Player One Trailers

It's time for our end of year reel! We've been fortunate to have quite a packed year in 2023, creating trailers for games like ARK: Survival Ascended, Pacific Drive, Path of Titans, Pistol Whip, and many others. We created over 30+ trailer assets across a wide range of genres, and won 169 awards, including Best Creative Agency of the Year and Best Independent Agency of the Year. Here are some of the highlights... Special thanks to the many studios that trusted us with their work: @AlderonGames @ironwoodtweets @survivetheark @SnailGamesUSA @CloudheadGames @Kepler_Interact @WeBeHarebrained @PdxInteractive

Today marks 10 years of Player One Trailers. An incredible milestone for us. Thank you to everyone who has worked with us over the years. Here are some words from our founder, Gage Allen: playeronetrailers.com/10-year-annive…

We are incredibly honored to announce our film Monster Hunter: Eko, which was captured entirely in-game of Monster Hunter Wilds, is now up on display at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, Washington to represent the art of in-game filmmaking. It will be playing every day for attendees for an entire year in their large Sound + Vision movie theater. We are grateful and would like to thank @CapcomUSA_ for allowing this to happen, and to the development team of Monster Hunter Wilds for approving the film without any changes. We would also like to thank the entire team at @MoPOP for believing that this kind of film is art. Important to note that the film itself was not made in association with Capcom, and the story is not related to the official main story of Monster Hunter Wilds. This was a personal film written and directed by @Lotims. You can watch the film here: youtu.be/F8DGrq10aPg If you wanted to catch it in the movie theater, it is playing week days at 3:15pm, and on weekends at 10:15am and 3:15pm. @monsterhunter

We were excited to continue our work on Pacific Drive by creating the launch trailer for Whispers in the Woods! It was an immense pleasure working with Ironwood Studios once again. playeronetrailers.com/pacific-drive-…

Some shots from our Announcement Trailer for Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods. Which earned 12 Vega awards, including for Cinematography, Best Directing, Sound Design, Writing, and Editing. You can read more about the making of it here: playeronetrailers.com/pacific-drive-…

After taking care of the official trailers for Pacific Drive, we were thrilled to get the chance to create the Announcement Trailer for Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods. Taking care of the entire process from concept to completion: playeronetrailers.com/pacific-drive-…

With the release of our Echoes of Elysium trailer, we wanted to share some moments we enjoyed from the trailer. Our capture team feels pretty happy with the results. Check out the trailer with a little write-up about how we made it: playeronetrailers.com/echoes-of-elys…

We had the pleasure to create a couple assets for Echoes of Elysium, including the Launch Trailer! So we built our ships and set sail among the clouds. Taking care of this piece from concept to completion, including gameplay capture, editing, writing, VO, motion graphics, music, audio design, and overall trailer production. playeronetrailers.com/echoes-of-elys…

Tomorrow...

Just remembering back to when I was lucky to make this trailer for The Sojourn, a really pretty puzzle game. Got to direct, edit, capture, and work on the sound for this piece. Been a few years but still fun to look at every now and then.

It was pretty damn cool to end last year by doing a trailer for #ARK at The Game Awards, which was also voiced by @FredTatasciore! Who I am fortunate to call a friend. I was also lucky to get to write, direct, capture, edit, and do audio for this piece with my team at @Player1Trailers! A lot of this was pulled from my love of the series and how it made me feel at its best.

Another trailer we did for Pacific Drive over at @Player1Trailers. The story trailer was a blast to direct, capture, edit, and sound design for. Had an outlet call it their "favorite piece of art trailer" which is pretty crazy praise. I had a very particular mood/feel I wanted to evoke with it, so all the decisions from the capture, editing, the music, etc... all played into the feel.

Flashback to my team and I at @Player1Trailers creating this trailer for @UnknownWorlds and their game @Moonbreaker! Lots of custom animations, alongside capture, edit, sound and more. It was a challenging piece but we enjoyed the process!

Flashback to when we did this trailer for Stellaris Federations for @PdxInteractive four years ago. I started doing these news report things in the Synthetic Dawn trailer (like 7 years ago now damn), and Federations felt like a really great combination of trying to show people how it FELT to play a game of Stellaris (especially with a politics focused expansion). All the VO and lore is original, with a lot of the custom cinematics we did as well (the CGI galaxy at the beginning for example), and of course the capture. We spent a long time on the audio side too. I remember being surprised by fan reactions to this piece. I thought I did a decent job, but seeing how many people really loved breaking apart the lore we did for this was a very fun surprise.

