Dead Island animators ‘blown away’ by trailer hit

Whether you love it or hate it – and a lot of people love it – you have to agree that the tease of Deep Silver’s Dead Island has this week caused a huge stir.

The trailer for the zombie adventure game, developed by Polish outfit Techland and out later this year, has been one of the most talked about game trailers in some time.

And the teams behind the trailer – UK outfits Axis Animation and Audiomotion – have today been confirming and adding some detail to their work.

The two teams (the former a CG specialist, the other a mocap studio) worked on the video to tease and build hype for the game.

It was directed by Axis owner and director Stuart Aitken, and produced by the studio’s Andrew Pearce.

“Deep Silver were really keen to create something different, something that would really stand out and when they put forward the initial idea for the ‘reverse’ sequence I saw the seed of something great there.” said Aitken.

“Working with the Deep Silver team has been fantastic. They put a huge amount of faith and trust in me and the rest of the team and it has paid off for everyone.”

The Axis team hired Audiomotion and Dimensional Imaging to capture the character performances, and Savalas for music composition and sound design.

“We are blown away by the reaction to the trailer and look forward to continuing the strong relationship with Dead Island and Deep Silver,” said Pearce.

Deep Silver’s global business development director Malte Wagener added: “We set out to create a rather unique trailer concept that would focus on delivering emotion and atmosphere while transporting the key elements and features of Dead Island. With the help of Axis and the great collaboration between our cinematic director, Anton Borkel, his team and Axis’ own Stuart Aitken, we ended up creating something that was a breathtaking combination of pictures, story and music which formed an atmosphere of intensity that – for us – was beyond words.

“Axis exceeded all our high expectations and then some on this project and really hit this one out of the park.”