Dimensional Double Shift - Announcement Trailer

An attention-grabbing, nostalgic live action trailer to announce the upcoming game from Owlchemy and Google following the success of their VR hit Job Simulator. They were looking for an impactful announcement trailer for VR fans, as well as quickly selling the multiplayer aspect of the game. The game, Dimensional Double Shift, featured revolutionary hand-tracking technology not seen in a VR game before, and so it was important to the client and us that we harnessed the cool film-making tech available to us at the time to make this live action trailer.

We knew we had to get the players we would show out of the headsets. That way our trailer would be platform agnostic and we’d get to see the fun they were having interacting together. The client wanted all the action to take place in a retro 90s Gas 'n' Grill which was going to be a tall order in the U.K. so, with virtual production being a large part of our tech toolset, we started exploring whether this could be a VP shoot, and if so what cool shots would that enable us to do.

Why we loved this idea:
1. Location - this meant we could craft our location to be exactly what we wanted. After a lot of concept art, we set about building our diner and gas station in Unreal Engine 5 - making sure every last detail fitted our 90s aesthetic.
2. Rehearsals - with the set built in Unreal, this allowed us to place cameras and stand-ins and rehearse the shoot multiple times in pre-production. This was invaluable as we were able to identify issues in setups and eventually squeeze so much more out of the shoot days.
3. Lighting changes - using DMX controlled lights, we built our shot setups to have live interactive lighting that could change as the dimension around the actors changed, allowing for an almost theatre-like responsiveness to ideas on set.

The result was the studio's “smoothest technical shoot yet” and a trailer that captures the chaotic fun of playing the game together in VR.