The latest piece we did for @pathoftitans was for the Pounce Update. This trailer was a labor of love, and it was a real honor for me to get to write, direct, capture, and edit this! Fans loved the new lore storytelling style I had done with the Nightstalker piece, so I decided to continue it with this next trailer, this time contextualizing the tone and feel of it based on the Combat focus of the update. This meant writing an original story and lore that built on the legend of the characters I had created in the last trailer. However, this time? I wanted to go further. Fan reactions to the ending of the Nightstalker trailer (a moment that isn't even made for selling a feature but just delivering on a good story with emotion) were so big that I knew I wanted to see how far I could take it the Pounce trailer. All of it was captured in-game, with every dinosaur being a real player. The music is completely custom as well. Oh and when making the title sequence there in the middle "Introducing the Pounce Update" I was able to design the background to look like the outline of the Alberta, just a nice little nod to the legend we were building. The @pathoftitans team trusted me and my crew at @Player1Trailers to an insane extent, and that let me make something special with this trailer...

This is the second of the trilogy of trailers I did for @pathoftitans! After the enormous success of the Gondwa trailer (million plus hits across multiple uploads on Youtube and large player count increases), it was settled that this in-game approach really worked. So, what was next? Nightstalker. When I heard the update would contain buffs for raptors at night, I immediately saw how absolutely horrifying it would be for players when the sun sets, and they hear the faint sounds of a raptor pack slowly hunting them down. I envisioned this suspenseful sequence to draw the viewer in, using the context of Gondwa as a setup to the warm and open tone, only for it to slowly descend into an unnerving feeling piece as the sun sets. I wrote in this little family of Albertas (who would become recurring characters), and how while they slept the hunters in the night would lure the baby into the dark and kill it. Which I used to immediately push into the horror of the night sequence. This was also how I established the structure of the trailers, where we contextualize the player experience with the story using gameplay cinematics, and then use a high energy sequence in the middle to go over features, all while thematically tying it together to the overall theme. I wrote, directed, captured, and edited this piece and had an insane blast doing it. Some eagle eyed viewers may have caught the parents of the family coming after their child's killers in the rain during the montage, where we show them fighting them off, inadvertently saving another family from the same fate. I thought that added a nice connection to the tone of revenge. Now... the ending. This came in fairly late in the process, but I remember imagining this "after credits" idea where we saw the two Alberta parents after they win the battle, scarred and bleeding, leaving the other family and their child saved. We follow them for a decent amount of time, then we see the other baby dino still alive as the sun rises, living its day, getting a second chance. But... we come back to the Alberta parents returning to the body of their own child. I shot it in a way where we sit with them just enough to feel the mourning they are going through. The lesson being, death is permanent, and nothing is a perfect ending. I wanted this unfortunate reality to hit, where we pan up and see another day rises in the harsh world of Path of Titans. When the trailer came out, it was a bit insane how positive the reactions were. I received so many deeply emotional messages and emails from fans about how it made them feel, and seeing how effective the very ending of the trailer was for people. The analytics were also hard to believe. Something was clearly working! #PathofTitans

Throwback! This was the first of 3 trailers I did for @pathoftitans. When I was brought on, I pushed hard that we use entirely in-game capture vs scripted engine stuff (a departure from their previous trailers), and I wanted to do it entirely with players controlling the dinosaurs. I thought that would give a really great authenticity to everything, weird movements and all. I then pitched that we make it less about people playing T-rex and killing each other, and more about the dream, the vision, the beauty, of the game. See, when I first booted up Path of Titans, I wasn't spawn killed or immediately bullied. It was just me, and as I looked around I immediately felt like I was transported 100 million years ago to an old Earth. As I made my way through the deep forest, I came across another baby dino, and (without any text chat) we teamed up and explored together. I saw these massive creatures with giant scars across their backs walk past us like massive titans of old. When I made my way over to a cliff edge and looked out, I saw it... The beauty of what the devs were trying to do with the game. So I wrote, directed, edited, and captured this first trailer to hit that same feeling I had when first playing. I convinced @RobertIrwin to voice it, and I coached him a tiny bit as this was his first VO only role (obviously he didn't need it). We shot a live-action opening of the eye ourselves, and then carried through with an unbelievable custom music score by Markus Zierhofer, who got exactly what I was trying to do with the tone/music. This was the start of a great journey as I brought what I felt was the right vision to the feel of the trailers for the game.

Took some members of our team out to see Dune Part Two. It was a fun outing.

We'll be at GDC this year. Reach out if you'd like to chat!

This shot was so fun to do. Believe it or not, that slide was NOT planned. Our Producer at the time was driving the car and I was on camera and directing (All the shots are controlled in real time btw, no splines or scripted bullshit) And they hit the acid and lost traction, I started SCREAMING "TURN LEFT! TURN LEFT! OWN IT!" as I moved the camera around (completely independently of the car btw) cause I knew if they turned hard enough I could wrap the camera around the front end of the car and get a cool transition cut out of it. Turned out sick as fuck. A lot of capture is equal parts improv and brutally fast thinking with fine motor skills to get the camera in position.

It was a real pleasure to create the official trailers for Pacific Drive over the last two years. The Announcement Trailer, Gameplay Trailer, Story Trailer, Release Date Trailer, and the Launch. Congratulations to our friends @ironwoodtweets for delivering a phenomenal game. Thank you for having us on this ride.