This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In 2004, Brendan McNamara launched Sydney-based games studio Team Bondi. His inaugural title, 40s detective thriller LA Noire, was to be a cinematic affair, starring the likes of
Mad Men's Aaron Staton, and its action was to centre around solving crimes by reading body language. "But I'd been doing motion capture in games for a long time," explains McNamara. "And nothing came close to the real thing. There wasn't any subtlety, it was too static."
The solution? Team up with Grand Theft Auto publishers Rockstar, ditch the animation studio for a film set, and replace wholly CGI game characters with real actors. As a first step, the cast donned motion-capture suits and acted out every scene on a custom sound stage, overseen by Mad Men director Michael Uppendahl. This logged each actor's movement and relative position in real space, and provided vital eye-line references. For the props and costumes, McNamara's team imported real clothes into the game using a laser scanner.
Next, each cast member was given an appropriately 40s hairstyle before entering the MotionScan studio, where they individually delivered their lines again.
The rig uses a 360-degree set-up of 32 cameras grouped into pairs to capture a performance from the neck up. The footage creates an exact 3D mesh overlay of every facial nuance -- meaning what you see isn't strictly animation, but more like a converted film sequence. Bondi filmed almost 400 actors. "Every single person you talk to [in the game] is a real person," says McNamara. "There's a level of humanity that's hard to walk away from." Sounds like life in the valley just got a little more uncanny.
LA Noire is out on Xbox and PS3 later this year.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
