God of War: Breathing New Life into a Hardened Spartan

[Music] all right so my name is bruno velazquez i'm the animation director at sony santa monica uh i've been with the studio since uh 2006 so i had a long relationship with kratos about 13 years or so my first game at the studio was god of war ii and that was a great experience working with corey barlog as a game director and for this latest project i had the opportunity to work with him again which was great uh this is my first animation boot camp so this is amazing that i get to be here with all of you guys uh talk about animation it's amazing i'm so happy to be here so thank you for having me and the name of my talk is god of war breathing new life into a hardened spartan so uh god of war it's a franchise from sony it's uh on the eighth game now uh the the latest one came out last year

and a certain centers around a uh spartan named kratos uh the first seven games pretty much uh delved into uh greek mythology and the latest one we decided to take it into the north realm now one of the biggest things when corey barlog first set off to give us the mission on how we were going to make this game one of the challenges for animation was how we're going to reimagine cradles how we're going to present them a new light we kind of wanted to not completely throw everything away that we did in the past before but we want to kind of depict them in a new light present them in a new way for new audiences and also to please the fans that had been with us for so long so our first mission was to reimagine kratos how we were going to do that so most everybody knows cradles this way they remember him from the previous games

in the path of vengeance and rage and destruction um you know he was that was that's a was his mission right it was to get revenge to get paid back from the gods so in order to kind of change a little bit of that perception we needed to focus on the humanity so we need to make a conscious effort on how we're going to show more of the human side of kratos so from an animation standpoint we that was a very interesting challenging for us so when you think of a character like the hulk i had to make my own drawing just to be safe don't want to get make anybody mad at me but uh when you think of a character like the hulk you know there's two sides of them right there's there's a hulk side the angry green guy and then there's banner there's a human side so what we needed to do was uh explore that for kratos you know those cradles what about kratos does

kratos have that side were see all just full of rage right so if you look back into the previous games there were little glimpses of that humanity you know we didn't show them very often but it was a little bit right um he at one point wanted to save his brother um wanted to to rescue him once he found out that he was still alive um his brother demos was you know fought alongside with him for a little bit before he lost him again there was moments where he showed uh compassion and care for his family you know even though he ended up tragically by mistake killing them but there was glimpses there that he you know he missed them he wanted to embrace them maybe with them once again and of course the moment of regret and remorse where he pretty much wanted to end it all he wanted to move on um he couldn't deal with it so definitely as much as we showed moments of uh of power and strength and cradles there was also a little bit of of the

human side kind of sprinkled throughout the games you know it wasn't all about ripping people's heads off well actually it kind of was most of the time right but we had to basically ask ourselves how are we going to go from this to something like this where chris is going to be a teacher a mentor a protector that was just something that you know we hadn't done much of before so one of the first things that we did is we looked at uh his proportions um if we wanted to have someone that people can sympathize with more we need to re revisit the way he looked a bit this is kratos from the previous games the proportions are a bit wacky i gotta admit you know he's got super long arms super long legs a tiny head i mean look at his hands he can he can crush his own head you know just it's it's a little bit off right but

in the end for what we needed these proportions for it kind of worked out you know he we were going for more of this comic book over the top style in the previous games so those proportions kind of read well in the poses that we needed him to be not to mention that the perspective of the game was so much farther away so he needed to read a lot clearer so those proportions worked well now one of the first things i did um once corey gave me the direction of like well you know he's going to be a father figure he's gonna have a son um so i just kind of scrambled and and looked for some old models or just grabbed whatever we had at the time at the beginning of the project started posting cradles out in this different situations in this case i just grabbed actually that's his uh his brother demos as a kid so it's a little weird to have you know his younger younger brother there but that was all we had to represent the treyas at the time

so in these um you know i kind of just wanted to explore uh what it was feel like uh for kratos to be a protector and also a teacher and a mentor um so here are some early poses of of him teaching the son how to how to hunt how to use the bow and also a situation which you would never really see in the previous games just sitting down and talking having a conversation eating and drinking when did kratos ever do that right so we wanted to to start exploring those things but as you can see uh the proportions you know the old models yeah it still was a little bit off so as the script uh progressed um there was a couple of scenes that we found that about where kratos you know the sun was going to be sick at one point cradles had to put his hand on his son's shoulder at one point even though it took him a little bit of time to do that in the game he was also meant to carry him at one point in his back during the climbing sequences so so i

