Game promos can sometimes feel like corporate clickbait made in Unreal Engine, but giving Nobody director Ilya Naishuller free rein to sell World of Tanks: HEAT to gamers starts feeling less like a glossy sales video and more like someone handed the filmmaker a pile of tanks, a punk track and complete freedom to make the most chaotic two minutes imaginable, and honestly, that’s probably not far from the truth.
Best known for using GoPro cameras to film Hardcore Henry and the brutally fun Nobody, film director Naishuller brings the same energy and 'how did they even shoot that?' camera work to World of Tanks – hint: it's pre-rendered. But the team still needed to mix the director's style for unique camera motion and shot building with the technology, which meant not using Wargaming’s engine.
“The only things we used from Wargaming are the character and tank assets, which we upgraded for the purpose of the video. We did not use Wargaming’s engine,” he says, revealing the desire was to bring his style to bear.
“Yes, outside of some of the wilder shots, the storyboards mimicked how I would shoot this practically.” For Naishuller, what makes a trailer stick now isn’t realism or fidelity; it’s surprise, energy, and finding new ways to mess with the format. “Apart from the obvious answer, IP that we personally care about, it’s playing with formats, surprising the audiences with great executions of fresh ideas.”
Read more about Naishuller's approach to making the World of Tanks: Heat trailer below, or read up on the future of game engines in the news of Unreal Engine 6.
Creative Bloq: The trailer feels closer to a music video than a military promo. Was that intentional?
Ilya Naishuller: Yes. It also matches the gameplay vibes of a fun, more arcade experience. A serious and grounded militaristic trailer would have been interesting to make, but it’d be selling a very different game.
CB: How do you shoot tanks so they feel emotional and characterful rather than just like heavy machinery?
IN: There’s that annoying directorial answer that’s about finding truth in the metal, etc., but honestly, it’s a lot simpler, at least for me. I think of the emotions that I want the audience to feel, and combine that with visuals that appeal to me personally, and try to keep both as fresh as I can. In the case of this trailer, I wanted big, juicy action shots with understandable geography, easy-to-follow characters and the predicaments they need to shoot or think their way through, add a simple, yet hopeful poignancy and set it in an environment that I’d want to drive around, under sunny conditions. Once you aim for an overall feel, everything starts to fall into place. The key is making sure the rest of my team understands exactly what we’re going for.
CB: Did you approach World of Tanks: HEAT more like directing an action film or choreographing combat gameplay?
IN: It’s the first, but with complementary add-ons from the gameplay. Meaning that I was using shots and camera moves that I’d refrain from using in live action, as I believe that while shots that grab your attention are certainly cool, they’re also capable of stealing attention from the things that matter in a film to a degree that I’d rather avoid. But if we’re asking people to watch a two-minute commercial, you better grab ‘em, and within reason, the goalposts of ‘obvious, distracting, attention-grabbing’ have to move.
CB: There’s a strong first-person game energy in the camerawork. Is this like going full circle from game camera work influencing your films to now influencing your game work?
IN: I think that all creatives, whether we like it or not, are influenced to a certain extent by everything that we see, hear and otherwise absorb. I spend too much of my time playing games, so the language of video game action has been a part of my vocabulary for most of my life. It’s the chicken or the egg question, but this time, the chicken is the egg and vice versa.
CB: How much of the trailer existed first as music and rhythm before the visuals?
IN: Visuals inform rhythm on this one, since it’s a two-minute piece of heavily concentrated action juice. The band and I wrote the song after the cut was completed, basing it on a demo of a punk verse we had many years back.
CB: What can game trailers do visually now that films still struggle to achieve?
IN: Visually, both formats can do almost everything. For me, the downsides for both are that games still struggle with faces and truly dramatic actor deliveries, and real cinematography is expensive. However, I think the main advantage that game trailers (and cutscenes) have is their ability to go wilder with tones and ideas than major films can. Again, due to the massive costs of filming, which get in the way of more out-there ideas.
CB: You used tech like GoPro to make Hardcore Henry. Is there other tech you’re keen to look at using in the future, or, in fact, could you imagine making a film in a real-time engine like Unreal?
IN: I am proud of Hardcore Henry and making what seemed to be no more than a gimmicky experiment into an actual working film, but it’s too early in my film career to grow tired of classic filmmaking and go all in on exploring new technical frontiers. Advances in tech excite me, but only as additions to the tools that I already have.
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