Perpetual Stew GMTK Game Jam Trailer

Roles: Editor, Writer

For the GMTK Game Jam, I worked on a project called Perpetual Stew. I was asked to make a trailer with roughly an hour, so I made an action plan:

- I recorded a full playthrough of Perpetual Stew (which took less than ten minutes) to gather footage and audio from

- I requested a voice over from our narrative lead and provided them a couple of lines, asking that they take creative liberty with delivery and phrasing

I started working on trailer sequencing immediately, and decided I wanted to use the opening screen of the game going directly into gameplay. From there, I added a fade out and in between the two and started scrolling for clips that I thought were attention grabbing. Once I'd gathered roughly a minute to two minutes of footage, I started splicing together my clips. I lined them up and added a dissolve transition between them rather than utilizing jump cuts because I hadn't received the voice over yet. Just as I finished arranging my clips, I received the voice over.

The voice over was 31 seconds and my current draft was ~55 seconds. I grabbed game audio to play over the trailer and had it fade in and out with the gameplay being showcased, and then set about working on adding the VO. Our narrative lead sent me three different takes, one serious, one whimsical, and one normal. I chose the whimsical one for the sake of tone and then spliced in the ending of the serious one for the "no sentient ingredients were harmed in the making of Perpetual Stew".

While lining up the VO, I moved around some of the sequencing to better match what was being spoken ("stir the stew, manage customer requests, etc") and spaced everything out. The issue I encountered was that there was a large deadzone of no VO for about 20 seconds in the middle of the trailer. To circumvent this, I clipped the "stir the stew" line and had it repeat with gain to emphasize the hectic gameplay on screen, furthermore matching the silly tone of the game and trailer. Below is the original cut of the trailer.