started posting posting this uh old models and as you can see yes the proportions needed some some development in order for for him to feel a little bit more human so the concept art team started working on that as you can see this is very uh some early concept where he started to they started taking inspiration from the previous games and the way that he looked i started adding the beard starting adding the norse motifs to him and as you can see he has a bit more of a human proportions a little bit closer to a more relatable human um even his weapon as you can see at the at the early stages there was no it wasn't a magical axe it was just a simple weapon that he was to use um the direction of the game early on was very grounded uh it's meant to be a lot more realistic and uh in in the early beginnings as as i will show you um some of the early animation was very

grounded and and more um not as sort of over top as it ended up being so we had to dial that in to make it uh to make it work with the direction of the game here's a shot of the 3d model as it was making progress this is around the time of the e3 reveal in 2016. the first time that we showed kratos to the public the new cradles emerging from the shadows so as you can see already he was starting to feel a little more more human you know then than how we previously depicted him but of course he needed to again interact with the son so even though um he had more human uh like proportions now he still needed to feel like a giant amongst men so even the interactions with the sun you know while they worked in the game he was still a pretty large large man

the next thing that we needed to look into was a posing you know how are we gonna create our poses in our animation to best depict cradles in this new light you know older grounded uh sort of more weathered warrior so looking back at the previous uh games this are some of the poses that you know we went for more you know heavy metal magazine cover type of look comic book over the top and many of these poses what's interesting about these poses is that many of these poses were done by the animators so we did not really want other teams like marketing teams working on our poses as much as possible because we wanted to maintain the feel of the character throughout even in marketing so i'm sure you know many of you guys have spent so much time posting developing bass poses for your characters combat

poses and then all of a sudden marketing comes back with these uh t-shirts and you're like wait who who made that pose you know where did that come from and that that you know that's pretty horrifying so we definitely wanted to maintain that uh across not only the game but marketing materials as well so taking this concept of this over the top poses we needed to apply those to our older hardened spartan so while we did not push it as far as we did in the previous games we still had hints of that you know as you can see in the uh his blocking pose still needed to be dynamic and strong and grounded but a little more grounded than before and even when he interacts with uh with enemies and kills them um yes it's a bit over the top but it's a little bit more grounded than it used to be before so we needed to keep that in mind as we were posing anything that had to do with kratos you know animation combat idols anything

he's not quite as hunched down as he used to be overall that was one of the main things we didn't want to get him as low as he was in the previous games another aspect of um of grounding cradles was atreus so kratos was there to help his son teach him how to be a god how to be a warrior how to survive but at the same time the importance of atreus was there to make critters feel more human in the previous games kratos would walk around and meet people and maybe say a word and then kill them most of the time so we needed to have an emotional anchor uh atreus was basically there to be the eyes and the voice of the player you know kratos would not when he would travel in the previous games he didn't wonder where this uh you know statue came from or or or what it said on what message was

written on the wall so um by presenting atres and then partnering him up with cradles we were able to you know sort of get conversations actually happening between two characters which just didn't happen before and this way uh our goal was for the player to get to know kratos a little more and to get kratos out of his comfort zone and by having a young son there that he needed to look after and interact with that was uh it offered a lot of opportunities for us to do that now a bit of the studio culture too you know as the studio grew and the team grew so did we and many of the team members became parents we got married had kids and that kind of changed the way we we saw things you know we wanted to tell different types of stories as well so this is part of the big influence of why we decided to reimagine kratos and make them more relatable previously it was like the greek era is

kind of like the college years right you know a little having a little more fun well you know not that we're not having fun still but uh the norse era is a bit more like okay you know let's uh let's try to tell uh some different stories that you know perhaps we can share with our kids someday as well without being too embarrassed not that the previous games are embarrassing but you know i would definitely wait a while before i ever show my daughters those games that's for sure and i would have to explain a lot of things so kratos uh was also meant to be a father once more uh we thought that that was the best way for him to have an arc of redemption um to have a someone that you need to care for and that was the best way to for people to sympathize with him so speaking about the animation style we needed to make a switch in our

animation style if we wanted to depict kratos in a more relatable way this is why early on we decided to look into motion capture so the previous god award games were primarily a keyframe about 90 percent was all keyframe 10 motion captured and the motion capture was reserved for the cinematics mainly but everything else including facial animation was keyframed all the bosses combat enemies all the kratos moves and here's some examples of some of the early keyframe animation that we did from the previous games as you can see the the moves are a little bit more arcadey over the top um often we you know especially with the blades we could just create massive arcs where we didn't have to worry about the camera and uh and often we defied the loss of gravity but once we moved into motion capture we

