Haste: Broken Worlds (2025)

The trailer starts off with a small environmental shot, establishing the general graphic design and art style of the game, this is used as an introduction to the world of the game as well as how the game is going to look, this particular type of shot is generally very common as a start but the reason as to why the developers decided to make the shot smaller and focused on a point rather than one big pan out into the world is because the first camera shot is also going to be used for immediately the next shot.

(Left) A close establishing-environmental shot determining and introducing the general art style and graphics of the game, a very basic shot which is why it is only used as a main focus for 30 frames in total where afterwards other objects take over the attention of the viewer.
(Right) The same environmental shot that started the trailer, now being moved into the background as the mysterious portal appears into the foreground grabbing the attention of the viewer away from the environment.

A close up of the Main Character, Zoe, from a waist down point of view. This shot establishes the character’s style as well as putting emphasis on their legs, this is important because the whole game is about running and jumping, which are actions that legs are needed to perform. Another thing to notice is the black bars that are on the top and bottom of the screen, these are used to put further emphasis on the character and actually limit what the viewer can see so that they can focus on the character that its in front of them.

From here, the camera moves very quickly, going up to see the protagonist’s face as the bars close in tightly in sync with them adjusting their hat on top of their head. The flow of the bars closing in in sync with the MC’s actions as well as the extra bars puts an emphasis on the character on top of the already existing emphasis from the close-up shot that focuses on the MC and doesn’t leave much of background visible to the viewer.
The camera pans very quickly towards the obelisk in front of the main character as the camera follows them, zooming in very fast as the character jumps into an obelisk and even a small cinematic sequence as short as this shows the viewers through the general pace design of the game is to be very fast paced purely by mimicing the pace and speed that the camera moves and pans.

As the first gameplay segments begins, the speed of the player almost follows the same speed used in the previous scene with the player falling down into a slope, giving them more speed and them continiuning running.
The main gameplay is in a semi-fixed camera shot that is positioned behind the player character and the speed at which the character moves is also very noticible, the game makes the player actually be able to feel the speed they are going at by using not only using details in the game, but more so using the camera movements, going further behind the player as if the camera is trying to catch up the player, increasing the FOV linearly to the speed as well as camera shaking and wind details. The game also uses the emphasis on the character’s legs in the trailer by using the colour of the flames on the character’s legs as another indicator of the sheer speed.
This long shot from an increased FOV also shows the main obstacles of the game which would be big lava pillars that are shown on the right, as well as big solid objects which the character would have to navigate.

I just wanted to include this screenshot because the long shot from the player’s behind the character POV displays the game’s graphic charm and just how pretty the game can look in an enviromental point of view.

This long shot shows a lot of particles, showcasing the amount of chaos that the game can include, being an introduction into the gameplay later in the game. The high amount of particules is the shots main focus, as much as it is set in the theoretical background. This technique of bringing the background into the foreground by making the colours sharper and more particles overall really grabs the player’s attention and capitalises off of it by continuining into further scenes.

After the purple lightshow shot, the trailer does what I would call a “Music Sequence” where a there is a lot of quick and different shots in sync to the background music. The sequences lasts 10 seconds with the general purpose of it being to show the enviroment and the different types of obstacles that the game includes as well as the different levels and how they look ranging between grassy and ancient stone looking, desert setting with lots of cacti and buildings as well as ice and snow enviroment. Below are all the shots in the sequences.

After the music sequence, another cinematic plays where it shows the enviroment as well as an introduction to the main antagonistic force in the game: The Void Corruption, a force which sucks up and destroys any matter and terrain, corrupting it and making it physically painful to be around. The trailer does this by showing an initial enviroment shot and the void corruption coming in and corrupting the land.

The trailer ends with Zoe stuck in space, floating with the enviroment changing constantly around her as the changes’ pace fastens and the title screen for HASTE appears.

I think that this is a really good trailer because it shows off very different aspects of the game such as both the enviromental design and the gameplay as well as showing off very small pieces of the story to set up a greater mystery for the player to be interested and to purchase the game to actually play the story. The cinematography is limited within itself as the gameplay is locked to be behind the player character but it still uses this with different zoom from the character to show off a sense of great speed in a game where running as fast as you can is essential. The cinematography in the small cutscenes is also very important for the setup of the story and to create an interest for the viewer but it also shows the artistic style of the game. This trailer also shows off the action and pacing of the game itself with how quick the trailer moves.

