It's more cost effective: All you really need is a wired/wireless third vive controller, a gimbal stabilizer (or even a cheap steady cam like the one I used pictured here), and some developer time to create an appropriately styled in-game avatar for the game on top of the extra time you need to film the trailer in VR. You eliminate all the overhead of having to buy/rent/create/light a green-screen setup and the crew necessary to operate this scale of operation and deal with the post production headaches to put them together.



To create the Space Pirate Trainer trailer I just needed someone to play the game while I filmed them.

You have more time to experiment: When you're on set with 5-10 people waiting for decisions - time is money. When you can shoot a trailer with less people over more days, you have more time to experiment and try different things. We shot for 3 days each for the Fantastic Contraption and Space Pirate Trainer Trailer to get all the shots we needed.

Change direction on the fly

When you're shooting on set there's very little room for experimentation since you're under the gun in terms of time and what needs to get accomplished during the day. Since we didn't have the time pressure associated with that, we were able to take breaks to check our footage and see if what we were shooting was working - and if not - adapt on the fly and change course.

It's amazing that what feels correct while in the HMD playing the game looks wrong when you're filming from a third person perspective. Blocking is important and where the player is positioned in the world can completely change the look and readability of the shot. Small details like the angle of your wrist can have a large influence on how natural the Avatar looks. Some movements might jank up the IK so knowing how and where to place your body is important - so checking footage so both the person playing and person filming are on the same page really helps with this constant iteration.

Actor performance/fatigue: This is something that most people don't think about, but it's tiring to play VR. Especially a game like Space Pirate Trainer. Getting consistent/exciting performances from your player is very difficult when you're dealing with a game with so many random elements and it's exhausting after about 30-45 minutes of play. Not being under the time constraints and pressure of being on-set allows more time to breathe, take breaks and feel more relaxed about the whole process.

It's incredibly surprising how much emotion comes through the avatar from just those three data points (the head and two hands). If your player is feeling tired or just not emotionally into what they're doing, it's amazing how obvious that is when you're filming them. When you're filming a live action person on set for a mixed reality trailer, that exhaustion is compounded about 10 fold and requires professional actors to keep up a level of performance for hours at a time.

Your character fits perfectly in the in-game world: It would have been extremely time consuming and expensive to create a costume similar to the in-game avatar in Space Pirate Trainer to make a player feel like they're part of the game's world. If we were to have shot this trailer with mixed reality, It would have felt out of place to have a player in their jeans/t-shirt facing off against all of these futuristic robots. We would have wanted to dress them up in costume, but even then, we wouldn't have been able to get close to what they were more easily able to achieve in-game since compositing a live player into a game's environment will never look as good as if they're part of the game world to begin with.

Variety is key: Seeing your game from one perspective (the player's) gets boring fast. To create a trailer or video that's compelling to watch you need to have multiple shots from different angles to give the viewer a sense of what they're looking at and how what they're seeing fits into the overall world of the game. That's basically impossible if you're limited to first person footage from the player's perspective. For a game like Space Pirate Trainer, the action is so fast and intense, that seeing it from different perspectives is the only way to properly visually communicate what is going on.