ABOUT

Partypoker released this new feature in the videogame as a competitive asset against the main competitor “Poker Star” and invested a lot of energy and money for having a successful outcome. I oversaw preparing the video promotion that would run on the web, on several social media. Working together with the creative director, we decided to proceed and create two main assets: a teaser trailer and an actual video promotion.

Teaser

For the teaser, I based my work on After Effects and Cinema 4D. I worked with the design director to compile the general concept of the new feature Hot Tables and the static visual assets already made. I prepared the camera rail on the 3D poker table, following the “wrecking ball” component in Cinema 4D for creating the disruption of the frame. After that, I composed the table in After Effects, adding the copy and the flames, generated with the plug-in saber. For the final explosion, I created a composition using green screen explosions, flames and particles.
The teaser was extremely successful, the board of the company was enthusiastic and the reception by the public was great. So, we decided to base the promotion video on a similar concept.

Promotion

I made a similar work in Cinema 4D, choosing a more stable camera for letting the viewer to focus on the copy, which was quite long and the most important focus in terms of promotion. Working with the creative director, we decided to include a phone and real gameplay footage for showing the new Hot Tables in action, alongside real players' emotions and reactions. So, I worked in After Effects for blending these features together, choosing relevant gameplay footage and composing it in a phone frame. I tracked the video to the frame and aligned the timing of the “winning” animation with the explosion effect on the background table. The effect was, again, created blending together the wrecking effect in Cinema 4D with the flames by After Effects’ saber and green screen footage. After that, I picked the most suitable player reaction footage and arranged them in the composition and used the “coins explosion” animation for leading the video to the end frame. The animation is part of the original game, so I composite it in a way to give the effect that the coins are actually “exploding” out of the phone.
For both the teaser trailer and the promotion video, other than the process just described, I worked on versioning all the compositions for the different social media destinations, adapting the programmatic version (16:9) to several other size resolutions (1:1, 4:5 and 9:16).