Today we saw the beginning of the end of one of our biggest projects for sometime and one that’s been hugely successful. Following our debrief today here’s the first part of our story;
EA briefed Maverick on Crysis 2 in September 09 and it was clear from the very start that their vision was to have a trailer that was truly outstanding and different. There was also a commitment to achieve this in a way and to a level seldom (if ever) seen before in games advertising.
We’d had a sneak preview of Richard Morgan’s back story for Crysis 2, which gave us an insight into the deep and immersive experience that the game sets out to achieve. There was also something else – a dark and emotive undercurrent to the story which got us intrigued and very excited but, at such an early stage in the process, we thought it better only to allude to these elements in the trailer, in order to convey something of the overall mood, tone and promise of the game without being overtly explicit in any details.
When we read Seamus’ first trailer concepts; they were very bleak, dark and disturbing, and we liked it; but would others? When we planned our presentation to EA and Crytekwe knew it would be a challenge to convey the emotion of the ideas in storyboards alone. Seamus and our Creative Manager, Lee Godfrey, had been extensively searching for the music and had come across a song called “Breathe In, Breathe Out” by a young singer-songwriter called Polly Scattergood. The track really sent a shiver down the collective Maverick spines and EA loved it – it was spooky and eerie and the vocal helped us all to understand the mood we were aiming for.
Of the three plot concepts that we originated, the one chosen was entitled “The Wall” – a short story treatment that establishes the Nanosuit in the setting of a future New York destroyed by Aliens. Our overall objective was to relay the essence of the game story, the character, and the situation but perhaps the key creative decision – and a very brave one from EA's point of view - was to do something different with the Hero. Richard Morgan had suggested a much more involved Hero than you would normally encounter in a game - his Hero had a very interesting inception and denouement in the various story-drafts we saw, and we could tell that it was something that would make the game stand out from the crowd. So Seamus made the decision to portray the Hero as a much more ambivalent presence – a Hero whose motivation cannot be immediately discerned; a Hero whose existence cannot be summarised by the next checkpoint objective alone; a Hero who knows he cannot save everyone.
We’re used to making trailers that rip your eyes out with high-energy montages of kills, weapons, enemies etc. - the stuff hard core FPS fan eat, live and breathe - but to make the trailer subtle, intriguing, enticing and genuinely teasing, and that attempts to create an emotional response in this same audience is a tougher creative challenge, yet one where the value, rewards and results are far greater.
More in PART TWO...
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