“There are no gods here. There are only monsters.” Platige Image and CD PROJEKT RED on the Production of The Witcher 4 Trailer

Platige Image and CD PROJEKT RED published behind-the-scenes footage from the production of the cinematic trailer for The Witcher 4. In the video, the creators explain the origin of the presented story and reveal what technological solutions were used in the production of the trailer.

The official cinematic trailer for The Witcher 4 premiered on December 12th, 2024, during The Game Awards gala. The game will be a continuation of one of the highest-rated productions in history, and it will launch the new Witcher saga with Ciri as its protagonist.

Different from Geralt

The plot of the new trailer centers around two characters. Mioni, a young girl resigned to her fate, and Ciri, a witcher who rejects the village’s bloody tradition. In the trailer, both characters are each other’s mirror images.

“The time has come to focus the story on Ciri, who is determined to follow the witcher’s path. Mioni saying goodbye to her father feels very personal to her because she senses the same thing she has been struggling with all her life, the almost constant weight of other people’s expectations,” says Sebastian Kalemba, Game Director of The Witcher 4. 

“Ciri practically feels what Mioni probably does. Duty, something she had grown up with, and the sense that you should act in a certain way, even though deep inside you feel that it is wrong. Their short interaction in the woods, when Ciri tells her ‘Save yourself!’ are the words that could have been spoken by an older sister, a friend, or someone equally close. She speaks those words because she knows perfectly well how Mioni feels and that her life is much more important than the sense of duty with which she had been brought up,” says Tomek Suwalski, Director from Platige Image.

Bauk from the far North

The scale of the project was enormous — starting with a story created jointly by CD PROJEKT RED and Platige Image, followed by a 14-day-long mocap session,  stunt team coordination, and the entire production process. What merits particular mention is the process of creating the monster animation.

“We wanted the Bauk to look just right, so we created an animation bible for its character. We divided it into several parts: the head resembling a goblin’s, a snakelike neck, front paws similar to a jaguar’s but with scorpion pincers, and hind legs and the tail of a dinosaur.  That allowed us to prepare documentation and make sure that the result will match the initial premise,” comments Maciej Pietras, Animation Director at CD PROJEKT RED.

“We created a physical model of Bauk’s head and arms that required four operators. You could say that we’ve recreated the entire monster. We prepared a sequence of movements, we did test choreography and it was a success — it looks fantastic on the screen,” says Maciej Kwiatkowski, Stunt Coordinator at Alpha 7.