Video game trailers are becoming more advanced these days as technology moves and developers find new ways of making the games more engaging. A good example of this is development is God of War 3 on the Playstation 3. The same can be said of xBox 360 games. This is good news if you want to make your own game trailer or indeed any kind of video presentation for the web. You can use these game trailers to inspire ideas for your own trailers as I have.
Here is the process I use to make my own video game trailers.
Step 1:
The first thing that I always do when making a video game trailer is to source good graphics and if it's for a game then its pretty easy. There is always an abundance of high quality desktop wallpapers on the internet. Just make sure that the wallpaper is of high quality to minimise degradation of quality when changing the file format or editing size etc. Most should be ok to use as long as you aren't using them illicitly. If anything you can always make your own if you have the time although I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to do 1 or 2 designs and no more.
Step 2:
Next you may want to source some transparent images. These are images with a see through colourless background which means you can add the image to any other image or background colour without the two clashing. So say you have an image of Kratos with a white background and you want to put him on a black background without the white showing. You will need an image of him with a transparent background and there are two ways to achieve this – one easy one not so easy.
1. The easy way:Go to Google images and type “kratos png” (without the quotes). You will eventually find the right images because most PNGs are typically transparent images.
2. The harder way: Get an image with clean well defined edges that don't blur into white or any other colour then use masking software like Fluidmask. It will extract the image from the background and save it as a png. You can also do this manually yourself in photoshop if you have the patience and time. Use your transparent image in you slideshow software or if you really want to go to town use it to do layering in software such as Adobe Photoshop.
Step 3:
Next I source the right music because the length and mood of the music dictates the structure of the slideshow. You can get royalty free music on the net or if you are lucky enough to have cds like the Uberschall or Bigfishaudio series. In some cases you are going to need the recommended software to extract the sounds if they aren't in WAV format. I use cinema scores for many of my game trailers. It's best to use software that can handle slideshows and music and has good transitions eg Power Director, Magix or Corel Videostudio. I do all sorts of cuts, fades, transitions and keying slide transitions to the music using this software. My Final Fantasy XIII is a good example of this. But you can also use Winows movie maker and other free softwares for basic presentations.
Tips:
If you are like me and don't like narrating then use text to voice software. Liquendo is the best I have found. I have used it for a car advert but any good quality text to voice software should suffice.
Another technique I have found that works well is mixing static slides with video. This is a bit tricky to do because you need to extract precise sections of video files that fit in into your slideshow. If you want to take things even further you can take a still image of that video and present it as a still slide then have it animate from a still.
Some of the above techniques although more involved than a standard video, should result in a nice effective video trailer that you can be proud of and that others can enjoy.
Rick Banks