAFE are always seeking to provide.
“I come from a more traditional advertising background. For many years I was an agency producer, putting commercial shoots together.” This is Simon Miller, FAILSAFE’s Managing Director and Head of Production. In the late 90s, he became an independent producer, working one-on-one with clients to put together their ad. Miller’s clients were mainly in the interactive-entertainment field: as a gamer, he had no problem speaking their language. The next logical step was to set up FAILSAFE.
FAILSAFE cut together spots from gameplay footage, cinematics, renders: as much as they can get, or as little as a developer can give. The team are regularly tasked with creating a whizbang piece from the sparsest materials. Sometimes the developers are just too busy to wrangle together all the footage that is needed. Traditional trailers were provided for games like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Mortal Kombat vs DC and Unreal Tournament 3; but FAILSAFE also furnishes behind-the-scenes shorts - developer profiles, development diaries. The Failsafe campaigns for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Astro Boy, and the newest Ben 10 game incorporate not just leaks of gameplay footage, but interviews with the game’s staff themselves. It’s easy to forget that someone has to be the gatekeeper and coordinator of that information: at some stage, someone made the decision what information you’d be fed and how it would be packaged.
A typical job for FAILSAFE will begin with a session of dense adspeak: “We respond to a creative brief from the publisher, where they give us their USPs: Unique Sales Propositions. We respond as exactly as we can.” The prerelease images you see on Gametrailers, the fuzzy handicams of Comic-con teasers, the floods of duped Youtube trailers, all are the eventual result of this intense positioning.
But there’s a lot of hard work to be done between branding chat and images in the public eye. On the tight turnarounds that are the FAILSAFE team's signature style, everyone has to hit the ground running. “Our editors, graphic designers and scriptwriters work in conjunction with each other. We have five days to turn everything around. We work out the script: is this going to be a voiceover driven thing? Are we going to work with a more subtle style? Maybe just titles will tell the story.”
The firm’s designers and editors go to work on the visuals provided, which may be extensive gameplay and CG, or may be... somewhat less. For Stranglehold, action-movie director John Woo’s initial foray into gaming, all FAILSAFE had for initial teasers was a few renders of the game’s main character, the digitized Chow Yun-Fat. The problem was solved by teasing Chow’s iconic image in reflections, gleaming on the surfaces of a pair of digital .45s created inhouse. Miller explains: “That was a creative way of getting around the fact that we didn’t have a lot of footage to work with, but we wanted to get a sense of the coolness factor. It almost becomes a directing process, where we’re trying to find key moments and try to build excitement and branded awareness from them. One of our creative directors, Doobie White, being an editor as well, knows key moments he wants to see, what’ll cut together well.”
Sometimes there isn't material. For Activision’s wild-west shooter, Gun, the first trailer was commissioned before the game was even playable. The entire trailer was created inhouse, a frenetic barrage of stock images and photography, much of it shot onsite: a hand in cuffs, a crucifix, a darting eye. "We're all in it, basically. You'll see an eye, a hand. Doing stuff like that is really fun," says White, the spot's director and editor.
The tech used to produce Failsafe’s work is fairly industry standard: Avid, Final Cut Pro, ProTools, After Effects, Maya, Cinema 4D. This is the same gear used to cut movies such as Brick and Zodiac. It’s also probably the same gear your Bittorrent-happy 15-year-old cousin uses to create Youtube montages of his favorite XBL teabag moments. Plenty of gamers with a sideline in edit-geekery saw spots like FAILSAFE's work for Dark Void, or McCann Worldgroup’s famous Gears of War ad, and thought, “I’ve got the tech at home to do that.”
Miller is aware of this shift: “Final Cut has really changed the market. It’s brought prices down, got everybody and their brother in their basement doing it.” (Which is exactly what industry sage Uwe Boll warned us would happen!) Search for any popular title and you’ll find dozens of Youtube fan-trailers, kids at home doing the work FAILSAFE and their ilk are paid for. For a couple of grand, anyone can have the beginnings of a professional trailer production suite.
But Miller is blasé about the technological demands of trailer creation: “it’s not about the software, it’s about the person and their ability.” White also worked in the suites of Gamer and Crank 2, two massive accomplishments of post-production. The ADD-addled Neveldine/Taylor look owes a huge debt to the same talent overseeing edits at FAILSAFE. Sales and marketing Manager Dmitrii Gabrielou previously helped spread the word for Blizzard's somewhat-popular World of Warcraft through his own website, GameZombie.tv; another Creative Director, Chris Williamson, brings experience including seven Emmy wins to the FAILSAFE crew.
So sure, one day spots may show up on Youtube that fluke the same workmanship of a professional game trailer. But the Web’s up and coming videomakers will be cranking out an awful lot of action montages set to Linkin Park and Requiem for a Tower before they hit the same sort of paydirt that the pros can turn out on a five-day turnaround. And FAILSAFE’s upcoming work includes plenty more than just the traditional sit-down-and-watch fare. The next wave of game trailers will include interactivity, Web-wide marketing, a far deeper level of integration. “There’s definitely a big audience out there, which is great for us,” enthuses Miller. “We’re big proponents of that. The gamer audience have a proclivity for hunting stuff down on the internet. People want information.”
From bare-bones stock-footage barrages to CG-heavy bombast, the creative team at FAILSAFE are responsible for some of gaming's most memorable trailer moments. As the business expands into new areas, their bag of tricks for exciting and informing audiences is only going to get deeper. And remember: as much as you enjoy watching a top-notch videogame trailer for the first time, the only guys who had even more fun are the ones who made it in the first place...
