January 17th, 2025 Video

Pre-Production

https://youtube.com/embed/s7H3vrje1nQ?autoplay=1&start=868&end=1321

Topics

• Embracer Group > Coffee Stain Holding > Coffee Stain Studios
• Satisfactory Updates > Teasers & Trailers

Transcript

so now that we have an idea we have a concept for trailer we start going into the pre-production phase of things, and this is sort of where we tried to figure out like how are we making this trailer so is it an in-house trailer as in like we're making this trailer is it or is it someone else making this trailer for us, I think every single trailer we've made have been inhouse, and been created like by the team so to speak there been a couple of external partners that have helped us out with some scenes and they've been super helpful so for instance the opening shots for the 1.0 trailer was made by an external studio and that was really nice like offboarding some of that work to them, so that we can focus on like more the the knitty greedy things that only we at cof stain and working on satisfactory would know, for the most part lenus is the one who's making most of the trailers here at cof stain but sometimes I also jump in and create and make some of them so like the update 6 trailer for instance and and the announcement trailer so one thing that's really really important for us, for trailers is audio design, almost every trailer that we made have always been like audio and music comes first usually what we do is we have we set a tone or a Vibe with our music and then we sort of build a trailer behind that and trying to like you know make the trailer fit the music so to

[Music]

speak but sometimes we have composers like Dennis, whove made a lot of songs, for from ghostwood Empire, write us custom songs and there's there's a bit of a trade-off there when you license a song you can usually take a song that people already know about, so they already have like a connection to that, but the issue with that usually is that, they can be really expensive and you can also only use them in like the situation that you're you're licensing for so like if we license a song we can only really use that song for uploading a video on our YouTube channel and that's it, whereas when you when we have like composers that make something custom for us, we can sort of Make a Deal better and like have it so that we have more you know lenience in terms of like where we can use it and how we can use it and stuff like that so for the 1.0 trailer for instance, we originally was going to use a license song, but it was hella expensive and it really limited Us in terms of like where how we could use it and like this the terms of that license meant that we could only really use it on YouTube once and that was it so it was a lot better to just have ghost with Empire right a track and- I'm glad we we went with this route actually because I think that song is a banger and the process there is usually like that we you know send them the composer a couple of tracks or like some references that we have, just to get the vibe going and all that stuff and they'll create something and then we'll iterate on that stuff, and for the announcement trailer, because we were so tight on time making that trailer from when we came up with the concept versus like when we actually needed to finish it, we had we decided to reuse the song that we had for the update 3 trailer, but we did ask Dennis to tweak it a little bit so it would better fit the timing and all that stuff for the, announcement trailer so it was a little bit tricky to make it work, but I think we got it done and it also ended up being like being that we had to reuse you know that trailer it was the same thing like we wanted to make a trailer that's dumb and like epic you know so we we we took like the most epic song that we could find and that was really that update 3 trailer song so once we have the song we start sitting down and making storyboards which is are basically, one of our artists sitting down and drawing up the frames showing sort of like what is going to be in in each shot and which shots are going to be in the trailer so when we make storyboards we usually sit and discuss first like this is what we want to entail and then our artist sits down and draws it and then we go through all these shots and discuss like you know does it make sense in this order or should this be in the shot changeed this and this and this, so the goal of this really is that at the end of pre-production we need to know exactly how many shots we need and which shots we are making, so that we can better estimate like how much time it takes for us to make this you know if we need a a lot of shots with a lot of big factories that's going to take a long time versus you know just close-ups of the pioneer or something like that, and also if like the shots are very intricate that also plays a big part in like how much budget we need to spend to be able to make these trailers and there's also elements like do we need custom animation and and like that so like storyboarding is such a powerful Tool, to be able to figure all this stuff out so for the the announcement trailer we knew which songs we needed and when we make storyboards we also usually typically try and put them in the timeline in like Premiere or something where we can sort of have it rolling and like see and get timing and stuff like that and since we knew which song we were going to use for this trailer we could just put that song in there and sort of play it out and and see how it goes and like see how much you know each frame can be on screen, at certain amounts of

[Music]

time so once we have that storyboard, trailer we usually try and do a pass where we do like a little bit of a blockout, in editor where we sort of try and like make a quick mockup of all the shots that we need to make and just Place some basic elements in there just to get a feel for what the framing will be like in editor if there are any limitations in game that we need to take into consideration, and we can also take the Pioneer model if we have like characters doing stuff and place them in the world and and you know get some poses in here and there and you know see how things flows and then you play these animations in the engine and real engine also has this tool called control rig so what control rig does is it basically takes the rig that you created and it adds a rig on top of that so you can control the rig in engine control rig it makes sense doesn't it this is a really really really powerful tool, from my point of view because I'm not an animator, but I am able to create animations in engine, in the scenes and whatnot and this is really really good for, when we're making the blockout because I can just take the Pioneer and I can create the poses in the sequence itself, really really really quickly in fact I actually made the entire intro sequence in the update 6 trailer with control rig so it is totally possible to make the entire trailer using control rig, but it does have some drawbacks and whatnot which makes it more suitable for like these kind of basic blockouts things but it is possible to to make a full thing in sequencer, in a real engine using control rig and yeah I can't tell you how much I love that tool because it makes things so so nice for me as a as like a creating these kind of cinematics in engine and in the storyboard trailer we can also use references to sort of indicate like we're going for with certain scenes when it comes to emotions or or you know movement and whatnot the running sequence in the announcement trailer for instance is heavily based on one, scene from Sherlock Holmes where they're running through the woods, we also had a lot of inspiration from Wes Anderson with like the zoom in and all that stuff and and how we compose the shots and whatnot so all whatever information you can convey in these like storyboard trailers in the blockout trailers, from you as a director to the rest of the team the better so that more people sort of understand your Vision as to what you're creating all right so now that we're done with