We are continuing to work on a series of promotional videos for the Spin Voyage mobile game advertising campaign. We talked about the first six videos in the spring , and today we want to show you a new game. We will analyze the concepts, explain the scenario solutions, and ask the client to comment on how the creatives worked in marketing terms.
Let's see how the new videos turned out, what they wanted to say and how the audience reacted to them.
Article written in Alconost
We wrote in detail about the game, the client, and the previous videos in the series in the previous case .
Movie # 7
The purpose of this video is to induce the viewer to tap. The order and logic of events in the first two scenes are the same: we point to the button, click on it and demonstrate the noticeable changes caused by clicking. The third scene deliberately violates the pattern of the development of events: the right to tap is appropriated by a hooligan parrot, to whom the laws of drama are not written.
Rhythmic music with bass guitars and a bright drum part adds dynamics, animation around the buttons goes to the beat of the music. Everything in the video works to get the viewer to press the button. A little exaggerated? Indeed, hyperbole is a technique of deliberate exaggeration in order to enhance expressiveness. This is what we wanted to achieve.
Client comment on video # 7:
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#8
The plot of this video, like video # 4 from the last case , is not connected with the real gameplay of Spin Voyage.
The eighth video was made with elements of suspense - anxious expectation, a premonition of failure. We immediately introduce the viewer into the mise-en-scene: here is the girl, here are the obstacles on the way to her, and here is the hero with a bouquet of flowers. Thanks to such an exposition, the viewer can immediately mentally replay the possible scenarios for the development of the story. When the hero overcomes the first obstacle and the tension of events begins to decline, the story is complicated by a new obstacle - a shark. She is predatory waiting for the hero's mistake while building the second bridge. Her unexpected appearance makes the plot more dramatic, the likelihood of a successful outcome of the story decreases, and the viewer has to literally change in a second the idea of what awaits the hero at the end.
The story of inept construction, which still leads to disaster, adds interactivity. We make the viewer think: “the hero builds incorrectly, but I can do better” and encourage them to make the right move.
The plot itself is slightly bloodthirsty, albeit in a mild embodiment: this is quite consistent with the recklessly mischievous spirit of the game.
Client comment about video # 8:
- It's no secret that the audience is very tempted with various sharp turns in commercials of various industries, therefore, in order to stand out and give a chance to show your product through an interesting story, you have to come up with leads that are very far from the main gameplay. Which is what we tried to do in this video, but with all this, all the assets of the video are in-game.
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#9
In this video, we have mixed the "obstacle course" plot, which is not related to the actual gameplay of Spin Voyage, with the visual elements present in the game: a parrot and coins. The cutscene is similar to the gameplay video capture, but in fact it is an animation intentionally stylized as an arcade game.
The setting is tropical, similar to the game: sea, palm trees, sand. The parrot runs along the sandy track collecting coins. When three crabs block the path of the parrot, he remembers that he can fly, overcomes the barrier on his wings and successfully completes the race.
In terms of production, the ninth video was the most difficult in the series. The reason is the complexity of the task: to convey volume and space using only flat assets. Usually this goal is achieved by creating a 3D environment and animating 3D objects, but this is significantly more expensive than animating in 2D. To save money, you can try to achieve the desired effect with flat graphics. But the animation in this case needs to be worked out very carefully. This is what we did.
We've added dust clouds on the track to convey the speed of movement and emphasize the depth of the frame. We also made the feathers more saturated so that the parrot, which occupies a very small percentage of the frame area, was easy to keep in focus. We also set the camera to follow the parrot. This both added liveliness to the frame and helped to control the viewer's attention.
Thanks to improvements that are almost invisible separately, we have got a stylization for 3D, conveying intense movement deep into the frame, dynamics and drive.
The client not only understood the reason for the higher project time, but also provided a constructive response at every stage. The problem was solved, and the client did not have to spend money on expensive 3D animation.
Client comment on video # 9:
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#10
The video begins with a close-up of a parrot, which is clearly up to something. He holds a cowboy hat, but he is not saddling a horse at all, but a rocket. Riding a rocket, the parrot attacks the rival's town, realizing an insidious plan.
If you thought there was an allusion to a Stanley Kubrick film, your intuition did not disappoint. Taking into account the fact that the game has the ability to cause inconvenience to neighbors by bombarding their towns with rockets, the reference to the famous 1960s movie fits into the plot organically.
Apart from the game of postmodernism, in 15 seconds we managed to hint at a game feature, show a map of the game world, a slot machine and a mascot, shower the viewer with coins twice and convey the predatory spirit of the game. In addition, the video also shows game cities with funny names: this detail, albeit small, quite accurately conveys the flavor of the game.
#10:
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As a result, the younger audiences also liked the video for its recklessness, conveying real expectations for the game to the viewer. In addition, he even easily crossed the borders of countries and continents: he went well outside the English-speaking world, because even if you do not understand the allusion, the video tells an interesting story and makes it live, understandable and interesting expressive means.
Videos # 11 and # 12
Considering that the two previous videos turned out to be more complex in production than the rest of the videos in the series, in videos 11 and 12 it was decided to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction and make simple videos as quickly as possible. For this, fragments of videos about Spin Voyage, made earlier, were used. We chose such scenes, the actions from which the user himself can repeat in the game.
While these videos are a counterweight to conceptual and original videos, we believe that this approach to adding variety to the content of an advertising campaign also has a right to exist. After all, one of the problems of advertising creatives is their burnout: they become familiar, the viewers become boring. Cutting fragments from existing videos and rearranging them is a logical move to avoid monotony. Some of the episodes may be new to some of the audience, but even if the viewer has seen all the videos of the series, it is better to show a cut of several videos than to replay one video entirely. In our opinion, this is a rational solution in a situation where you have just rolled out several complex creatives and are preparing new original videos, but do not want to pause in updating the campaign content.
Client comment on videos # 11 and # 12:
- Many times, not only we, but also our colleagues in the shop have come across situations where a minimal change, polishing without a seemingly significant visual effect simply drastically or significantly changes the KPI of a creative. That is precisely why you should not definitely forget the creatives that have already been unscrewed and / or burnt out or are slightly below the benchmark. It is always worth trying to rethink a little what has been done before, try to breathe a second life, go to other channels and placements. Our experiment did not disappoint us.
Alconost would like to thank the Spin Voyage team for the comments on the case study and for the pleasure of working together.
about the author
The material was written in Alconost. For 8 years we have been creating videos about games and applications, products and companies: selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expans, trailers for Google Play and the App Store. The videos in the case are examples of our work. We also localize games , applications and services in 70+ languages: native translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, any format of string resources.