(Originally posted in September 2020)
To continue my streak of fan trailers, I wanted to do something faster and more energetic this time, edited to a metal soundtrack. Since I had Doom (2016) in my Steam library, that ended up as the subject. The game has moments with a really good flow of movement in the heat of battle, and I wanted to try reflect that in the editing on my fan trailer.
After playing through the game and capturing the best parts with Nvidia Shadowplay, I started the process by extracting the dialogue audio from the game and finding the clips with some dialogue lines that might be suitable for a trailer. From those, I pieced together a voice over that served as a basis for the structure.
Next I went through the game’s soundtrack by Mick Gordon, in search of a clip that would structurally and mood-wise work well in a trailer. I ended up using a part of the track “Flesh & Metal”, which had a good variety of calm and intense moments and escalation. It provided a great basis to sync moments of impact in the heated battle footage to.
After planning the structure with voice over and music, I took the most interesting looking moments in the gameplay clips and placed them on the timeline. I captured new gameplay clips where necessary to fill out the escalation of the beginning with ominous pentagrams, hell-landscapes and other things that more or less fit the voice over.
For the latter, action-focused half of the trailer, I marked impact moments with impacts in the music. I tried to use as many match cuts as possible with continuity of motion in the edit – the end of one clip has the same direction of movement as the beginning of next clip. This worked out in some cuts better than others.
Once everything else was finished, I adjusted the gameplay audio with volume keyframes and balanced out the audio tracks to sound good with compression so that all parts, music, voice over and gameplay can be heard.