The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show · published
Hey everyone! 👋
Today, we are excited to give you an inside look at the making of The Intern, the short film we released shortly before the launch of The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show, as part of our 10-year anniversary celebration. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to check it out first! 👇
Over half a million people have already watched the film across different platforms, witnessing how The Intern, by finding and collecting all the playing cards, was able to publish the Mr. Rabbit Magic Show just in time for you to play it! And now we’re excited to share how it all came together just in time for our 10-year anniversary celebrations!
The Idea
When we first conceived the idea of creating The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show to celebrate our 10th anniversary, we knew right away that we didn’t want it to be just a game. We wanted it to be something bigger, an experience. And that experience shouldn’t be as simple as a shadow game drop; it needed to be hidden inside a special announcement video, one that would fit well with the in-game content. That’s when the idea of pairing the game with a short film was born.
As most of you know by now (and if not, play the game before reading any spoilers), The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show takes a rather unexpected turn. What starts as a magic show glitches into something else entirely. Suddenly, you end up as The Intern in our office, completing all kinds of strange tasks to help prepare for our 10th anniversary celebration. This twist: dropping you as a fan or player directly in our workspace, was something we were excited about when designing this project. Our office feels like a museum full of Rusty Lake artefacts and has all the ingredients to be a full Cube Escape room, which nicely balances the smaller mini-games from the acts in the magic show. So when the game takes a turn to our office, we realised it would be a perfect fit to have the short film take place there as well. That way, viewers could already get a sneak peek into the place you later experience as a player.
Filming The Intern began less than three weeks before the official April 30th launch, so we were under quite some pressure! Luckily, we had a great team to pull this off. Marcos Lornes, whom we previously worked with on our Christmas teaser (and funny enough, also once applied for an internship at Rusty Lake), immediately said yes to becoming the director and editor of the short. During a chat about other ideas, we pitched this concept to him, and it just clicked. He quickly wrote a script that matched our vision for the project. We teamed up again with our main film crew: Juun Hoyng from Hoyng Images, who did all the filming at our actual office in A Lab. For the role of The Intern, Sem Roolvink was recommended to us through Emma Koveleva, one of our former UI/UX interns. Sem was a long-time fan of the series and was absolutely the perfect fit for this role. His energy, familiarity with the universe, and performance helped bring the whole Intern experience to life. The amazing soundtrack and audio atmosphere were crafted by Victor Butzelaar and Driftwood Audio, helping the film with the right mood and atmosphere.
Our few filming locations made it extra special:
Our very own Rusty Lake office in A Lab - as you have seen, it was rather empty that day, but here is where we create all the games and projects!
The Study Room scene was filmed by artist Britta Möller’s workspace in A Lab. It was the perfect setting for the start of the film. A big thank you to Britta for letting us borrow her space.
We also shot some exciting footage in the Metro and on the ferry as part of The Intern’s journey to the office.
The film was shot in just two days thanks to a small but incredibly talented crew – thank you all again! A Special thanks also to Bob Rafferty, who created three amazing merchandise advertisement videos that appear in the film when the in-game TV switches on. Bob did an incredible job to incorporate our merch collab with Lost in Cult: the remake of the Comic, the playing cards and the vinyl. Check out our behind-the-scenes video here!
The End?
After The Intern finally published the game, the film ends with a big surprise: the official trailer for The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show, shown live to thousands of fans on YouTube and Bilibili. At that exact moment, Mr. Rabbit Magic Show was released and ready to play on PC and mobile, on both iOS and Android!
We had a great time putting this 10th anniversary gift together, and we are incredibly grateful for the support and love from our amazing community.
So what’s next? Our upcoming title, Servant of the Lake, is now in full production, and yes, next to our secret teaser (which you can see after unlocking the secret safe in our in-game office), there will be more teasers coming out very soon. Don’t forget to wishlist the game if you haven’t already, and please stay tuned for Servant of the Lake updates on our Steam page or official blog
P.S. We’ll be at Gamescom with the very first demo of Servant of the Lake together with a very special object! We hope to see (some of) you there!