- He's on his stomach and you have the grunt going to punch him. Instead, why don't to have him grab him by the head and just kind of yank- - Rip off there? - Rip off the head. [clapperboard snaps] [grunting] - Pull, pull, pull, pull! Snaps neck, snaps neck! And, there you go! [hollering] - Nice. Good. - That looked good. [techno music] [suspenseful music] - Swing through. [grunts] - Dodge out of the way. Crack him out there. Wham! Right on the top of the head and crack the skull open that way. - [Glen] We ready to do some deaths today? - Yes, sir. - Hey, nice pajamas. [eerie music] - You are in our mo-cap stage. Only studio, AAA studio, in this whole area that has one of these. It's a big investment. It goes through the long way of having quality in your animations. - Set. - So we started with Byrd striking at Primo. Primo's going to use a player dodge to get out of the way. And action. Primo dodges. He strikes to the legs, which swipes him out. He comes up, crack, splits the head open. - Right, okay. - This is the environment we're thinking about having this take place in. Maybe we have him- - Wait, against the wall? - Yeah. Maybe drive him against the wall or something. - Yeah, I like that. I like that. - You like that idea? - Yeah, yeah. - Okay. - Actually, guys, let's try this. Let's bring a wall in. - Don't get hurt. - Alright. - Going up! Alright. - And there's our set. Compare that to movies, huh? [banging] [shotgun fires] - This is Chris Stone, he's a chief creative officer and, he was the one who kept telling me I need to buy one of these, so we did. This is Primo, Animation Director, and been working with you a long time. And Byrd here is new, but he knows how to run one of these and this is his office. Truth is, is that I get into the mo-cap room once in a while, but all I have to do is give them my direction and you know, 90% of the time they do it on their own. So the great thing is, I know I have the freedom to ask them to fix anything at any time. [grunting] [crashing] [grunting] - [Chris] Without a doubt, without this stage, we wouldn't be able to hit the quality that we want on this project. You know, having these guys suit up being able to do this stuff, being able to prototype character styles and things like that. You know, when you have a big whole monster with tentacles and giant arms, there's not reference for how that moves. So being able to have someone on the stage to move around figure that stuff out, you know it's pretty critical in, in finding that. What you see around here, every one of these little guys, the blue lights, those are our cameras. Those cameras are basically snapping somewhere in the neighborhood. 200 to 300 images every single second. From the second we hit record, those things strobe a light. Now, you can't see it with your eye, but the cameras are picking it up. And what they're doing is they're reflecting off of every single one of these little markers. Even on the virtual camera here, right? So as they move, for every second we're getting 300 samples of their motion. Same thing with this, you know, our virtual camera allows us to basically have a full virtual production studio here. So in the same way that a director would have a camera or a cinematographer would have a camera on a set, we use this on our motion capture stage. You know, what are those guys gonna look like? You know, I can see that over there. I can see that on my camera here and I know exactly what every single composition is going to be. So when Glen comes in, I can show him this and say, "Hey, thinking about something around in here for this kill. What do you think about that?" You know, I'd love to frame this a little bit more. Get a little tighter on Jacob's face. Get a little bit more of that baton splitting his head in half. We can see what that looks like right on the spot. So yeah, that's kind of it. Everything in this stage is markered up with these little markers, so we can track everything, weapons, guns, batons, you name it. We get everything we need. [machine opening] - No, no, no, no, no! [waves crashing] - [Glen] Over the last few years, I feel like we've gotten out of the uncanny valley, as we call it, for characters, right? This technology is the next step to immersion, realism, and that ultimate virtual character. - [Primo] As an animator, I mean I've been doing it for over 20 years, to get that realistic animation, I could do it, but it'll take me a week. But we come in here and get it knocked out in an hour. And as we said, the realism matches the technology we have now. We have no choice otherwise it won't match. It'll be cartoony in a realistic environment. So this is essential. - You know, we even had contortionist-type work done that was really great for some of our characters with just some twisting and arm bending and sometimes we'll have to put arm extensions on to be able to get this sort of long, big extended arm. Or we'll take sandbags and we'll weigh his body down and have him drag himself on his belly. And you know, that's actually one of the most fun parts of doing motion capture is figuring out creative ways to make things look strange and creepy. - We act to what we see on screen. So then I know for my stepping, I need to really accentuate my arms 'cause I see how it's working on the creature there. And we can also tune it real time. Can you have that elbow stick out more in just this pose? - Movies, it's just, what looks good through that frame? Video games, the player has control, they can move the camera around, they can see everything, so everything has to be a really high fidelity. You have to be able to have him do walk left, plant