The Witcher 4 reveal trailer took 14 days of mocap, and CD Projekt wants you to think about what happened after it ended

The Witcher 4 reveal at the 2024 Game Awards was a very big deal, and appropriately the trailer setting the stage for CD Projekt’s next big adventure was long and elaborate, offering a look at Ciri’s complicated life on the path. In a video released today, CD Projekt served up a behind-the-scenes look at the trailer’s creation, which was itself a long and elaborate process that among other things required a whopping 14 days of mocap.

There’s a lot to see in the video, from the themes CD Projekt aims to embrace in the new Witcher game to the mechanics of bringing the monstrous bauk to life, a process that involved four operators swinging around a physical mockup of the creature’s shoulders and arms. “On the screen, we saw in real-time a moving bauk,” stunt coordinator Maciej Kwiatkowski says. “We created a witcher-style sequence, just practiced it a couple times—we practiced how to move the bauk, how to synchronize—and it worked. It worked beautifully.”