Simple Game Trailer Templates
I want everyone to make the best trailers they can possibly make for their particular game, but I fully admit a lot of the theory and high level thinking I throw at you is not immediately applicable if you're a new editor who needs to make a trailer.
So here are a handful of trailer templates which I think are the easiest for a new editor to wrap their head around which can be used to make a perfectly serviceable trailer. That may sound like I'm setting the bar low (I am), but I've watched a lot of game trailers, and frankly I think a lot of them are barely reaching even that low bar.
Tell, show, tell, show, repeat.
This is a trailer which uses title cards and/or narration, and then afterwards shows gameplay which illustrates that thing, and repeats.
This is by the far one of the most basic formats a game trailer can have. I sometimes call these bullet point trailers, because it takes a list of bullet points, shows each one at a time, and then shows the relevant parts of the game. I used this exact format in one of my first fan trailers which was for The Behemoth's Alien Hominid.
The trailer starts with the cold open story cutscene from the game, flashes a bunch of cool shots, shows a pedigree title card, more gameplay and then proceeds to intercut title cards about specific gameplay mechanics, and show gameplay for them.
That's it.
Is it very original? Not at all, but it works perfectly okay for some games. The only thing I would suggest is to word your title cards to be less about the minutiae of what you do in the game, and a bit more about what you're accomplishing through each game mechanic. This is what I wrote about in my post Show the Dream, Not the Job. That said, sometimes the high level goal of each thing is the same, and you need to get more granular. In Alien Hominid, the goal is to defeat FBI agents and get your ship back, and in this case the variety of ways you do that is part of the hook of the game.
Music video montage
I wrote about this in my post about having fun with the editing. This is simply taking fun gameplay, and cutting to the music beat as many cuts, hits, slams, whooshes or any sort of on screen movement as you can. This format is best to use for games which are very simple to understand from watching, like action games where characters are running and jumping, guns are being shot, or there's physical violence.
If you can also sequence the gameplay so the simplest to digest shots are at the beginning, and the most complex are at the end, then it'll be much easier for the audience to watch. Here's another Behemoth trailer I made a while ago which followed this philosophy.
BattleBlock Theater is a relatively easy game to understand because it's a platforming game where you're trying to move through obstacles like saw blades, fans, grenades, water, and stuff. Looking back at this trailer I can see why I chose certain gameplay clips based on how they sync up to a few beats of music in a row or have some sort of rising or falling quality which matches the music if/when it does the same thing.
Chronological order
Simply capture footage from your game, keep everything in the order they appear in the game, and cut them in an exciting way while maintaining that order. A lot of games are structured somewhat like level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. in that they introduce ideas, make some twists on that idea, and then test the player's ability to understand them (this structure is well explained in this episode of Game Maker's Toolkit)
This format for games is essentially what a lot of game trailers do, so it stands to reason keeping this sequence of events in that same order might work for a trailer! I'm often surprised to see game trailers which don't do this in some way considering how hard game designers work to create this sort of arc in their games. The excellent trailer for Papers, Please mostly follows this format, as well as this trailer for Astroneer. The only caveat I'd add is to make an exciting intro if you can, because starting with the MOST fundamental parts of the game can be boring.
Just explain the game
Some games are simply really difficult to understand at a glance. Maybe the game uses a lot of abstract symbols which have no analog in real life, or maybe there are multiple steps in the game loop which the audience will just not know until they’ve played the game. This approach works best for those sorts of games, because you risk boring your audience if you start explaining the mechanics of a game which IS visual or has recognizable images. Just imagine a person explaining how to unlock a door point by point, or maybe using a web browser.
This spec trailer by Ashley Ruhl is mostly what made me think of this category because it does this exact thing in a way which I think is very entertaining, and effective for the game Spacechem by Zachtronics Games.
In a world...
No seriously. For a story trailer this is about as dead simple as you can get, just look at this Twitter thread showing myriad trailers with remarkably similar voiceover structure. Story trailers are probably the most difficult to execute of the formats in this list, but an "in a world..." style voiceover can be a crutch to lean on. The voiceover simply needs to say in this order:
This is the world (or the premise)
This is the person in that world
This is the problem that person faces
This is what they're going to do to confront it
These are the obstacles they're going to face
That's what nearly all story trailers do! Some of them skip to 2 because it's not so much about the world, but the main character. A lot of teasers stop at step 3 (because the premise is often interesting enough to tease the audience), and save 4 and 5 for the full trailer.
My last tip for any of these formats is to make sure the gameplay capture is CLEAR. Whether that means turning off HUD elements or composing shots to limit the number of things on screen at any given time. Retention of knowledge is far more important than quantity of content.
Okay, I lied. My actual last tip for this post is to create an exciting intro if you can, because it's so important to hook the audience as soon as possible when they're scrolling through a feed on their phone or ready to click somewhere else at a moment's notice.
These templates are all very simple, but that doesn't make them bad. I still cut trailers using a mix of these formats! The only "advanced" thing I think I do now is play with pacing, and ebb and flow so the audience is engaged through the entire trailer. A logical order is often best because it makes the information easier to consume. If you've ever watched a trailer with little to no rhyme or reason to the order of the clips (especially with dialogue) it can be an incoherent mess.
Good luck!