learned a lot we learned a lot about the process because we hadn't really used it for combat before so here's an example of a move and this is a data from footage from the motion capture stage this is the data as you can see it got us about you know 80 of the way right and then our animation team would go in and uh enhance it without the keyframe knowledge and experience we were unable to do it now these moves are uh at 60 they're actually exported uh with a lot more frames because then once we get into the game the fidelity of the of the chain blades would would read a lot better that's why we had to export those with a little bit higher frame rate and of course motion capture gave us the fidelity for scenes like this where we really needed to express a little bit more emotion to try to get kratos to uh feel more relatable so motion capture motion capture gave us

um a bit of a shortcut to get to that a lot faster we still had to do a cleanup pass and then keyframe pass and enhance pass on most of our cinematics but without essentially the amount of the with the amount of scenes that we had to do it would have taken a lot longer to keyframe out everything it just wouldn't have been possible so how do we get a team of keyframe animators to to jump on board with this notion of hey we're going to introduce motion capture into this you know it was it was tough at first you know i mean we as animators we we love to just keyframe everything as much as we can but motion capture is a tool um and the way we convince them is we bought an accent suit and we gave it to the animators like here let's let's just try some stuff and what happens when you give a more capsule to an animator this happens

[Music] yes so hr didn't know a lot of the stuff was going on upstairs um we would have had to sign all kinds of waivers but yeah we liked it so much that we ended up getting a second suit so that we can do this kind of like paired up moves and uh and by involving the animators in this process um it actually you know got them to kind of start jumping on board i was like okay i okay i see how this works i get to shoot the data and you know i drive the performance a bit and and then i get to clean it up and i get to enhance it and push it so it's not like i'm eliminating you know my my role my job i'm actually enhancing it

and then i'm getting a lot of data a lot faster and getting me about 80 of the way and then we would go in add the extra layer of awesomeness to it with keyframe so um yeah this is me also i decided to jump in and and try to suit myself um but early on um having said that early on like i mentioned before the direction of the game was to be a lot more greedier and grounded and heavier and slower so this is some of the first bit of data so yeah this is uh exclusive kratos killing kratos um and yeah and like as you can see the axe was just a basic axe there was nothing fancy about it it was you know it was meant to be just this you know really gritty game um so after we had the extent suits we decided okay well you know let's try this for real let's go over to the mocap stage but we felt we needed to try it out ourselves so this is erica pinto our lead cinematics animator

and merisef our lead gameplay animator so we decided to go on stage ourselves and shoot a scene so the first scene that we collaborated on that we did together was the ogre intro there's a moment in the game where this guy comes through the door and attacks kratos in the trailers so i was kratos maddie was the ogre erika is atreus in this case and i just realized that medi is actually holding a cell phone so i don't know why an ogre would need a cell phone but yeah he's just snuck in there so um so what we did in order to approach this because um another part of the mandate was to do this as a one-take game and i'll talk a little bit more about that uh in a later slide we decided to go and shoot this in live action first and rehearse it and really rehearse it over and over and over and over um and then before we took it to the

stage so i'll just show you this video and walk you through it so this is the footage of us rehearsing uh the whole scene yeah we had to get creative with the scale with the sizes to represent the sizes as best as possible um and that was definitely fun and challenging now this is the the footage the video footage feed that was on stage um and this is how you see the the scene being shot in motionbuilder the bushel builder feed now the tricky thing about this scene is that even though everything looks lined up with the camera the characters are interacting they were all different sizes so we got to the stage we we had to deal with it we actually had to shoot the scene in separate spaces so that the scale in relative world space and we had to rehearse it in the way that we were interacting with each other but apart from each other now as you can see there um dory who's the director of photography is holding a marker this is

before we had a virtual camera and he was actually walking around pointing the the marker and looking at the screens up on top to get his framing right right so that he can frame all three of us so he was using kratos as the anchor for the scene and just in order for us to be able to interact with each other in different scales we had to do that in our own separate acting spaces now what that got us was a scene that had all the characters in a relatively solid timing with the camera all in one right and that is when mehdi had to come in and do the keyframe pass on top but without this early sort of rough block out of the scene it just would have taken a lot longer to do a lot longer to pull off so he had a very solid base to go off of and this is what the final scene ended up looking like

