Dead Island’s promotional trailer, created by Glasgow-based studio Axis Animation, made a splash back in February. Partly because the trailer displayed unusually high craftsmanship, partly because its story of a child’s death sparked an industry-wide debate on tasteful advertising, and partly because the promotion failed to include actual footage of the game. But did the sexy tease promote a comparable experience?
There are many immediately noticeable discrepancies between the videogame, which was released in September, and promotional trailer. In the game, the primary action doesn’t occur in slow-motion or in reverse. Nor is the story that of a doomed little girl. Dead Island’s plot hinges on four wise-cracking protagonists – the upwardly mobile receptionist, the fading rap star, the retired NFL player and the child-molester-neutering ex-cop – who unite to exterminate the undead population of a tropical resort hotel.
However different in plot, form and aesthetic, both imagine a picturesque vacation spoiled by a gaggle of reanimated corpses. And that, in the opinion of its creators, was the intention.
“[We] set out to create a trailer that would capture what it would be like to survive a zombie infestation,” says Richard Scott, executive producer at Axis Animation. “To me, this is clearly what the Dead Island game is about. Survival.”
This sort of trailer is becoming the norm: straightforward, beautiful and void of anything to tell you that what’s being trumpeted is a videogame. Dead Island has perhaps the most recognisable example, but Axis, along with the California-based Blur Studios, has made a cottage industry out of similar work.
“I think that any trailer, whether for a movie, TV show or game, is designed to do two things,” Scott says. “It’s designed to feed the existing fans’ desire to know more and see great content. It’s also designed to cross the product over into places where it can create new fans and grow its own audience.”
Scott doesn’t mention parity, perhaps because one-for-one correlations between an ad and its subject are no longer important for success.
The Dead Island trailer was successful, both on Scott’s terms and the traditional understanding of what constitutes a good advertisement. Practically every big gaming Web site hosted the footage, which was expected. What was unexpected was how the 24-hour news cycle, allergic to most game news, chomped into the imagery, inadvertently getting the footage in front of millions of viewers. And in June the short won gold at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Richard Scott, executive producer at Axis Animation
Scott believes trailers have evolved, becoming more sophisticated in order to compete not just with other products but also other methods of advertising.
“With games being a cornerstone of the entertainment industry they need to compete on the same marketing levels as movies, television and music,” he says. “This, however, isn’t specific to CGI trailers, this is across the board. Sophistication and production values in marketing have increased in line with the increases in production values in the games themselves.”
Today, publishers sniff out new methods with which to introduce their wares to additional customers. Take, for example, Activision’s broadening of the Call Of Duty brand through creative, expensive and experimental marketing: the publisher runs ads in the NBA Playoffs; maintains Call Of Duty Elite, a singular social networking platform; publishes One Of Swords, an internally operated games blog; and created Call Of Duty XP, an elaborate conference for fans recently held in Los Angeles and featuring a performance by Kanye West.
Publishers want to meet people everywhere, not just in trade mags. And the CG trailer, though not as glitzy as a rap concert, is proving effective for those publishers on a more modest budget. The trailer is familiar to anyone who’s been to the movies, digestible and easily distributable.
Today, the Dead Island trailer has over eight million views on YouTube. It’s so popular that it’s preceded by an advertisement. Scott confesses that Axis doesn’t possess a secret to sending YouTube hits into the millions. Engage and entertain: those words make the firm sound less like it’s in marketing and more like the creative developers it’s contracted to promote.
If consumers retract from marketing and flock to novel advertainment, studios like Axis will prosper. And so the divide grows between product and promo, and dwindles between artist and ad man.
You might also be interested to read about our recent visit to Spov, the CGI specialist behind Modern Warfare's cutscenes, which is in issue 236 of Edge, out now.
Comments
4I don't mind ads that feature something that is obviously not a representation of the game (ie the Dead island trailer). What I would like to see an end to are videos that are trying to look like it's in-game action and it's not or screenshots that have been touched up or feature something you simply can't see in the games. For instance Halo games were notorious for posed 3rd person screenshots which do look much better but it doesn't represent the game at all.
There's nothing wrong with a well made trailer that is designed to set the tone for a game more than just a bunch of strung-together shots of gameplay. Those types of trailers are alright too. I think a lot of gamers are just super anal-retentive.
Videos of Dead Island's gameplay was good looking and visceral enough that it is not like they were hiding anything.
Trailers and Cut Scenes are why I stop playing games. If you want to make a movie, please go make a movie. When I press start, the next thing I'd better be doing is playing a game. If you can't sell me the tone, mood, feel, excitement, etc of your world & story WITH the gameplay, you don't need a cut-scene, you need to go back to the whiteboard.
I find I am much less tolerant of cut scenes these days, I watched all of the MGS 1 and 2 cut scenes, but none of them in later games. Some of it comes from the fact that I have less time than I'd like to play games these days, so wasting my time watching an unnecessary or overly long cut scene can be infuriating. But also because other games have shown it can be done much better.
However, I still think operating without cut scenes at all, especially for narratively driven games, must be extremely difficult to do effectively. Even the much vaunted Valve games, which manage to get so much across without a cut scene, still have to resort to occasional moments of locking you in a room for a contrived reason, with nothing to do except listen, while an NPC goes through some plot exposition. Perhaps we will always be stuck with some form of cut scene, but provided they are concise and kept to a minimum by not using them as the main plot and tonal device, then that would help matters a great deal.