ULTRAKILL (2020)

The trailer starts off with the introduction to the game, a story setup, something that provides lore and a sense behind the gameplay, as well as what becomes one of the most famous lines of the game.

“Mankind is dead
Blood is fuel
Hell is full”

The use of these short sentences with how vague and powerful they seem, they really grab the attention of the viewer before any actual gameplay is shown. This shows that even a screen of text can be very important to a trailer, provided the words are powerful enough.

As the both the gameplay and music starts, the music beginning with a very electronic and bass heavy sound building up, the player picks up the pistol and begins sliding. The game is made in first person but in this shot the artistic direction is seen to be a very retro and arcade style, with low-poly and low-pixel count textures, including flat textures on surfaces. Another thing to notice is the sparks coming from the floor as well as the wind particles created when the character dashes and slides. This is something similarly seen in the trailer from HASTE where wind particles seen by the player are used to further indicate how fast the player is truly moving.

In these images, more of the retro artistic style is shown, with the first image showing a style points system, heavily inspired by the likes of Devil May Cry which includes a same system. This system is needed in the game as it also very important to the overall score that the player recieves at the end of every mission. These shots show how much action there is in the game, as well as showing off the reward for the player of creating more and more action: a higher style score per mission.

The trailer features a lot of explosions and blood, referencing one of the intro lines of “Blood is Fuel” where a core mechanic is that the player has to be very close to a dying enemy and heal off of the blood that comes out of them as they die, and this frame shows that perfectly that even with explosions that damage the player, as enemies die, the player recieves their health back.

A lot of the trailer is mainly showing off the action that happens in the game, showing off bossfights and the different weapons and how they interact, examples being the 2 pistols one which is a railgun and the other being the one that throws out the coin as well as a shotgun and a machine nailgun.

The reason as to why the trailer is made like this is to attarct the very specific demographic of players who want very fast paced shooters which are very mechanically challenging but also rewarding in the sense of both the style points system but also the game rewarding the player by allowing the player to exploit many different mechanics in order to gain insane speeds or create weapon combos that can do thousands of damage at once to defeat any bosses.

This trailer shows off all of these rewards, that the game allows the player to do a lot more than it should be – and even the developers are aware of this and have actually made several exploits or bugs just pure game mechanics that the players have to learn and practise and get better at.

In this frame, the player is seen missing the boss as it dashes: this shows to the player that the start of the game is generally slow, as the player tries to get used to the control scheme and try to figure out initial mechanics of the game and the movement foundations, contrastic itself by showing off later game content after the player has suppsosedly figured out movements and different mechanical functions. This further layers the trailer’s key demographic to pander to an audience who wants a mechanically difficult and fast paced game.

This frame shows the game including boss fights which can appeal to some players with the next frame showing how aggressive the player wants to be with the boss in the boss fight, whether it be up close and personal to maximise damage or further away to try and survive the most.

This clip of the trailer shows off a part of the skill ceiling in the game and how the player can maximise their movements and arsenal capabilities to pull off combos with the different weapon serving different purposes. The clip showing how the player uses the shotgun explosion to kill off 2 out of 3 enemies really quickly and finish off the last one with a simple pistol shot after dashing to dodge any of its attacks.

Here the trailer showcases the enemy density within in the game and how the player has to handle the situation by utilising the movement to its best capabilities to dodge and kill all of the enemies in the hallway

In this clip the trailer shows how the player can use a ground slam to push enemies up into the air, the trailer adding an increased ground shake to further emphasise the power of the ground slam as well as try to grab the viewer’s attention further afterwhich showing off that the player can parry their own shotgun projectiles to create a bigger explosion that kills all the enemies that were slammed upwards.

The trailer ends with the title card for the game, panning to a straight position on the horizontal and then the camera zooming into the title of the game.

I think that overall, this trailer is very good in grabbing the attention of the viewer and showcasing the different gameplay features, the trailer’s music helps this as well by adding a lot of bass-heavy tracks such as “The Cyber Grind” that put the viewer in a state of adrenaline while watching the fast-paced action gameplay that the game and the trailer provide. I will be taking inspiration from this trailer, potentially making the different cards that the trailer uses to describe different aspects of the game as well as using a more bass-heavy background sound when it comes to action-scenes within the trailer.

