Dead Island Reveal Trailer

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Dead Island Reveal Trailer
Title screen
AgencyAxis Animation
ClientDeep Silver
MarketWorldwide
LanguageEnglish
MediaVideo
Running time187 seconds (3:07)
Product
Release date16 February 2011
Directed byStuart Aitken
Music byGiles Lamb
Production
company		Axis Productions
Produced byAndrew Pearce[1]
CountryUnited Kingdom

Dead Island Reveal Trailer is an announcement trailer for the video game Dead Island, which was developed by Techland and published by Deep Silver. The story of the trailer follows a family who is attacked by a horde of zombies in a hotel. The trailer begins with the infected daughter, who has turned into a zombie, being thrown to her death from a hotel window. The trailer was produced by Glasgow-based Axis Animation, with music created by Giles Lamb.

The trailer was designed to be emotional, allowing players to care for the characters and to be distinct from trailers for the game's competitors. The trailer does not show any gameplay, instead telling a short story about the game's world and the background behind its events. The development team's goal was to show the inevitability and the helplessness of a family in a zombie outbreak.

Upon its release, on 16 February 2011, the trailer sparked public interest, and the community reaction led Techland to adjust the content of the actual game. It was met with a positive reception from critics. Praise was directed at the trailer's new ideas, story, emotional weight, immersion and tone. Criticism was reserved for its lack of gameplay information and its depiction of a dead child. Retrospectively, the trailer has been praised as superior to the actual game and widely regarded as one of the best video game trailers ever made.

Plot

The story is presented in reverse chronological order and in slow motion.[2] The trailer follows a family, consisting of a father, a mother and a daughter, visiting Banoi, an island paradise. After they have settled in a hotel, an unexpected zombie outbreak occurs. The daughter is running away from the horde of zombies in the hotel's corridor and dashing towards her room, where her father and mother are staying, when she is caught. A zombie bites the daughter's legs, causing her to become infected with the zombie virus.

The father opens the door and picks up a fire axe to fight against zombies. He rescues his daughter and brings her inside the hotel room. After placing the injured daughter on a bed, the couple begin fighting the zombies who are breaking into the room. The zombies overwhelm them, and the daughter turns into a zombie and attacks her father, biting him on the neck. To defend himself, the father struggles, trying to push her off, until he throws her out of the window, breaking the glass. The daughter dies on impact with the ground, her eyes reverting to her human form briefly. While the father is struggling, the mother is attacked and eaten by several zombies. The final scene cuts back to the family's arrival to the island, and the family taking a picture together. The corpses of the couple can be seen in a hotel room in the beginning of the game.[3]

Background

The logo for Deep Silver
Deep Silver (logo pictured) gave a script a general ideas to the company that created the trailer.[4]

Dead Island, announced in 2007 by Techland,[5] is an action role-playing survival horror video game. Set in a zombie-infested tropical island called Banoi, the game focuses heavily on melee combat.[6] Until 2011, Techland declined to give new information regarding the game as requested by the game's publisher, Deep Silver.[7] With the lack of new information surrounding the game, many journalists believed that the game had been quietly cancelled.[8] The trailer was released via the YouTube channel of IGN on 16 February 2011.[9] It was produced and made by the Axis Animation, which had created trailers for Killzone 2 and Mass Effect 2.[10] It was one of the largest animation and VFX studio based in Scotland.[11] Axis recruited Audiomotion and Dimensional Imaging to handle the performance capture of characters.[12]

Development

To prepare for the trailer, a team led by Anton Borkel, a creative consultant at Deep Silver, was given a design document outlining the game's broad concepts. From it, they understood only that the game was meant to be "cinematic," "brutal," and heavily focused on melee combat. The trailer was initially designed to showcase large amounts of violence in order to gain viewer attention. Borkel rejected this pitch for its lack of originality and approved a concept depicting negative aspects of a zombie apocalypse, highlighting a family's unpreparedness and helplessness.[13] The trailer is made up of computer imagery and it does not show any gameplay footage of Dead Island.[14] The team hoped to use the trailer as a piece of artwork, stating influence from the Carousel advertisement by Philips.[4][15]

According to Stuart Aitken, the director of the trailer, Deep Silver allowed them to create their own characters instead of using the in-game protagonists.[14] Axis positioned the trailer as a short film set within the Dead Island universe.[13] They intended to use the trailer to depict the background information of the game, presenting information regarding the discovery of the outbreak and its unstoppable nature.[16] The team had an internal debate on whether the trailer should show guns, deciding that doing so would distract from the primary goal of the story and help differentiate the game from other first-person zombie shooters such as Left 4 Dead. To make the trailer feel non-linear and focused, the team narrowed the trailer's location to a hotel room.[4] Deep Silver wanted the trailer to have some exterior environment, so the team added a segment with the daughter falling from the hotel window, where the audience would glimpse the island setting.[16] An early version of the trailer took place through the lens of a camcorder; though this concept was scrapped, residual footage was used to show the family's vacation before the outbreak.[13]

