Beautiful Battlefield ‘Trailer’ Was Shot Entirely Using Unsuspecting Real Players

By day, Gage Allen makes video game trailers. But for this Battlefield clip, he wanted to do something different. Instead of carefully staging every shot and lining everything up just right, he tried to just play Battlefield, capture a ton of footage of random strangers running around and see what he could do with it.

Turns out he could do something gorgeous:

It’s lovely to look at, but I’m here for the fly-on-the-wall nature of the footage. “If you played Battlefield 1 or Battlefield V anytime in December or January”, Allen says, “you may be in this.”

“Battlefield is known for massive moments of scale. Destruction, online operations, and war stories”, he writes of the video. “The trailers are meticulously crafted – from cinematics to online gameplay where every player is an actor that is being directed to do a specific action. But what would it be like if you didn’t coordinate anything? Could something created entirely from random multiplayer matches – with no players aware their actions were being filmed – still deliver an original story with emotional weight? And finally, how good could you make that look? This was the challenge I took on in this short film.”

Allen did a lot of the work singlehandedly, from the writing to the VFX to the audio mix. You can see more of his trailer work at his YouTube page.