ASSASSIN’S CREED IV BLACK FLAG | ACCOLADE TRAILER / TEST MONTAGE

Ubisoft had a little money for a small accolades trailer that also showed off the vast area of the game. But they’d never worked with Fire Without Smoke (few people had!) and they wanted to see a cut quickly to see if we were up to it.

It was Tuesday. Could they see something on Friday?

Of course you can!

What they didn’t know is that we didn’t have any employees yet.

So… avoiding sleep, I conceived, shot and cut the Test Montage in three days on my own. They loved it and green lit the trailer.

The trailer concept was inspired by a pirate treasure map, emphasising the scale and variety available in the game while allowing us to be flexible on quotes and imagery.

The trailer was a big hit and pushed a new spike in sales of the game.

While I largely shot this trailer myself, I was focused on imitating the existing look of the Assassin’s Creed trailers. We had to prove that we were the equal of their current agency to win the job and it had to have a similar style. That is why there are an embarrassing number of jaunty dutch camera angles.

If you’re dutching that much, it generally means your cinematographer doesn’t know how to compose a frame and needs to add “energy” to a dull composition. They’re vastly overused in video game trailers to this day.

When we took over the AC campaigns, I banned them.