now [Music] [Music] oh [Music] so it was definitely a lot of fun to do that and uh we got to learn a lot and as leads if we went through the process understood the process then we can better um you know have our animators join in with us and help us out to get this done definitely uh you know it went a little bit up to our heads but then after doing a full day of shooting we realized that we can't do this ourselves we need we need experts we need professionals to help us do this but it was great to at least go through

that process once and and and figure out how it all works so the benefits of motion capture for us it gave us a solid foundation for our keyframe animators to push things a lot further we were able to complete over three hours of cinematics in our game without motion capture just would have been really tough and acquiring motion captured data allowed us to focus on you know other cool things like stuff that couldn't be motion captured like these scenes that are uh mostly all keyframed so the dragon is all keyframed uh kratos in the trails is a combination of keyframe and motion capture and of course there's no way you can mocap this guy and those guy in kratos intro is flying through the air definitely keyframe as well so it just freed us up it freed us up to do a lot more of this stuff so moving a little bit over to the narrative process we also needed to revisit our narrative

process to see how we're gonna depict cradles in a more relatable way so early on in the project uh corey he had the idea in the mandate of i want to do this entire game as a one it's a water and the reason for that is he wanted to essentially sell the player on the idea of you're there with cradles in atreus every step of the way there's no like cutting away to mean time in the bad guy's lair you know he's you know making his plan over there no no he wanted you to be there alongside cradles for the entirety of the trip so that it felt like you were there taking the trip alongside with them and this was done to you know to enhance the personal narrative between kratos sin and his son so early on we started how many of you guys have seen the movie hard-boiled show of hands okay all right not as many

as expected but that's okay so we looked at a lot of films that had uh you know that had scenes that had no cuts in them for reference and inspiration but there's one particular scene in the movie called hardboil it's directed by john wu it's a hong kong action film now i was unable to secure their rights to show you the scene so i'll quickly describe it really quickly just to make my point so in it uh it's there's two detectives two police officers there's one named tequila i mean that's his nickname tequila and the other one's alan so they're going through this hospital having this intense shootout all the sudden elevator door opens alan looks over shoots someone that's coming out of the elevator and then realizes that he's wearing an id he's a police officer he just shot a police officer so he's in shock so his partner tequila grabs him drags him into the elevator the elevator door closes and he's just sitting there i can't

believe i just had a police officer this is i can't believe i just did tequila says don't worry about it it wasn't a police officer don't worry we need to get out of this thing we need to survive this you gotta keep focus on on getting keeping us alive so the elevator doors open they go out another insane shootout happens and soon after tequila says oh by the way the thing that happened way earlier in the film i kind of shot a cop too by mistake and i know it feels horrible you know i i can relate to you and then alan says wait a minute so you're saying that the guy i just shot in the elevator was a police officer yeah yeah it was right and then they go back to insane shootout now everything i just described was all done without any cuts and all with practical effects without any cuts so how can we take that so we saw that and we're like okay that's an amazing scene it had action almost like gameplay and went into

a shocking moment for one of the characters realizing that he just killed a fellow police officer he gets you know uh consoled by his friend and then his friend reveals to him that hey i went through the same thing and then back to action so we wanted we got inspired by that we're like that's amazing they were able to pull it off just as one scene now how can we do it for the whole game so this is one of the first scenes uh early on and um the e3 demo that we showed that kind of has a bit of that going from action to an emotional moment back to action off the ice

i am so sorry i your dear is getting away yes sir so without cutting away we were able to have uh action uh a moment a teaching moment where critics trying to teach the sun to take out the creature to a honest mistake by atreus to a moment of bonding between them you know so that was definitely something that we wanted to carry on throughout the entire game so we needed help so we um we brought in dory arasi he's a director of photography to help us get the everything that was on the script um planned out and laid out in a way that we can actually execute the one take within the cinematics so if um if you guys have the time to

spare definitely on uh wednesday uh if you have a chance to go see his talk he's gonna dive a little deeper into the emotional connection through uh the cinema cinematography and in our game so please if you have a chance to go check it out um because of this one take approach we had to uh we basically had to shoot our scenes more like a play we had to think of a more of a play than a movie everything had to be done rehearsed very well and very closely because we wanted to we wanted you to have the experience of watching a play that was happening in front of you being in the play that was happening in front of you rather than watching a movie right so that was one of the mandates this is why we had to kind of start thinking about plays rather than film when we got inspired our inspirations um and because of this we had to do a