To create my own trailer for a game, I chose to make a trailer for Warframe as it is personally one of if not my favourite game of all time (2k+ hours played) and it is a game very dear to me. I know that the game contains tools in-game that will make it easier to create a trailer such as the custom photo mode and the Captura mode, specialised for creating cinematic shots in game.

I started off my planning by creating a basic storyboard that covers basic views into most aspects of the game while keeping it as spoiler free for the main story as possible because I believe that the story is one of the best stories I have seen in a very long time and I believe that the story should be played with as least spoilers as possible.

Research

For my research, I had looked into different videos that showed different styles of game trailers, this video stuck out the most to me as it was the best formatted and very concise with its information:

I decided to mainly use the “Tell, Show, Repeat” as well as a section with the “Music video montage” style. You can also see how both of these styles were used in the previously mentioned trailers that I analysed

Warframe Trailer Storyboard

(intro cutscene clip)
“for generations you’ve slept”
Space nebula ->
black screen -> DE logo fade in -> fade out -> Warframe Logo fade in -> fade out -> black screen

“no purpose, no call, to wake you”
“forgotten like a dream”
Silence
the three warframe statues shown

GAMEPLAY STARTS – Fade in Grineer Onslaught comes in at the double bell (0:04)
Excalibur – slash dash – grineer earth
Volt – Shield and then shock – corpus ship captura
Mag – crush – captura – earth grineer

BLACK SCREEN – Cut Music -> GRINEER SCREAM DEATH STOCK SOUND -> Gradual Cross Fade, See It In The Flesh

earth – basic customisation – basic weapons – extermination mission
venus ship – basic customisation – basic weapons – extermination mission
venus land – basic customisation – basic weapons – extermination mission
“ORIGIN SYSTEM”
origin system show
“DIFFERENT MISSION TYPES”
mars – excavation – more fashion but still basic
ceres – defence – more fashion but still basic
some random 4-point defence

ARSENAL – See It In The Flesh 0:38 starts
“Choose your playstyle”
Show off warframes list
“Choose your weapon”
show off weapons list – primary, secondary, melee
“Choose a friend”
show off companions

FASHIONFRAME
“And customise to your hearts content”
show off fashion frames – transitions (turn arounds?), quick and snappy
show off weapon colour changes too

MULTIPLAYER-Goes back to start of See It In The Flesh start again
“Play by yourself”
show the player by themselves dancing in vallis
“Grab your friends”
exact same place, full squad dancing in vallis

show 4 players, advancing to the corpus gas station in vallis (slowmo?)

OPEN WORLDS
“visit expansive worlds”
show a big overhead view of Plains of Eidolon
show a big overhead view of Orb Vallis
show a big overhead view of Cambien Drift

show off some of the hubs
-fortuna cutscene start and general lookover
-show off cetus and the people also lookover

STORY – See It In The Flesh 1:45 – cut through the frames in guitar / kick sync
“experience the incredible story”
start scrolling through the main quests screen, show off a small frames of cutscenes.
-> cut to black between shots
The War Within – Hallway to Kuva (3 or 4 different shots, all cutting between each other) = 8 kicks (4 TWW, 4 black screens)
The Sacrifice – Umbra staring back = however many frames he looks back on -> 1 kick/black
The War Within – Camera away from Everest (remake in captura with wf?) = x (x = 1 kick per frame of camera zooming out)
1999 – Pan upwards of Hollvania into nuke shot from cutscene = a couple kicks, no cuts, just scene flow, EXPLOSION FLOWS INTO ↓

BACK TO INTRO CUTSCENE – beginning to This Is What You Are
back to three warframes from intro cutscene
“Wake up, tenno. Wake up”

BLACK SCREEN – choir of This Is What You Are
“Warframe”
“all rights reserved to Digital Extremes Ltd., the creators of Warframe, this was just a college project”

Production

For my Production, I have chosen to use DaVinci Resolve as my editing software as it is editing software that I have previous experience and feel the most comfortable using. DaVinci is also often used as industry standard editing software in some companies and it is a free program.

All of my game capture has been filmed in OBS Studio as it is a free program that professionals also use for game capture, it is easily customisable and very comfortable to use.
I will also be using the in-game provided photography and video making mode Captura that allows me to create custom scenes in the game, the scenes will still be recorded in OBS.

