An attempt at a broadcast-ready videogame trailer, and other silly things

So I've been thinking over what Steve Hickner said on timing so I took a shot at creating a broadcast-ready marketing trailer for Assassin's Creed: Revelations!

The piece was created in Adobe Premiere Pro from 20+ minutes of gameplay footage and CC copyrighted music from KillerTracks.com, which my school subscribes to.

My goal was to convey a short, contained story that included a balanced combination of humor and badassary. I feel that I did this rather well.

The trickiest part was editing out all of the game's redraw lines. See unlike film, which has a fixed frame rate, video games can have an unlimited frame rate. So, the game is animating faster than the monitor can draw it! This creates a bunch of lines across the screen. Just fine for games, since you're busy focusing on the gameplay, but terrible for film marketing. Fortunately, there is a way around this:

Duplicate the film clip with the scan line onto an empty layer in Premiere, edit it down to the frame either before or after the scan line error, then move that frame on top of the scan line frame and you've got one fixed! There are quite a few scan line errors in my video, the trick is to edit out the major ones that will take the viewer out of the action.

To a degree your audience is used to this sort of thing.

To a degree.

This was for a class project to see how well we could market a game and I am happy to report that it was well received!

Also, I completed a personal piece that I've been chipping away at in my limited spare time, a cosmic vixen deity!

I tried several new techniques for digital painting that I have been learning over the past few months and I am thrilled with how they came out!

I officially have a deep obsession with rim lighting.

Oh, funny story, in the background, there are a bunch of lines. These lines were the result of a web browser error that occurred while I was researching a paper on Napoleon. Here is the picture that burnt out:

And now, the big one...

I showed off my modular kit to my class in UDK. Oh, I should mention, we are collaborating on this level so we will be using each others assets. I have been approaching this assignment with the mindset that I am making these assets not just for the grade, but for my classmates as they will be the one's potentially using them. I say 'potentially' 'cause they don't necessarily have to use mine, they can choose to use whoever's they want.

As far as I can tell, my models are sound, the textures are what need improvement. My teacher gave me a lot of pointers for them. He says that, on their own, my pieces are beautiful but they are not unified/; They don't look like they're part of the same set.

So, I have been doing lots of cleanup work on the diffuse maps, editing the normal and spec maps when necessary. I am almost complete, just need to add a lot of mildew to all the wood. Almost there guys! For now, I leave you with this:

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's back to the labs I go!

I'll se y'all next time! ;D