Dark Souls

Agency: Maverick Media
Client: Namco Bandai
Music: In-game score
Areas: Creative, video/VO direction, game capture, video and music edits

Three trailers directed, captured and edited during late 2011 in the lead up to the release of Dark Souls. I have honestly never had so many “WTF?” moments playing a game, and won’t forget the moment it all clicked into place and I saw through all those deaths to the potential for good ol’ fashioned reward that this game has, if you have the time to devote to getting there…

After Binary Domain, this was my second time going toe-to-toe with a Japanese engine (and debug menu), making sense of it all to capture the footage was almost as challenging as playing Dark Souls itself.

Dark Souls: Hardcore Trailer

In most games, being killed is generally a bad thing but in Dark Souls it’s inevitable. The brief for this trailer was to present this as a challenge, throwing down the gauntlet to the player and asking ‘Will it break you?’. In my case, the answer is ‘Errr, probably…’.

The secondary intention was also to showcase the scale and huge variety of bosses, the quality of the game’s art direction, environments, animation and effects.

Dark Souls: Enemies Trailer

Second of three trailers for the intensely difficult Dark Souls, the aim was to focus on the loneliness of the game as it pitches you against a huge array of hideous monsters

Dark Souls: Classes Trailer

The last of three trailers for Dark Souls, this focused on four distinct high level versions of ten possible starting character builds. Whilst you’re free to take your character in any direction you want, this affects your stats, perks, weapons and visual appearance throughout the game.