ABSTRACT
To the degree that character performance in shooter games is weak, it is often because of what was done in the motion-capture (mocap) sessions. Call it “performance capture” if you will, but the end products of the capture sessions are computer data and code. It is all about movement. Strong performance by the mocap actors is a secondary consideration, and, at any rate, some mocap directors lack directorial skill when it comes to actors. Many of them have never previously directed actors at all before arriving on the mocap set. If strong and experienced actors are in the cast, they will – all by themselves – motivate a lot of the movement, just because that is what actors are trained to do. If you instruct an actor to move from point A to point B on a set, she is going to ask, “Why?” If the answer
is, “Because I need that movement,” she will do her best to motivate the move, even if the motivation is not supplied in the script or by the director.
By the time the animators bring their talent to the project, the broad strokes of performance have, for better or worse, already been established during mocap and, to a lesser degree, in dialogue recording. Animators are put in the position of having to tweak and polish this already established performance. If allowed sufficient production time and resources, the animators can generally endow mocapped performance data with the blush of life. They can make a US$30 million game look like a US$50 million game by working with characters’ eye movements, eye contact, blinking, the currents of thought that happen in between and underneath the spoken lines and the continual unspoken motivating character cues.
