I am a strong believer in the philosophy of starting with the bad news and ending with the good news, so let’s get the first part out of the way: It’s probably going to be a while before we’re all able to curl up on the couch and dive into The Witcher 4. And so far, we haven’t had much to go on beyond the game’s reveal trailer from The Game Awards 2024.
OK, now for the good news: That last part isn’t quite true anymore! Not as of Wednesday, when developer CD Projekt Red published an in-depth video going behind the scenes of production for that six-minute cinematic trailer from December 2024. (As an aside, this is not just the studio’s second video about the trailer, but the second such video that’s longer than the original thing: The day after the trailer premiered, CD Projekt Red released an eight-minute trailer breakdown featuring game director Sebastian Kalemba.)
This making-of video has everything: Boatloads of concept art. Interviews about animating virtual cameras to look like handheld cameras versus ones on cranes or dollies. Writers explaining the thematic connections between Ciri and the village maiden she’s trying to save; between the young woman and her father; between Ciri and Geralt of Rivia, the protagonist of the previous Witcher trilogy. Discussions of narrative elements common to Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher stories and to the folklore of Central/Eastern Europe more generally. There are even clips from three days’ worth of test shoots that look like deleted scenes from Midsommar, which the developers used to get a handle on lens optics — “distortions, lens flares, blooms, how the bokeh behaves,” according to Karol Stadnik, digital cinematographer at CD Projekt Red. They and the artists at Platige Image, the computer graphics studio that produced the trailer, then used this learning to accurately replicate those dynamics in Unreal Engine 5 for the trailer.
But if you ask me, the coolest thing in this 10-and-a-half-minute video is the segment about how they put together the battle between Ciri and the monster, which is known as the Bauk — a beast with the head of a goblin, the neck of a snake, the arms of a jaguar, pincers that are literally scorpion claws, and dinosaurlike hindquarters.
“We created a physical representation of Bauk’s shoulders and his attacking arms, and having four operators, we kind of re-created the whole monster,” said Maciej Kwiatkowski, a motion capture professional who works under the name Alpha 7. “On the screen, we saw in real time a moving Bauk.”
I love my job, but I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to spending my day manipulating giant plastic rods and playacting as one-fourth of a fantastical eldritch creature. Just don’t make me don a mo-cap suit.
The post Here’s a 10-minute video about the making of The Witcher 4’s 6-minute reveal trailer appeared first on Polygon.
