Demon's Mirror Reveal Trailer - Be-Rad Entertainment

Here’s the Demon’s Mirror reveal trailer! There are 1000 things I wanted to add or change while working on this (like adding more gameplay footage), but overall I’m super happy with it. I’ll share some insight as to how it was made below the video.

Wishlist Demon’s Mirror on the Steam page to get a notification when it’s released. The Steam page also has more info, screenshots, and some cool animated gifs to look at.

Ok, here’s what you care about, the trailer:

How the trailer was made

The trailer was created for the game’s announcement in the Guerilla Collective‘s streaming showcase during the week of E3. I hadn’t been in a show like this before so I figured we’d be able to upload the trailer like a week before the stream and call it a day, but then I get an email saying I need to upload the game by a much earlier date, which was only a few weeks away! Gulp. I hadn’t even started trying to find someone to make the trailer yet.

Tutorials tutorials tutorials

Since it was such a tight timeline I decided to take a stab at making it myself. I signed up for Adobe Creative Cloud and downloaded Premiere Pro and After Effects. I spent a full day watching tutorial videos on Youtube for both Premiere and AE. There are plenty of really well made tutorials out there. It’s time consuming, but to be able to go from zero to sixty in a couple days is pretty rad.

Derek Lieu also has a bunch of tips for making game trailers. I referenced these a lot when putting together my trailer.

After the tutorials I edited together a basic outline of the trailer to send to Wilmer Sound, who are doing all the audio for the game and related items like trailers. They give me some really great ideas for how to move forward with the trailer. After two weeks I sent the picture locked video back to the audio team and they spent a few days putting together the final audio track.

Tricky edits

While the audio team was busy working on the final edit I realized I hadn’t updated a few of the card names in the game footage. Unfortunately, it was too late to send a revised version of the trailer to the audio team. I made the decision to recapture the game footage and make sure the shots would match the audio files they sent me. Thankfully, it worked!

It’s really obvious if the sound doesn’t match up to the gameplay footage correctly. The first clip in the trailer where the cards are being moused over was the most difficult. I did around 15 retakes of that clip to get it right. For another clip I did some fancy editing and swapped out only the area containing the cards. This one was tricky because the cards move around so I had to get creative with masks and layers for that one.

Whew, it’s done!

I’m quite happy with the final trailer edit. I must have watched it 20 times to relish in what we had made. The game has come a long way and I’m super happy with where we’re at. The audio in the trailer has a thundering buildup and a strong finish, which gets me pumped up every time I watch it. It feels good to be able to make a trailer of this quality without relying on a third party. It was time consuming to make the trailer, but I’ll only get better and faster at making them in the future. Plus, if I do the trailers myself I can always go back to make a new version, say, if I need to add a new platform to the splash screen. If I had someone else make the trailer I might not have that flexibility.