The RESSHOUMANIA 2024 trailer is dope
It’s a lazy Saturday morning, so I’m gonna talk for a bit about what all went in the RESSHOUMANIA 2024 trailer to make it turn out as dope as it is.
First off: This is the second RESSHOUMANIA trailer we’ve had Okami, Theo, and Irene working together on the edit, music, and art together. Every Play Guilty Gear work samples heavily from the stuff that inspires us, but kicking off RESSHOUMANIA with a trailer that features original art and music is a nice way to keep our creative direction feeling fresh.
Creative for RESSHOUMANIA starts with the main event. Last year was Foo vs. Daymendou 1, and Daymendou was defending his title, so our key art drew inspiration from Castlevania, with Daymendou’s Slayer looming over the challenger, Foo’s Haehyun, in the Gamecenter parking lot.
This year we’re running Foo vs. Daymendou II, and the theme for this year is revenge. However, that wasn’t the original planned main event! We actually wanted to give Daymendou a break from championship matches because he’s been in all four of them, and we had another revenge story from Foo’s past that we wanted to run. We had the trailer just about ready to go, and then that revenge story had to drop out, and when I asked Foo who else fit the bill for the revenge theme, Foo said it’s gotta be Daymendou, since Foo took his title at RESSHOUMANIA 2023 and then lost to him at Slashback and Combo Breaker. Thankfully, most of the trailer was still usable.
The direction for the trailer started with the PGG leads (myself, Lanline, Starsky, and Irene) eating fried chicken and thinking about revenge. We started kicking around revenge-themed movies we liked, which naturally led us to Oldboy. (If you haven’t seen Oldboy or any of the Vengeance trilogy, I highly recommend them.)
The Oldboy rerelease trailer hit us real good; a quick rehash of some of the movie’s most memorable scenes, set to a haunting piano that starts out slow and gradually builds up, with styled text showing off praise from the critics. We really liked the buildup from the slow moodiness, and the lack of voiceover really lets the movie clips breathe.
Crucially, since it’s the trailer for the rerelease, it doesn’t need to explain what the movie’s about or sell you on why you should go see it; instead, it assumes that you already know the movie (and have probably already watched it). We went back and watched the Oldboy trailers from the original release, and they have to do a lot more explanation of what the movie actually is.
RESSHOUMANIA trailers aren’t really marketing like that; the audience for RESSHOUMANIA trailers is “people who already know they’re going to RESSHOUMANIA”, and we actually hit our reg cap like two hours before the trailer debuted. I wanted the trailer to set the mood and establish the theme more than raise awareness.
With the Oldboy rerelease trailer as inspiration, we came to Okami and Theo for editing and music. It turns out that this is right up Theo’s stylistic aisle, and since we anchored the inspiration in a trailer it was relatively easy for Okami to match the tone, pace, and style. Okami threw together a draft cut with clips from the last year of Xrd to tell the story and room for me to write the text, and Theo got to work on the brilliant theme for RESSHOUMANIA 2024.
My one request for the theme was that we had a brief homage to Baiken’s GGXX theme, “Momentary Life”, since we use that as the intro for our PGG streams and in my mind it’s the theme of team Play Guilty Gear. Theo did it beautifully, working it into the buildup, and Okami paced the trailer out so that it came in for a brief moment of hopeful energy.
With the edits and music telling the story, I came in with some light writing to tie the story together. This writing ended up far more dramatic than I usually get, but RESSHOUMANIA is above all a stage for our players, so I had to match the energy I wanted to see. (The “taste your fear”/”scream your pain”/”love your hate” lines will also be great for the t-shirt design, IMO.) I also decided to open the trailer with the quote from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook to make both the homage and the theme explicit.
Finally, Irene’s art came in with more beautiful Oldboy homage — and, crucially, a more economical illustration wrt the time she had available to do this while juggling other work, and an easier illustration to translate over to our t-shirts. Last year’s RESSHOUMANIA art was incredible, but much harder and more expensive to get printed.
Now with the trailer out, we’re going to start taking match signups, and our players will have a chance to play out their revenge stories themselves! RESSHOUMANIA is named as such because it’s the endpoint for the stories that played out over the year, and where our new stories start. The rest of the Play Guilty Gear Chop Shop editing team is already cooking on some fun ideas for this year, and I cannot wait to see where we end up.
Less than two months until RESSHOUMANIA!
-patrick miller