For my intro of the trailer, I decided to take a small piece from the game’s intro cinematic to introduce the trailer slowly, this helps build up a sense of tension and mystery when it comes to watching the trailer. I have included background narrative lines said in the cinematic, spliced in a way for them flow to sound like they were all said after another.

The wipe effects at the top are transitions that show the logo of the company, Digital Extremes and Warframe’s logo. The black screen is used to create the feeling of a better transition.

music transition to getting out of the player’s aircraft, cutting straight into action

Here, I used one of the templates for animated texts that DaVinci provides, using it to show off the world map that the player has access to.

audio – dialogue into dialogue into dialogue sequence to make it flow, into creeping heavy music that then takes priority

cross-fade between 2 heavy songs, ending the gameplay action and showing off other gameplay aspects.

I used more animated texts to show off both the beautiful scenery and the name of the open worlds that Warframe has in its game.

I also wanted to show off tiny parts about the story to try to hold the viewer’s attention, I took a couple shots from the starting cutscene of 2 quests as well as made my own using the Captura tool with a scene that is used at some point in the story. To show off the different parts of the story I took videos and cut them up so that whenever the background music did a drum kick, it would snap forward to progress the cutscene as they were slow. I did this to hold the viewer’s attention and to show off the different cutscenes in a much faster pace to match fast energy of the whole trailer. I ended it off with a bomb going off in one of the trailers which as the explosion faded out, a black screen faded in which would mark the end of the trailer, you can see here as well that I matched the music to be fading out as the screen fades out too.

For my last component in the trailer, I had to include information to the viewer that the game isn’t mine and who it belongs to as well as adding the name of the game at the top and the logo of the company who owns it on the bottom right corner mostly for legal and copyright purposes.

The Full Video:

Feedback

I sent out a form to my class mates for them to give open feedback on my trailer.

From the answers to the first question, the issue of audio balancing was already found, this means that if I were to do this again I would have to look more carefully at my audio levels as well as music and voice audio balancing to make the overall sound sound better, cleaner and have a smoother transition between the different tracks.

From the second question, the feedback here is overall really positive so I’m very happy how it turned out, a piece of note being not trying to overwhelm the viewer as much as some comments mentioned there being too much information.

From the answers to my third question about the later part of the trailer the feedback also seems very positive and I am personally very happy with how they turned out.

The feedback recieved in my fourth question was also very positive and gives me insight that if I were to do something like this again that this is something that people would want to see: big cinematic shots as well as engaging footage and editing.

These 2 questions and their answers are interesting because they prove that the trailer worked exactly as it was intended to. The trailer is specially made for the player to not be able to grasp the full concept and basis of the game, enticing them to play and experience the game and what it has to offer for themselves. As you can see from the answers to both questions in the image, the trailer also fulfills its role in giving the player a small grasp on the basis (most people voting somewhat to understanding the point) and interesting the viewer in playing the game and trying it out.

The feedback on critism for the trailer tells that I would need to work on the pacing of the video and more audio balancing. Another thing to mention is the text on screen being too quick for some viewers to see and read so I would need to look for including more time to read the text on screen along with the pacing of the edit.

People who have taken the survey gave me an average of 8/10 on my trailer which I am personally happy with; I believe that the trailer succeeded in what it was designed for as well as the form succeeded in getting informative feedback so that I know what to do in future units similar to this one.

Another piece of feedback that I recieved was that during the text scenes the background was wrongly scaled which I completely missed.

Conclusion + Reflection

Filming and editing this was generally very fun, I really enjoyed grabbing the different pieces of footage from different aspects of the game and this gave me a reason to play with all of my friends before and after grabbing the multiplayer section footage. Warframe is generally my favourite game and this unit gave me a reason to play again, I also finally got to use the Captura tool built into warframe which was very satisfying once I understood how it worked. The editing part of the whole production process was a lot more challenging than I would have thought, the perfect music syncing and lining up the audio tracks to flow into eachother as well as the cutting of differnet footage to make a whole trailer turned out to be very difficult and took me several hours to make over the course of a couple afternoons and nights.

If I were to do this again, I would definately try to come up with a storyboard as soon as possible because it greatly helped me when it came to figuring out what footage I needed and how to sturcture the footage captured in editing.
I would also focus more on balancing out my audio and focusing on not wrongly scaling scene sources. I would also try to aim to not overwhelm the viewer by not packing a lot of information into one section.