Bloodstained: Ritual of the night (2015)
After the success of numerous crowdfunded Kickstarter projects, 2 Player Productions became noted as a go-to producer for creating high quality pitch videos and campaigns for many crowdfunded titles. This time, the crew was approached by Koji Igarashi, the iconic game designer for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Igarashi-San wanted to follow in the footsteps of several other legendary Japanese game developers who were in the process of creating spiritual successors to the titles they were most known for. When I saw the video, I knew right away that it would be huge, but didn’t realize that it would be an even greater success than the campaign we had worked on with Keiji Inafune — Bloodstained raising more than $5.5 million within its first 30 days.
Igarashi wanted to shoot the pitch video while visiting San Francisco on business, so 2 Player Productions made the arrangements for it to be shot on location at Castello di Amorosa, an actual castle grounds about 70 miles north of their San Francisco office. The script was finalized, and the video was shot in a day, later sent for me to complete audio post production as quickly as possible, so that the Kickstarter campaign could be announced by a certain date.
The reputation of Igarashi’s previous titles gave us a lot of inspiration for what the Kickstarter pitch video should be like, paying homage especially to Symphony of the Night. The dark, gothic style leant way to dark, atmospheric sound visuals, music, and soundesign — a lot of which was recorded in my home studio, using a simple setup for foley, in addition to using stock sound libraries for bigger effects, like lightning cracking open a gravestone… very goth!
To further promote the Kickstarter campaign, I mixed a special episode of 2 Player Productions’ series, Devs Play, where Koji Igarashi played his standout classic hit, Symphony of the Night, while giving director’s commentary.
Director, Editor: Paul Owens
Executive Producer: Paul Levering
Director of Photography: Asif Siddiky
Music: Michiru Yamane
Visual FX: Juan Cardarelli, Eric Levy