Technical Post - Creating the Heart of the Woods Trailer (Patreon)

Meowdy ny’all it’s Adi! I’m here to talk about the HOTW trailer that went up a little while ago - specifically how it was made!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN5SLBPYGfo

(Watch it if you haven’t!!!)

So I don’t actually remember how I came about making the TWA:P trailer (that was me also) but thankfully the team liked it enough to bring me on board again for the HOTW trailer!

My approach to this trailer was a little different to TWA:P - I didn’t really know what I was doing for that one and tried to make video segments that captured the mood of every story in that game. This time I wanted to introduce HOTW properly and convey the game to the watcher, so they know what they’re getting and get a little hook to be more interested in the game too. We didn’t have trailer music at this point in time, so I did a rough structure as shown below:

I wanted to introduce the premise, the characters, the romances and the more dramatic side to the story (and the ending tease!).

We were actually super excited about the idea of an email from Morgan but that kind of slipped under the radar hah.

Because we already had music for the TWA:P trailer, I used this to ask for some suitable music because I was more familiar with that process! Josh also wrote up more information about the style of music in particular, because I wasn’t quite as familiar with the HOTW sound. After some back and forth with Sarah we had a relatively finished version of the trailer song.

When I receive the music, my approach is to listen very carefully and take notes where each part ends so I can structure the trailer to fit the music, and then work on each part separately bit by bit until it’s done! (Though I always go back to finetune parts that I already completed broad strokes on.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw6rGsXBYVc

Here’s my first pass at the intro section! I throw stuff in to make sure my idea works, and while I was pretty unhappy with that bit in general, it’s a good starting point. Some issues in that clip are:

• The big snowy town background is the old one, from the demo! The new asset wasn’t done when I had made that.
• The text introduced the setting nice and pretty, but wasn’t very great in introducing the plot

For points like the 2nd one, I asked our lovely writers for the text. I tried to get as much text from in-game as possible!

https://youtu.be/CN5SLBPYGfo?t=25

I’ve seen a lot of character introduction segments in visual novel characters, and I’ve always liked the ones that tell you a lot about the character’s motivations. (I’m also big on dense trailers…) The clips we chose to show off in the trailers were very carefully chosen to highlight something important about each character, and their personal quotes were carefully picked to show off their main source of conflict in the game. I feel like this is an effective way to get people invested in a character!

(Also - shoutout to minute for the video clips and to Rachel for helping write the intro line and choose the quotes for this bit!)

I decided to end it on Tara because her quote led on really well to the spirit segment! There was actually a bit of text in between to try and bridge the spirit coming in, but timing wise it was on screen for too little time so I cut it out.

I’ve seen a couple complaints here and there about trailers that don’t show off gameplay, so through the character intro videos and 1:09 to the end I used in-game footage with the UI to show what the HOTW experience was like. The choice segment nearly didn’t make it in - the CG that’s in that section wasn’t a part of the ‘approved for public CG list’ but like - look at it. Our programmer and visual director minute did such a good job, how could I not?

And of course - the ending illustration. We actually have a clear name for it that I had to crop out from the image earlier - if you’ve played the game, you might have an idea of what it was called internally! It’s Josh’s favourite CG, and the scene it’s in is beautiful. There was a lot to HOTW that wasn’t revealed through the demo but we really wanted to share it! I hope it was an exciting tease for you pre-release and I hope you love it as much as we do!

That’s my little write-up on developing the trailer - I hope it was informative and maybe having read it, you’ll spot new things in the trailer! Thanks so much for reading!

• adirosa