Axis used the trailer to build up the mood and atmosphere for the game.[17] In the main game, Techland designed quests which required players to help people who had lost their families, with the goal of making players feel that they were the only hope existing on the island.[18] To ensure that the audience would be connected with its characters despite the trailer's short length, the team decided to tell a story of an ordinary family unit.[4] The mother was originally the one that turned into a zombie, but the team switched the role to the daughter, whom they considered more vulnerable, to evoke greater sympathy from viewers.[16] A child's death also showcased the feral nature of the zombies, triggering an urgent protective instinct within viewers.[13] The team was worried that the action and violence featured would seem excessive; they alleviated this by introducing non-chronological storytelling.[19] The trailer intercuts to a chronological depiction of the zombie attack on the daughter in an effort to heighten the drama.[16]

The marketing team debated whether they should release a chronological version of the trailer, but Borkel decided against it, opting to let the community recreate the timeline themselves to drive better engagement.[13] Deep Silver proposed to mitigate the violence by having the trailer presented in slow motion, as they believed that it could make the action feel "balletic" instead of purely violent.[16] Much of the violence in the trailer was directed at the zombies, as the team felt that depicting the family's fear and helplessness were more interesting than showing the brutality of their deaths.[20]

The trailer's music was composed by Giles Lamb, who worked for a soundtrack development company called Savalas.[14] The music was designed to be "somber", "melancholy", and "elegant",[16] in contrast with the gore presented in the trailer.[14] During the violent action, the music was designed to be tense, while during peaceful moments the music was designed to sound softer. The team hoped that the music would create a "juxtaposition between beauty and horror".[21]

Reception

A week after the release of the trailer, more than one million people had viewed it through YouTube, exceeding Deep Silver's expectation of 100,000 views. Dead Island was one of the most searched items on Google, YouTube, and Twitter for several days, and became one of the most anticipated titles of 2011.[13][22] The trailer's unexpected popularity prompted Deep Silver to adjust the game's marketing campaign. Techland modified the main game's gameplay and story in response to the trailer's positive reception.[22] It also attempted to adjust expectations, with producer Sebastian Reichert comparing its gameplay to Borderlands 2 rather than emotional experiences like Heavy Rain.[23] Borkel remarked that the game's story concerned a "bigger picture of the situation on Banoi and less on an individual tragedy".[15] By 2018, the trailer had amassed more than 18 million views on YouTube.[13]

Wired described the trailer as a "masterpiece" with "the trappings of the classic Hollywood teaser"[24] while Keza MacDonald writing for VG247 called the trailer "advertising as art".[2] The trailer's story was praised for presenting an unconventional take on a zombie apocalypse.[25][26] Mike Fahey from Kotaku called the trailer's use of the dead girl "heartbreaking" and thought that it would be amazing if Techland was able to incorporate these emotional elements into the actual game.[27] Robert Rath from The Escapist liked the segment, calling it "deliberate and necessary", and thought that the overall effect would have been significantly hampered if had been removed from the trailer.[15] However, some reviewers found the depiction of the girl's death offensive and thought that the team had surpassed what is socially acceptable to depict.[28][29]

Its graphics and pacing also received commendation.[30] Jason Schreier from Wired said that the trailer had successfully made a saturated genre feel fresh again.[31] The lack of gameplay information was criticized, with concerns that the trailer would cause players to expect an emotional story that would not be present in the game and that clips gameplay were not shown in the trailer.[30][32]

The trailer was given a gold award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.[33] It was named by gaming journalists as one of the best video game trailers ever made.[34][35][36][37]

Legacy

During previews, gaming journalists remarked that the game did not share the same emotional tone as its trailer.[38][39][32][40] Upon release, many reviewers thought that the trailer set expectation too high for the actual game, which the game did not meet.[25] Outside of sharing the same setting, the actual content of the game was vastly different from what was depicted in the trailer.[41] Haris Orkin, a writer for Techland, noted that the trailer "brought so much attention to Dead Island created an expectation for a tone that really isn’t possible to pull off in a game where you’re decapitating zombie".[42] Will Adams, a creative director for visual effect company The Mill, noted that the trailer ultimately became more memorable than the main game and overshadowed it.[43] According to Borkel, the controversy surrounding Dead Island prompted gamers to become more skeptical of cinematic trailers released during a game's marketing cycle.[13]

A live-action remake and a recut version of the trailer which shows the story in a chronological order were released by fans.[44][45] The announcement trailer also boosted the popularity of Techland and Deep Silver.[42][22] The announcement trailer for Dead Island: Riptide, released in 2012, featured a similar, depressing tone.[46] A trailer for Goat Simulator in 2014 also mimicked the format of the Dead Island announcement trailer.[47] A movie tie-in based on the trailer was once proposed by Lionsgate, though the project was ultimately cancelled.[48] Deep Silver released a musical tribute to the trailer, coinciding with the launch of Dead Island: Definitive Edition in May 2016.[49]

References

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