right, walk left, you know, while crouching and aiming. - [Chris] You know, it's actually blending to different motion capture that we've done that gives Jacob a real organic feel when moving through a world. Whether he is dragging his hand across a wall, or he's picking something off the ground or he is cracking someone's head open. All of those things kind of seamlessly blend together because of the amount of motion that we shoot. And we feel very strongly about every pose that our characters have. Should be a composition. - [Primo] I mean, like you saw, we were able to put a wall there, and then we interacted with the wall. So like this chair, we can place it in the world, put our hand on it but virtually, it can be a desk, it can be a barrel. - So all these cameras are, virtual cameras, are optical cameras. They're seeing the markers and that gives it positional data. So I'm able to tell that software, this is where the camera is relative to the scene and parent it to this mo-cap system that's driving it. - [Primo] In the past, I'll have my scene and then I'll animate the camera and the camera angles and I'll, you know consult with these guys. But now we can actually do a realistic camera move and it'll look real handheld, export that. And that's what you'll see in game. Again, it's fidelity, fidelity, fidelity. - From the early days of mo-cap when you would look at motion capture data and you're like, man I'm going to have to do some salvaging in here, like reconstruction. And you know, the feet never planted properly and you know, God forbid you actually touched something. I mean it was rough. You think about a film that runs at 24 frames a second, right? That's when you go to see a movie, that's how many frames of data you're seeing for every second. We're getting 300 frames for every second of action in here out of these cameras. That's how much data and fidelity we're getting with them moving around. If a grunt is grabbing Jacob and pinning him to the ground and putting his fingers into Jacob's eyes, like you are getting every motion in there. Every single exact motion relative to one another. I mean just that sort of fidelity and resolution. - Yeah, makes my job easier. - Makes it feel real. - It's what makes the game as immersive as it is. [horrific music] [stabbing] - [Glen] The way to look at it for quality is that we used to have to rent a mo-cap stage and we would get it once every five weeks for like, three days and we'd have to get all our shots done in those three days, every six, eight weeks. - Oh easily. - Now we can come here every day and just shoot one shot if we want. This is about quality and iteration which is the big part of video games. - [Chris] Yeah, without a doubt. When we would rent a stage, we would have to cram 100, 200 shots into a single day. But here at Glen's point, we can shoot something, we can get it in the game, we can look at it, be like, get rid of that, let's go back in tomorrow. Let's re-shoot it. Let's make it exactly what we want it to be. We've been doing that every day for three plus years now. - I know, I know. [screams] [gun fires] - [Chris] If after the fact we look at that that paired kill and we're like, you know what, I think the camera could be better here, we don't even need to re-shoot it. We can actually bring that animation data, that kill back up because I'm looking at that scene right through that screen. I can author a new camera on the fly for that same action that I might have shot two months ago. We run a vicon system in here, which is top of the line motion capture system. And it has what's called a live link with unreal engine which is what we use. We can bring our game levels right into the capture session. And again, that's not something we've ever been able to do. [grunting] We just made a big change to the way our weapons switching works because of feedback that we got about how it needs to function while moving and the speed and everything. And so on previous games we would've been like, there's no way. But we came in here, we shot some new actions for it, we plugged it in. We tried a few different versions very, very quickly. I mean, within a day. - I remember the crouch, we first put the crouch in and it looked hunched over or whatever and that was even mo-capped. But the person who did it didn't realize how they were doing it. Like they don't know that you got to be cool sometimes. It worked and all that, but they were like, don't worry, we got it. And next day we had a new crouch in there. [grunting] And then if we don't get them in, you know we have DLC. - [Chris] Yep. - [Glen] We'll be doing downloadable content after this. So as much as this equipment may have cost, it's paid for itself 10 times over. Really has. - Pull! Crack. Rip it off. - Okay. - In my 30 years, this has been the most difficult development I've ever had. At the same time, it's starting to feel really rewarding. We were here, what? Nine days, we moved into this? Nine days. - Yep. - We had to close down because of covid. We have what's, a new IP. We have a new company that owns us. We have a new team that we're building. We hired 140 people over covid. On top of that we have a new engine and a new game. And they were even able to, over Zoom and everything, mentor and teach some of the newer people. We got a bunch of people out of school and things like that. So, for us to be able to get this game out is just a huge, monumental task. It's all because of the team. One of the most talented teams we've ever worked with. We'll establish ourselves as a top tier studio. I know that. Again, you hire the right people and it all comes together.