Promoting FAF, Cinema Trailer Style!

[Astronomer]

Hey guys, this is my first forum post so go easy. I'm in the process of making a cinematic trailer to promote FAF, and wanted to know if anybody had good ideas or suggestions about what kind of content to aim at in the limited space available. I'll be uploading it to my youtube channel and probably mirroring it on Gyle's channel too.

In a nutshell what I'm asking is this: If you wanted to excite potential new players to buy FA (or dig their old copies up!) and to join the FAF community, what kinds of FA content would you show in a short trailer?
For example maybe somebody knows of a replay where something particularly impressive/unlikely happens in the midst of a battle that would look good on-screen, like a CZAR being struck by a nuke, or shot down by a t3 artilliary piece.

Please bare in mind that whatever is done will be within the framework of:
- A cinematic 'film trailer' style
- Trying to focus on exciting action and combat rather than economy and underlying mechanics
- Fitting the whole thing into 3 minutes!

I have uploaded a small rough sample to youtube to show you what I have in mind, it's very short, not remotely polished, and still only in 480p while youtube processes it (final version quality will be significantly better):
http://youtu.be/YjyLK02z2vU

I'm interested to hear what people have to say (if anything! ) about this idea before I put more time into it.

[noobymcnoobcake]

Really look forward to this, great job so far well done

[TA4Life]

One idea that I wanted to use in a video, that maybe you would like:

Take all the UEF and Cybran units and arrange them in two long columns facing eachother. The beginning is a scout, lab, tank, arty (putting a few of these in formation would be even better looking), the t1 factory, t1pd, t1aapd,t1 radar, then t2 units, where the uef shield is across from the cybran deceiver etc. This of course goes through the experimentals and at the end you can have the scathys across from the mavor.

With the camera zoom in close to the beginning of the two colums, as if a low flying gunship(could make this an aeon scout tracked with the camera zoomed just below it, so you don't see it until the end), then slowly pan parallel to the two columns with newer and bigger units appearing as the scout gets further and further along.

At the very end after the big guns you can show the engineers and support commanders from each faction gathered around some quantum gates and of course the two ACU's next to eachother. This would also be the good place to put nice batteries of hives and kennels.

At this point you can zoom out so that the aeon scout can enter the camera, and perhaps a naval battle can be seen in the distance.

All this is just dreaming, was actually quite difficult to make look nice, it will take lots of work to make the squadrons of t1 and t2 units face directly at eachother. It is also difficult to find a stretch of land long enoough for all this goodness. Perhaps Ian's cross would be a good idea, there you can put the columns of units on the bottom shelfs, with the engineering core up on a hill. (Of course you can put navy there) Thought about setons, but there really isn't a nice flat piece of land for this one that map, perhaps if you make these columns into curved lines.

Maybe people can make a couple of versions of this in skirmish, save the game and post it here, so that all that Astronomer would have to do is given the aeon scout a move order, zoom the camera and record.

This would be a great illustration of sheer magnitude and scale in this game, as well as point to faction diversity and unit design. You could say, "We have more units than your unit cap."

Another idea that would take a lot more work, would be to remake the Total annhiliation intro using Supcom FA units, but keeping the epic narration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6mZZiI4ShQ

The most difficult aspect here would of course be who gets to play the role of the peewee.

Looking forward to seeing more ideas from people

[TheStrategist]

Looks very good so far, You're doing a good job of keeping the units the focus of the vid (most FA vids draw too much attention to the low poly maps)

IMO, you shouldnt have more than 1 shot of a nuke explosion in the trailer. Some epic arty and naval shots should be included, too.

[Astronomer]

Thanks for taking an interest and the kind words guys! I agree with you Strategist about the nuke explosions. They look a bit odd from any angle other than directly above due to the way they are rendered. TA I like your idea about the sort of animated 'scale comparison' chart by doing a camera fly-by of all the units, that's definitely an idea for a future video because few games can compete with the scale of supcom.

All the footage I have is from the same isis game, so the next order of business is to go through several high-octane games on a variety of maps where artillery and big navies get used. I want to avoid taking footage from a 'staged' game where a friend and I build huge armies on nothing but time if possible. I feel like you can tell when it's staged, and it takes away from the epic sauce.

[uberge3k]

Your standards for what constitutes "rough" are ridiculously high. This looks awesome in its current form, and I can't wait to see what the final looks like.

[pip]

Your standards for what constitutes "rough" are ridiculously high. This looks awesome in its current form, and I can't wait to see what the final looks like.

Hell yeah!

[Karottenrambo]

Looks damn cool, at least on the same level as Angel Supreme so far.

[Raging_Squirrel]

/me liked