Back in February of this year Oats Studios – a project by Neill Blomkamp to make high quality short films on YouTube – released Conviction, a very short film centred around the game Anthem which was then rebranded to simply being a trailer.

While that video is just shy of four minutes, the studio has released a huge 28-minute long behind the scenes featurette which you can watch in the embed below.

While it may be a bit crazy that this extra piece of media is several times longer than the finished product, it really shows how much work, effort and talent went into the production.

What’s initially surprisingly about the behind the scenes footage is just how much of the trailer is practical. Many of those Javelin suits were actually made as static props and the production was done on location in both Spain and Hawaii.

Aside from just making props, there’s some unique physical stuff in there too, such as the team studying motion capture actors in a vertical wind tunnel to properly animate flying in the Javelins.

Two things become clear when you get to the end of this video is that a lot of money was spent on the production, and there must have been more planned in terms of filming Anthem live action content.

While that latter statement is more conjecture on our part, we just don’t see why EA would have spent so many resources to get just one short trailer made. With Anthem not being the most popular game right now – to be very kind – we’re probably not going to see more like this unless there’s an Anthem 2 on the horizon.

Regardless, we really like the work of Oats Studios and this behind the scenes stuff is always interesting even if you’re not particularly interested in the nitty gritty of production like working through a torrential downpour on a shooting location.