Case Study
RoboCop: Rogue City game trailer post-production
We’re big fans of Paul Verhoeven’s original 1987 Robocop film, starring Peter Weller, so we jumped all over the chance to offer post-production for the promo of the upcoming RoboCop: Rogue City video game.
The game’s developers, Tenyon, take us back to Old Detroit where RoboCop (character name, Alex Murphy, to mirror the film) is tasked with taking on the city’s drug-fuelled gangs. At the same time, as always, he must crime fight among the debris of corruption left by the rotten OCP organisation.
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Promo for RoboCop game: "Dead or Alive, you're coming with me"
We worked closely with director Conor Boru, who was commissioned by 4media group to shoot the trailer. The full promo was split into three short narratives, each sending RoboCop to different ‘light-hearted’ crime scenes — offering a more playful feel.
We started building an offline edit against the script and then gave this a very basic grade, which immediately started to breathe life into the visuals. Next, we moved on to sourcing audio and SFX to further feed the dynamic, and even at this early stage, we could feel RoboCop's world was starting to take shape.
Then we dove further into more intricacy and by tracking we added tailored footage onto the mobile phone screen, as shown here. The branded ‘can’ of soft drink you see was fully intended as jovial and was created purely for this promo.
Then we really started having fun to give the promo more of RoboCop's stamp. With the addition of graphic overlays, we are taken through RoboCop’s perspective, as we utilise the timeless Robo-Vision for the POV shots. Our aim was obviously to try and make this as similar to the film as possible.
In this scene, a small group of youths are reprimanded for littering, when of course, RoboCop is called to the scene. Once more you can see the effect of the colour grade, as well as other small details that we added such as the vape smoke from the girl.
Although relatively short, the process of producing the final trailer was fairly involved, considering removing elements from frames, motion GFX and our fundamental sound design — although this got polished by professional sound designers before completion.
Revisiting this iconic film series served as a small dose of reminiscence. In principle, the final trailer was a lot of fun, and in part, this is reflected in the crimes that RoboCop is sent to ‘diffuse’ — in a typically disciplinarian fashion. Yet obviously, we tried our best to keep in touch with the feel and aesthetic of the original films.
