Psychological horror legends Frictional Games were set to release SOMA on Xbox One and planned to include something called “Safe Mode,” which allowed the player to discover SOMA’s incredible storyline without having to be too concerned with monsters.
As there wasn’t a lot of new visual content with this release, I wanted to create a trailer that felt fresh and was entertaining as a standalone asset. I created a script featuring a mysterious AI purgatory and introduced a new character, The Interviewer: a program designed to judge empathy and the presence of human emotion.
To achieve this I took actor Stuart Gillies and filmed only his face in the darkness, then heavily processed the footage to make it feel like a simulation of an interview. From there I worked with Frictional to build out custom scenes, presenting assets from the game in a new way to illustrate the thought experiments that the Interviewer was suggesting.