Planning and creating a video game trailer
Outcome:
Higher bitrate embeded:
Lower bitrate youtube:
Initial Trailer Research
Ubisoft (2025). The Crew Motorfest: Season 7 Launch Trailer. Youtube. Available at: https://youtu.be/qwI2qX8eVQA [Accessed 8 Oct. 2025].
I chose this Trailer as it has a good mix of close up camera angles of individual cars and also shots of the chaotic racing environment which I would like to imitate in my trailer. The trailer also includes some of the audio techniques of focusing on the engine and cars sounds then zooming out to the music of the trailer. The trailer also shows some shots of the environment and landscapes around the tracks which helps break up the fast paced racing and allows people to enjoy the graphics of the game, which I think is crucial to a good trailer.
First person, fast paced racing shot – creates a sense of suspense
Small break from the action looking away from the cars at the environment and billboard
Less intense, solo car drifting down a empty road.
Close up of cars
Note worthy timestamps :
0:02 engine noises, 0:06 close ups, 0:13 environment shots, 0:22 racing shots, 0:29 drift, 0:31 engine close up, 0:38 in the garage shots, 0:51 Interior of the car shot 0:58 parking shot
War Thunder. Official channel. (2024). ‘Dancing on the Edge’ — War Thunder official cinematic trailer. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miVz9nsMYEw [Accessed 8 Oct. 2025].
I chose this trailer because of the action packed scenes and how immersed the camera is within the trailer.
Haze effect from the heat of the afterburner
Dirt and smoke exploding into the camera
Interior close up
I like these effects as it makes the viewer feel as if they are in the scene on the battlefield. I also like some of the long shot camera angles as jets fly-by but don’t come close to the camera. I enjoy the shot from the back of a tank as the camera is given a shake effect as if it was being held by the character in the tank, which again builds immersion. Close up shots of the characters fighting also shows emotion in the scene which could be hard to replicate with in-game footage that isn’t animated for the purpose of a trailer. Further more some of the transitions between scenes intrigue me as there are fairly unique such as at 2:03 which transitions from a missile firing from a attack helicopter to the inside of a tank, peering out a hole in the armour where a shell had pierced.
Note worthy timestamps :
0:15 camera is affected by fire and dirt, 0:31 far shot fly by, 0:58 close up of interior, 1:11 camera feels inside the firing zone, 1:39 camera moves like a human (bounces)-feels immersed, 1:46 cool transition, 2:03 transition.
Reasoning
I chose Forza horizon 5 as my game to make a trailer on for a few key reasons. First cars are cool, and I would enjoy spending time recording them. I have spent over 300 hours in the game and have most of the content unlocked, so I have a broad understanding of the game. Forza has many camera modes such a: first person, rear, orbit and even a drone mode which you can record others in a seperate camera drone. Also has a replay mode in single player which makes recording much easier. Forza also has good HUD visibility control, meaning I can almost fully hide the HUD which would overlay my screen recording. Forza is a action packed game with intense cinematic races. Lastly Forza is a beatiful high graphics game, in which there is loads of scenic areas to admire.
Stylised Research
While traditional game trailers use cinematic music and pacing, my chosen trailer style is inspired by modern social-media promotional edits. This format is becoming increasingly common in the gaming industry, though especially for mobile and indie game marketing.
A company that advertises and promotes their games with shorter form trailers is supercell.
Here is an article thats shows Anna Mizina’s research on tiktok as a advertising platform with:Top 10 Games Advertised on TikTok That Captured Players’ Attention.(2025). Available at: https://www.trapplan.com/blog/top-10-games-advertised-on-tik-tok-that-captured-players-attention [Accessed 9 Dec. 2025].
Target audience
Because of the higher engagement and entertainment my trailer is targeted at younger people who use social media often. This is because I personally do not search through game trailers to find games I like, I discover them from social media edits. Further more a higher majority of people have access to accidentally scrolling across the trailer on social media rather than YouTube or steam algorithms therefore the trailer has the potential to reach a wider audience.
The trailer will be suitable to display on platforms such as Tiktok, Youtube and instagram.
The purpose of this trailer is to interest viewers into thinking about the game and potentially deciding to buy the game with a immersive and entertaining trailer.
