Hi everyone, we are very happy to announce that our latest DLC, Fatal Falls, has just released on PlayStation, with two new levels and a boss adding new ignominious ways to die halfway through!
However, today I wanted to take a look at how we put our animated trailers together, because it seems a lot of you are just as excited about the cartoon trailers as you are about the new game content.
So how do you go about making a cartoon? Unless you’re fantastic at 2D animation (which most of our artists actually are) and have a lot of spare time (which none of our artists do), you need to find a production company that matches the cartoon style. that you want to do. For us, we naturally thought of the French company Bobbyprod. The people who run the studio often work with some of the best animators in France and have worked on a bunch of cartoons that we love.
Once you know what style you want and have decided who will be able to pull it off, you need to know what your trailer is supposed to do. A game trailer must:
- Showcase the DLC i.e. showing new levels, bosses, enemies, and weapons, this is a gameplay trailer after all.
- Be eye-catching and interesting to watch. We usually go for something funny, because it also matches our main character’s style.
- Build your game universe, develop characters, and bring personality and life to a world that usually only exists as an unfairly difficult game.
If you’ve got all of that figured out, it’s time to write your storyboard. This is probably the funniest part of the process, because this is where you can come up with a bunch of crazy ideas and see if you can put them together into something that will do all of the above for you, while still being fun. to watch. . We like to let the production company come up with a few ideas first (that’s what they’re good at, so just let go and let the masters work).
Once we have a first draft of the storyboard, we will go through and make sure that all the ideas offered correspond to the above objectives, if not, we will work with the production company (phone calls, emails, Slack feeds etc.) to refine the storyboard until we have something that we think is worth animating.
Now we can really bring things to life! Bobby takes the storyboard and works on their animatics, the kind of “concept art” for a cartoon that will define the visual and animated style of the trailer.
We then add the coloring to make sure it meets the artistic direction that we have set either for the series or for the game universe as a whole.
Finally, we really take a look at the pacing of the whole animatic and make sure the pacing of the game’s trailer is just right, removing anything that we think isn’t up to the mark. This incomplete version will be shared with the composer so that he can start to get a feel for the mood of the trailer and what kind of music might be suitable.
From there, the navigation is generally smooth with back and forth between the musician and the animation team to make sure everything lines up and the overall timing of the trailer doesn’t change to new.
Finishing touches add end slates (those boring bits with the names of everyone who worked on the game) and exporting the trailer in 9,700,000 different versions for all stores and various places it needs to be shared (kill me).
This whole process usually takes about three months… Three months for a cartoon minute, think about it next time you watch episode 984 of your favorite animated series.
Thanks for logging in, I hope you enjoyed the trailer and enjoyed the Dead Cells Fatal Falls DLC as much as we worked on it. Available today on PlayStation.
