Aiden "Conviction" Album Trailer
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» Background
This trailer was a pain in the ass. Pure and simple.

Deadlines on other projects had me start on this the week before album release date, with no ideas, direction, nor idea how i was going to make something even KIND of interesting,

The art was cool, but there was so little of it, much less any kind of over-arching theme in the album itself to tie into. I just had to go with basically the most interesting idea that didn't completely suck and run with it. I ended up creating a game that was a synthesis of Hangman and Whack-a-Mole.

» The Idea
The link to the trailer takes you to a jump page, with the normal preorder, tour, blah blah boring info. This was my first attempt to remove what i thought distracting or uninteresting content from the trailers. I understand kids would want to see when Aiden is playing in their town, but there are plenty of places to do so, and if the original idea of doing these album trailers was to create an experience, i felt including marketing and sales info to be detracting from the experience.

But of course, a business is a business.

When you enter the trailer, music starts to play, as the soundtrack to the game. A disembodied head in a potted plant drops down, and explains the game to you. It's simple. There are spaces on the bottom of the playing area, that are equivalent to the lines in Hangman. Other potted plants will jump towards the user with letters on their head. Clicking a potted plant puts the letter it carries on the phrase line. Completing the phrase gives a reward.

The parade of letters seems random, but is actually arranged (mostly) in an array like below (X = incorrect, O = correct):

First Three: O X X
Next Three: X O X
Next Three: X X O
Next Three: O X X

...and so on. Clicking a correct letter generates a pink letter in the phrase line instead of white. As each word is guessed correctly, the background fades a little bit, revealing a hidden picture underneath.

Upon guessing the entire phrase correctly, a bunch of little potted plants drop down from the sky, and the player can stream clips of the entire album (represented by the little potted plants).

That's more or less it. It was launched a couple days before release date, with little or late promotion behind it, which is a shame, because this was one of our bigger releases.

It stands as the most under performing trailer we've put out, and the least favorite of mine.

It wasn't all for nothing, though. I had never made a game in any fashion before, so learning and creating game logic, even as simple as it was, proved to be quite interesting. Faking the pseudo 3D animation of the heads jumping toward you was also satisfying. If anything, regardless of the trailer, the ideas that form them help me learn more about how to use Flash.

As soon as I finished this, i insisted at work that we begin meetings and brainstorming for the next one immediately, because i did not want to end up in the same position: another lackluster album trailer that has failed to live up to the promise boasted by the first one.

and thank god i did...