lot of key a lot of previous lots and lots and lots of previous and we employed all sorts of methods for different situations so when we had things that were just impossible to shoot or where characters had to cover large distances we used the keyframe method this is a scene in which kratos is pushing a large hammer and him and his son are writing it down all the way so they could shatter the ice below but yeah this is no way we could have done this in any other way to visualize how we were going to do it the other method was we were fortunate enough to have a small motion capture space also within our studio where we could do previous we could do you know just simple motions before we went over to the main main stage so there were situations where we needed to previous um characters interacting with the environment or interacting with certain uh creatures that we just you know needed

to do it in 3d so yeah that's uh we needed to figure out the scale of this boar we need to figure out where freyja was going to be interacting on the shelves where the characters need to be standing and placed so this was how we would show this to our director before we get approval and then finally my favorite way of doing previous was live action where the animators had the opportunity to have a bit of fun and this is uh just one of the previous scenes that we did out of many many scenes the reason why we use uh live action was because we could then go outside go upstairs shoot a couple of scenes very quickly show them to the director get feedback and within the same day we can go shoot him again and if he hit more feedback for that we could shoot it again and then it was just it was just cost effective and the speed of it was was great and on top of that we had to have a lot of fun that was something

that might catch oh that was a perfectly good waste of a nap how do you not see there is nowhere to hide up here it's it's a trick my people have a special way of not being seen you can turn invisible more like i can step into the realm between realms and your mind can't understand what it's seeing so it actually sees nothing at all it's how we avoid using the weapons that we actually crap but it doesn't seem to work on dragon's den your brother wanted to know if you're eating well i can tell him that you are brock asked about me was there mead on his breath you let him work on this again come on

so we have a couple of dwarf characters in our game so if you're wondering why this walking around on his knees that's why so we can get the scale approximation right so shameless plug number two um if you have the chance to also go see erica pintos talk she's the lead narrative animator and she will dive a little bit deeper into the process cinematic process a lot more than i am doing here so continuing on with this principle of of shooting everything as a play because of that it became very apparent that we needed to focus on rehearsal a lot more we couldn't just have actors show up the day of shooting so we did a lot of table reads a rehearsal day will look like in the morning get everybody together on the same page read all read the script get everything planned out and then we would go step by step through each scene and dory would film them live action

takes of of every scene and then rehearse with them the blocking the staging the the beats uh connected to their dialogue where they needed to be when they needed to be at certain positions and here's a bit of the rehearsal footage that we did for the opening of the game so you some of you guys who may have played the game will recognize this from the opening and action this is the opportunity to get notes over to the actors to dialed in all the performances also to work out where all our props are going to be one big one

and block out the timing of the camera so that rehearsal day became very critical so on shooting day we did a all-in-one approach we captured the body data the face data the face cams we did audio recording um so for the final performance i mean we did have some adr sessions but yeah we pretty much got most of the dialogue on set and also the virtual camera so by the time a scene was delivered to us everything was pretty much dialed in with the with the timing that we wanted so here's an example of uh of us shooting a scene uh corey is back there with the with the writers with the writers overseeing the sim delivery and uh they get we get to see everything through motionbuilder as is being shot so as you can see this is a careful

rehearsed dance between the actors and dory to ensure that we hit the beats accurately and our goal is to do it all in one take so another important part of the process was casting getting the right chemistry between our actors to make craters feel more human the anchor emotional anchor was going to be atreus luckily we were able to find the right people for the job uh christopher judges kratos and sonny soldiers atreyus and um once we got them together to do their chemical chemistry uh sorry chemistry test as you i will show you in a second once we got that we knew we had the right people also something that helped us out was

even though we weren't casting for height it ended up being that our two star pretty much felt like kratos and the trailers as it is they were the right right height uh and then that made the cleanup process and adjustment process a lot a lot simpler once we did the motion capture now one of the things that people like to say is that oh don't work with animals don't work with kids but um for us it was there was no other way to go then to actually you know get a child actor there's no way that a i feel that a adult could pretend a hundred percent to be a kid and it was it became apparent early on after we brought sonny in this is one time we were just at state at the stage started messing around i might have said to hit play on the recording maybe maybe i did maybe i didn't but um but yeah definitely this kind of uh this kind of you know childlike movement

