The main purpose of a debut trailer is to give you sense of remembrance for the media. Once you see a debut trailer it has to embed the content into your mind so that when the property releases, you remember it. Well, there's no denying that Dead Island's debut trailer was one worth remembering, and it's a trailer gamers are still talking about to this very day.
Nevertheless, this was another hard decision because the debut trailer category consisted of amazing debut trailers, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Epic Games' real-time next-gen trailer called The Samaritan, which showed off dazzling new features for the Unreal Engine 3. However, only one trailer created waves like no other trailer this year and that honor goes to Dead Island.
Directed by Stuart Aitken from Axis Studios and made in collaboration with Deep Silver, the Dead Island debut cinematic sequence easily surpassed 2 million views shortly after it went online and within two days movie studios were vying for the rights to the Dead Island movie license.
Deep Silver's global business development director and acting producer on the project, Malte Wagener, stated that...
“We set out to create a rather unique trailer concept that would focus on delivering emotion and atmosphere while transporting the key elements and features of Dead Island. With the help of Axis and the great collaboration between our cinematic Director, Anton Borkel and his team and Axis’ own Stuart Aitken, we ended up creating something that was a breathtaking combination of pictures, story and music which formed an atmosphere of intensity that – for us – was beyond words.” ... “Axis exceeded all our high expectations and then some on this project and really hit this one out of the park.”
The reverse sequencing for the following trailer easily makes it one of the artsy videos where you're first trying to figure out what's going on and how it ends up the way it does, but eventually as the whole story quickly unfolds you can see how it's both fascinating and saddening. I can't tell you how many times I watched and rewatched this mesmerizing trailer. Once it starts it grips you like nothing else and hands down, this has to be the coolest debut trailer of 2011 and deservedly so.
