(Background): This is an ambitious trailer I have been working on throughout my freshman year at UTDallas. My inspiration for this video was the many reveal trailers for new fighters in the popular fighting game "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" for the Nintendo Switch. I've always wanted to see a 3D-animated trailer for "Steve," Minecraft's main character, and not just the conceptual idea of the fighter you see all over YouTube; so I decided why not create it myself?
I created a concept for the thumbnail/reveal image for what I wanted the final video to look like in my final project for my Computer Imaging class at UTD, using the skills I had learned in Photoshop.
Here are just the animated parts of the trailer, which I created in Blender and used footage from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a background so that Steve would look like he was actually in the fighting game. This includes a cinematic scene at the start, a moving image of Steve's "reveal," and Steve fighting "within the game."
I animated, did particle effects, and positioned lights in every scene. From this project, I learned how to include video footage in the background to reduce render times, I applied animation techniques I had learned from Animation I (such as the overlapping action of the ender dragon flapping its wings at the end of the video), and I learned how to plan each shot/animation to match the audio. The rigs/assets and backgrounds were obtained online.
Here is the full video that I released on my YouTube channel, which has gathered over 25K views (Now 76K after Steve actually got added to Smash!!)
In addition, to my surprise, several articles were written over this video, most likely because I advertised the video on other social media platforms. Nevertheless, this was very exciting to see!
Links to the articles:
Last but not least, Steve from Minecraft was actually added to the game in October 2020. This was not only an exciting thing for me, but the trailer they released ended up having a lot of similarities to my original trailer, such as the way Steve was revealed (character is launched, Steve mines through wall), Steve's moveset, etc. Of course, this was a coincidence, but it was reassuring to see that my video was pretty spot-on at capturing the way that Nintendo would reveal Steve as a fighter.