you're not going to get this from from an actor from an adult actor it'll be a lot tougher you know it'll be a lot tougher for sure so this is why this is why it was important for us to to bring in sunny and to work with them now as i mentioned before the chemistry test we actually hired atreus first we found sunny first uh since he was going to be the emotional anchor for the game and then we brought the actors that were trying out for the part of kratos to do the chemistry chemistry test with him to see if it was going to work i'm not fit to be a father i cannot change i have become everything i never wanted you to be run run far away from me but you have changed you're not a monster that is exactly what i am not to

me you will fail how you deal with it is what makes you stronger my father taught me that yeah so when we saw this i mean you should lead the way we had the right people all right so moving uh over to the combat animation process i want to talk a little bit about that um early on one of the things that was thrown out the door was the blaze of chaos so the blaze of chaos have a lot of

history they have a lot of baggage with cradles so what better way to present the character in a new light then start stripping away some of the things that were present in his past so early on we decided that and it was very scary like how you how you remove the lightsaber from luke right like no you want to you want to try to maintain as much as a character as possible but by stripping away these weapons it made them feel maybe a little bit different more vulnerable in a way but at the same time we wanted to replace those weapons with another iconic weapon so this is why we decided to create an axe which is um a little bit more it fits a little bit better within the norse mythology that we were moving on to and it sort of uh fits the you know the fantasy of my owner in a way the thor's weapon thor's hammer where you can throw it and summon it but it wasn't like that at the beginning like i mentioned before

the moves were supposed to be very grounded and methodical and not not very magical at first because the game direction was to be a lot grittier but as we play tested and we moved forward we discovered that hey we need to kind of inject back a little bit of the old god of war games into it so here's another pass an early animation where we started like getting a little bit more of that old kratos movement back one of the things you notice is that he's actually throwing the axe as a boomerang um this is when we start introducing some of the magical nature of the moves but they were going to be part of the combo originally so before you were there were just going to be button presses and the axe would come out and fly out and hit the enemies and come back automatically um so it wasn't until the breakthrough for the axe was definitely being able to throw it and being able to summon it back and i mean that completely ties into the fantasy of thor you know the the norse myth so um once we did that it definitely was

what got us over the top to real to be able to to make this into a weapon that would stand side to side with the blades and in addition to that the history of the axe was that it was given to him by his by his wife rather than being given to him by by a god for as a weapon of destruction right so it was more of a weapon of protection you know given to him by his own wife so already the story behind the weapon was was different to try to make him feel a little more connected to it in a different way than than anger and rage also we need to d we had to deal with a new camera right so since we needed to be closer in the cinematics in the game place so we had to be closer into combat long uh we're gone the days where we could just do crazy arcs over the top you know and even though the blades did make it back uh as a as part of the story uh

sorry if uh spoilers for those so you have not played the game but we couldn't get away with um with doing these white arcs anymore because of the camera we had to be up close so yes we still had to animate everything to look good from every angle but we particularly had to focus on making it look good from a new camera perspective so as you can see we pulled in the chains way more way more than it used to be it was it was meant to just read enough with the camera but still retain the same feeling from the old games and here's some examples of how both the axe and the blades look from the new camera perspective in game and as you can see we definitely moved away from the the grounded feel and even though you know kratos is jumping up in the air but he's not jumping as crazy as he used to in the previous games so there's a nice blend that we were able to achieve between the grounded and in the previous games

and also to utilize the keyframe animation talent that we had in our studio but having said that we still needed help to get great motion so this is where eric jacobus comes in now he is an amazing stunt performer but in addition to that he's a great director he's a fight choreographer and stunt coordinator so he does pretty much everything and in addition to that he has a great understanding of the motion capture process he's one of the few stuntmen that i know at least that is interested in um motion capture technology and how it works and how how to best use it for for all kinds of needs so i came across a youtube channel his youtube channel and i recommend if you guys um have time take a look into his youtube channel he has an amazing array of short films um that he's directed and he's put together with this amazing action

and because of that i was like whoa this is this is great this guy can can do a bit of everything but the thing in his youtube channel youtube channel that really attracted me the most was a series of videos that he created where he was reenacting like moves from games from fighting games and let me give you an example of that [Music] yeah so he's essentially taking something that was probably mocapped and heavily worked on by animators and keyframed and then you just recreate it in the live action you know so it was pretty amazing it's almost like he was doing exactly exactly what we needed him to do and having this direction of trying to make things more relatable and grounded