Planning
My inital ideas that I sketched down roughly.
Ininitial storyboard translated into words:
Ticked clips have been used in the production, shown below.
Production:
I am using After effects to create my trailer.
I gathered around 136 30 seconds to 5 minute clips which is more than enough to have every clip I need to create a 90 second trailer.
This is how I organised the files as I recorded them for ease of access when I thought of a clip to use in the trailer.
Above is some keyframes I created to controll the opacity and location of masks during transitions. As shown some I had to keyframe nearly every frame to create a smooth mask of the moving video.
Below shows one of the effects I applied to every clip. It is a colour effect which allows me to fully tweak the video and change the saturation and contrast etc. The slider shows 2 Instances of the effect with different settings.
This is a Audio level Effect I added ontop of the whole trailer to adjust some sounds to be smoother and clearer such as the vocals and bass.
Below is some of the sound effects I added during transitions all at differnt audio levels depending on what they where playing over. Some game audio and moments in the song combined where much louder than other parts. Tho I tried my best to keep audio levels stable over the whole trailer, so that no game audio clip was too loud.
Feedback
Firstly the largest useful criticism is the fact that I did not include many game features. I explained why I chose to not in the reflection section below.
Overall My trailer was rated well with the majority of the votes being 10 stars and all being over 5.
Further more everyone appreciated the time I spent on the transitions as they were rated higher than the trailer itself.
The amount of time I spent finding errors and adding more effects is proven by the agreement of the high editing quality.
Additionally the time I spent changing audio levels and adding sound effects(as I showed in the reflection section below), was fully appreciated and a key factor of keeping attention.
My main purpose of the trailer is proven successful as everyone was entertained and had their attentions held by the trailer even if only slightly.
The majority of people agree the trailer is easy to rewatch and therefore if it was uploaded to a suitable platform such as tiktok is could attract lots of attention from repeated views.
This was a fatal flaw I realised just after starting, that the trailer is too stylised and doesnt really promote the game. However it still shows it off in someways and therefore its upto personal preference whether it would interest you into getting the game, as the Report shows below.
Overall I conclude that my trailer was effective in the ways I aimed it to be and the time I spent working on it to fully entertain and immerse the viewer was a success. I also learnt that I should definitely think things throught a lot closer before I rush to start a project as there are many things I could have done differently with sufficient cinematic trailer planning. Tho despite what could have been the trailer is still effective at promoting Forza 5 in a immersive and entertaining way and showing of okuta’s song with my transitions.
Reflection
I enjoyed timing the text and manually masking out the cars for some of the transitions. I also enjoyed learning OBS and After Effects to record and edit. I cant really pick specific things I enjoyed over others as I enjoyed the unit overall and the learning challenges that I faced and overcame.
The biggest challenge was mostly motivation as I really wanted to restart and create a cinematic trailer however I didnt have the clips, songs, or inspiration to do so. Otherwise there was no noteable problem that a little research and trial and error couldnt fix.
I used my research to inspire myself to immerse the camera within the edit and also use some sound effects as thats what I enjoyed In my 2 researched trailers. Additionally the pacing of the crew trailer helped me pace my trailer. The War thunder trailer inspired me to create the Trailer using only racing clips as their trailer also shows no game features besides cinematic battle.
From some very initial feedback others had thought of some great ideas that I did not include though I have my reasons why I did not consider doing them. An idea was to include the garage and liveries customisation. However I did not consider this for my social media inspired trailer as personally while playing forza 5, I get in a car and stick on the best community made tune and also search for a community made livery then never really change it. However for other people spending hours manually tuning a car and changing its parts then being able to decorate it how they want afterwards is enjoyable. I did not add this into my trailer as I do not consider car customisation that interesting.
My editing skills have gone from 0 to what I would consider adequate to create most things if given enough time. Specifically how to use after effects, using: The pen tool, effects, colour grading, Text tool and fonts, keyframing and configuring speed and value graphs. I would like to believe my planning skills have improved aswel, as I will take more care with my ideas before starting them.
If I had a next time I would take more cinematic clips, and also clips of how you could edit your car and maybe the different map selections. This is so I could show off more game features however the Trailer would become less entertaining and that was my main focus of creating a social media inspired ‘edit’.