It's been a while! Very excited to have helped on this trailer! I've gotten JoelG's blessing to explain a bit in-depth on how this trailer was made and how the team worked together to get it made!
Context:
This trailer was originally envisioned to some music Joel discovered in late November 2022, who quickly drew-up an animatic of interesting shots and narrative. This, with the music gave a very rough approximate of the final trailer.
Over the proceeding week Joel worked very closely with Brian Zavala (@Mizu_Wolf) to adjust the shots to be much more cinematic as well as come up with a clear color script to follow for it's production. Part of this color script is available on Joel's Patreon and will hopefully be fully available sometime in the future for interested fans!
Production:
Work began with Joel mixing some of Mizu's ideas with his own, as well as getting input from the ENA Team. Oliver Buckland offered to help complete original music for the trailer and the soft deadline we set for this trailer was to release before December 25th.
As we continued into December, shots were decomposed into the necessary elements, mainly:
- 2D Painting (Mizu, Sleepcircle)
- 2D Animation (JoelG, Marco C.)
- 3D Animation/Stills (Myself, Vlif, Floofinator, Sleepcircle, Talon Zane)
- Gameplay Recording (Myself)
- Music (Oliver Buckland)
- Post Production (Mizu, JoelG)
Animation:
Using the color scripts and several animatics from Joel, we created 3D assets, animations and physics simulations used in the trailer. These were rendered out to PNG stills or sequences and imported into After Effects for compositing with the painted backgrounds and 2D Animated characters.
Some shots like the swinging giant's swinging hand (above) was made in several steps to have the 3D and 2D components match. Color script, background, background animation, and post production done by @Mizu_Wolf.
All together, this 1 shot it took several days and several people with different expertise working at the same time to complete it. Most if-not-all of the other shots had a similar set of steps and challenges that we worked together to solve.
The process for this trailer felt very similar to a mini-ENA episode. It was fueled by passion and patience. As the soft deadline of Christmas came and went, we took some time to gather ourselves and kept marching forward on the new year. We tested some of our limits and brushed against crunch and burnout but in the end we had fun making something so epic even though it was released way later than we originally wanted.
We hope you all enjoy it as much as we do, and if you haven't yet, please wishlist Dream BBQ on Steam!