Big Farmer: Still Wakes the Deep Campaign

The Big Farmer team were tasked with creating three full-length trailers for Still Wakes the Deep to build awareness and anticipation from reveal to launch. The big challenge for a game like this is to ensnare viewer interest with glimpses of the horrors to come without giving away too much about the monster or any major moments in the story. 

We knew that these trailers would need to be rooted in strong visual storytelling – moving from the eerie to the outright terrifying. As soon as The Chinese Room told us that this game was a Scottish “The Thing” set on an oil rig, we knew exactly what style of trailers we wanted to make: Moody, confident and foreboding – centering a sense of unravelling. The triptych approach would work well for this, with each trailer allowing us to build intensity and hint at more of the horrors of the rig.

For the reveal trailer, we wanted to introduce the harshness and loneliness of the game’s environment. Working from the vision shared with us by the team at The Chinese Room, the opening hook of this trailer is a slow, ominous shot across the expansive ocean as we creep closer to the rig. For this we worked with the ocean system of the game build, framing the shot just as we wanted and enhancing the environment with VFX. After slowly revealing the imposing presence of the rig itself, we juxtaposed this with quick cuts of cinematic and gameplay scenes, hinting at Caz’s claustrophobic navigation of it.

For the second trailer, we focused on the idea of fleeing. In act one, each scene has subtle signs of being abandoned in a hurry – forgotten shoes, a running shower, a steaming coffee left on the table. Act two is introduced by the alarm sounding and follows with gameplay clips as Caz fights for his life amidst gory scenes. The VO - a powerful reading of a letter from his family - perfectly accompanies this trailer, reminding the viewer of what he has left behind in the past and urging them to take the next step into his present.

In our final trailer for Still Wakes the Deep, we wanted to focus on Caz’s humanity. The rig started to come alive in every sense – from the other staff to the supernatural. More environments and characters are revealed as tensions rise. Finally, with peeks at the monster and shots of Caz’s peers being picked off, we wanted to capture the human connection and catastrophe that will be experienced in the game. 

We loved working with The Chinese Room in building these three trailers and worked on a branch in their Perforce depot so that any work we did was available to them. At their request, we also ported a small amount of the set dressing and lighting work we did into the main game and worked closely together to polish up some gameplay shots for the capture we did. It is always a pleasure to work in such a collaborative way with clients.

Along with our trio of full length, linear cinematic and gameplay trailers, the team also provided high-resolution still images, custom motion graphic title cards, and a variety of platform compatible versioning to ensure a fully rounded campaign across all social media variants.

The reception to our trailers for Still Wakes the Deep was phenomenal! The reveal trailer premiered at the Xbox 2023 Showcase and went on the win Best Reveal Trailer at The Global Entertainment Awards in 2024. The release date trailer featured on the Future Games Show and the launch trailer premiered on the PC Gaming Show 2024 before amassing half a million views on YouTube. Our trailers and assets were widely picked up across gaming and entertainment media and we were proud to even be included in the credits of the game itself.

Services Included

• In-engine cinematics for multiple shots, including lighting, cameras, shaders, set dressing & VFX 
• Gameplay capture & edit
• WIP audio for the first reveal and full audio for the second and third trailers
• Composite pass & colour grade
• Versioning