Which surroundings are ideal for designing a trailer for a medieval RTS game? Correct: The chilly vaults of a medieval castle in the middle of a spring-flowering park directly on a river.

We were very lucky to be able to spend some time for the colorgrading and the final processing of our new trailer in the facilities of Burg Giebichenstein in Halle, which is probably one of the most beautiful art academies in Germany. Here we were rewarded with a phenomenal ambience, the hospitality and the comprehensive know-how of a befriended filmmaker.





To edit the trailer we mainly used Davinci Resolve for colorgrading. Since Unitys built-in posteffect pipeline, the Postprocessing Behaviour Script, has a similar structure, we were able to transfer what we had learned to Empires and Tribes and revamp the game. Basically, our approach to color grading can be broken down into the following steps:

- Raising the mids and highlights to take full advantage of the entire color spectrum and to lose little of the black areas.

- Raising the saturation to get rid of our old brown-grey look.

- A slight colour shift into cooler and bluer tones to move the terrain, in which predominantly green colours dominate, somewhat into the background of interest.





And this is the direct comparison:

















And since our interest has been aroused, we are already busy planning further possibilities to use Colorgrading in the game. For example, the mood of a sunrise, a heavy thunderstorm or a warm night in May can be set even more intensively in scene by correct grading.

In the near future we will take a closer look at the sounds for the trailer and will soon report on the next step here.