By Randi Altman

Electronic Arts and DICE (EA Digital Illusions CE AB) will be releasing Battlefield 2042 on October 22 of this year. To promote this highly anticipated game, they have released a trailer giving players a glimpse of what they’ll be able to experience when playing this first-person shooter game.

Mattias Lindahl

The reveal trailer was created in-engine (via Frostbite) by the Swedish-based Electronic Arts Marcom Cinematics group, the same multi-disciplinary team that created the official reveal trailer for the WWI-themed Battlefield 1, which received over 67 million YouTube views.

Randy Evans

“The overarching theme of the trailer is that Battlefield is back. We are reclaiming the sandbox,” says director of global cinematics Mattias Lindahl. “This trailer is an homage to some of the biggest, most well-known moments from the game’s history — user-created and moments previously created by us.”

We reached out to the Lindahl and the rest of the team — creative director Randy Evans, senior animator Cameron Scott and cinematic artist/generalist Rikard Hörnedal — to find out more about their workflow, the challenges of the process and only using assets from the game in the trailer… months before the game is available to the public.

Cameron Scott

What direction were you given in terms of what they wanted to show and not show in the trailer? 
Evans: This process is one of give and take. The challenge is always going to be that we (Marcom) want to show features and art that is not quite ready in time because the game is still in an early stage of development. So we start off with a suggestion of what to feature based on the vision for the game. We then work closely with the development team to prioritize the development of those important key assets — the ones that are going to be the most exciting to show off for the fans. We, of course, also want to hold some stuff back. It’s a long campaign.

Rikard Hörnedal

So the trailer uses assets from the game itself?
Lindahl: This really is hitting on the very core of our existence. What some of our competitors do is produce trailers in CG that have very little to do with the game experience itself. We always want to lead with the game, so not only do we use assets from the game, but we also create the trailer in the native game engine Frostbite. And we use exactly the same technology as the game itself. So it is, in fact, the game. We do, however, sometimes add custom animation to help us with storytelling.

How long was the process? 
Evans: The first ideas hit the page in July of 2020 and after that we began a handful of storyboards to hit on the bigger moments of the creative. In August 2020, the first creative treatment was realized and I began to share with stakeholders and get buy-in from the studio and the rest of the organization before we moved on to the next phase, which was motion capture. The first edit of the entire trailer was done at the end of July. I rendered the final version of the trailer in May. All in all, about a 10-month production, our longest yet.

This seems like a giant endeavor. Did you previz everything? 
Evans: Yes. Before we begin a production, many of the sequences and sections of the edit are relatively clear to me, and some of them are not. Occasionally, throughout the process, there are standout sequences or moments that need some extra groundwork and that is where Cam [Cameron Scott, our senior animator] and his team are crucial in helping to visualize things with previz.

My team and I are generally quite good at building entire cinematic scenes in the engine quickly, which helps me understand whether something is going to work really well or if we will need to try something different. We usually make big changes and take big risks early to cover all our bases. Even though our production on this reveal trailer is the largest we’ve done, I always leave room for surprises.

There are a ton of effects — like smoke, fire, water, blood and a tornado. Can you talk about that?
Evans: The tornado fully belongs to the incredible VFX team at DICE — all I did was place it where it needed to go and make sure that it visually represented the game in the best way possible. There was a lot of work that went into the development of that tornado, and I’m still in complete awe of what they achieved. Really excited for fans to get a much closer look at it.

We work very closely with the development team on VFX. My team and I do the placement and timing of most of the VFX work in the trailer and then collaborate with the VFX team at DICE on any custom needs. In general, we always stay as true to the game as possible, so with that in mind there are almost never any VFX that don’t end up in the final product or aren’t completely representative of it.

What about the faces and movement? Assuming it was via motion capture? Also, can you talk tools?
Scott: Custom animation was mocapped via an external mocap vendor called Goodbye Kansas, then we processed it and cut it into the trailer in-house using a combination of several DCCs, like Maya and Motion Builder as well as the native game editor FrostEd. All shots were rendered locally through Frostbite engine.

We try to do as much of our work as possible using the various game systems in Frostbite. But for those moments that might not be quite ready yet in the game, or if we need something extra for storytelling reasons, we turn to animation in Maya/MotionBuilder as well as custom motion capture. We then import that animation into Frostbite and render together with all the rest of the game assets.

We do all our editing in Adobe Premiere. We use standard but high-end Dell PCs outfitted with Intel W-2155, RTX 2080 Ti, 128GB RAM and NVMe storage.

Does your team only work on trailers and marketing assets? How do you interact with the team working on the game assets? 
Lindahl: This hits on another really important detail of our work. Since we only use assets from the game, a super-tight collaboration with the game development team is absolutely key.

More often than not, we start work on the trailer long before the levels and art are completed for the game. We work closely with the game art director — Joseph McLamb, in the case of Battlefield 2042 — to make sure that the areas of the game that we shoot in get prioritized in time by the dev team. Otherwise, we would risk featuring art from the game in the trailer that is not yet complete.

We also work very closely with the designers and producers to make sure we fairly represent functionality and features from the game. We have such passionate fans that the smallest mistake will be picked up on and analyzed. Attention to detail is very important.

Can you talk about working remotely throughout the process?
Hörnedal: Our team is more or less a very close group of friends who love being in each other’s presence and making cool trailers together. So the reality of working from home and not being able to be in the office together, like we were before COVID, came with a lot of new challenges in communication and mental/social health. Communication and mental health are two key factors in making a project like this come together successfully.

The whole project became an enormous learning experience about how to communicate more effectively while working remotely and how to find ways to keep us all aligned. We had to remind ourselves that each one of us was still here and available to collaborate — not in person like before, but available, nonetheless.

Whether it was talking over Zoom more often or finding some stupid thing to joke about, it all contributed to better mental health and communication within the team.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.