what better way than to get him in to try to do the moves for us you know so he would lay out he would his performance would give us you know eighty percent eighty to ninety percent of the way so that we can then take and push them a lot further so once i saw this video i said please can we contact this guy let's get him and let's get him in our building and what happened was before his actual audition for for kratos all we said is you're auditioning for kratos he has an axe that's it that's how we tell them and days before uh he was meant to come in for his audition he sent us this all on his own

so as you can see without any direction at all he was already like brainstorming all these awesome cool ideas that we could use um so at that at that point as well what was revealed to us from that footage was that okay yeah we need to we need to work with this guy but we need to make him part of our team we need to bring him in so what we did a lot of uh was we brought him into the studio we walked him through the entire story we explained to him all the cradles rules you know what he can do what he cannot do what kind of character he is what kind of what kind of personality he has what type of movement he does so we really got him involved as almost like one of the members of the animation team so that he would truly understand the character so that it wasn't just about okay come in this day here's your list and then just you know just start acting these moves you know just copy what i'm doing you know um so that was we tried that at first

and you know we got some good data but it wasn't it wasn't quite what we you know what we could end up doing if we practice with him more sort of like how we did with our our our actors for their cinematics so here's an example of uh one of our animators james che recording sort of the motions that we needed to capture he's just kind of demoing for eric ahead of him coming into the studio and then we brought eric in and we just spent an entire day rehearsing practicing move just so that we would have this footage ready to go once we went over to the mocap stage and by the time we went to the mocap stage we were very efficient because he knew exactly you know what to do we could always bring up the video footage that he himself shot with us and then execute all the moves so here's an example of a move going through every step

this is james priebus then we bring eric in then on stage he knows exactly what to do and we can be a lot more efficient and focus on the quality of the movement rather than rather than the idea [Music] and this is after has been polished and enhanced by our animation team so yeah keyframe animation still critical for us to push this stuff through to the next level so in conclusion um i see i'm running a little bit out of time so i just wanted to um you know kind of recap in order to bring new life into kratos we definitely had to focus more on the human side which we tried to do through the animation by you know getting more subtlety through motion capture by getting the right performances in we needed to evolve our

animation team to embrace the motion capture technology but also continue to play on the strengths of keyframe animation and um you know because of that we revamped our our approach to combat and narrative and again you know finding the right actors for not only the cinematics but also for your combat uh motion is essential but having said that couldn't have done it with an amazing animation team um they did an amazing job they as well as the rest of the team they really pushed through to get this project out the door and i really appreciate all their all their help and effort thank you very much [Applause] so i think we have around eight minutes or so if anyone would like to ask any questions i would really enjoy

answering anything you guys may want to know about yes oh uh i believe there's a microphone in the aisles right on each side yeah um so i was playing through the game i'm not going to spoil anything but there was this moment where there was like a big reveal and then atreus's face got covered by kratos armor and i had to reset and to strip that away that armor and and see the scene again just because i wanted to feel and and i couldn't see a trail's face in that one uh did the team ever consider like going back or forcing the uh like to use default armor on the scenes or maybe even animating the pieces so that they couldn't block the the build cinematics so that definitely was a big challenge for us

because um this is the first time that you can you know armor up cradles you know pretty much play dress-up with kratos and um early on you know as we were developing the scenes we knew that there was going to be some there but once we got the concept and actually the armors were made there was a lot of situations where we had to deal with that um unfortunately we couldn't deal with every single situation like the the one you encountered but um we did go through some lengths and especially the most critical scenes that we felt we wanted to not have any distractions and um well i don't want to steal the thunder from erica's talk but she definitely goes into that a little more but there was a there was one particular situation where we uh when kratos is pulling the boat and this sun is on the boat and he's pulling his there's a rope slung over his shoulder right so in that it was so close there that you could see armor clipping depending on what armor you were using we actually created on a separate layer

variable rope animations and there was a five or six different rope animations that would play specifically with what armor you were wearing so that way we could avoid they would like okay play rope animation a with armor sets one through six you know so um so there was the changes where we did unfortunately we couldn't get through all of them but if we were to do this all over again we would definitely keep that in mind in the future yeah thank you great question thank you so how challenging was to seamless transitions into the cinematics to go from them playing to the actual into catching to have that awesome transition that you did it was uh very painful very painful but over time we developed a couple of tricks so um most a good percentage of the

cinematics uh began with a player interaction right so at least we would know um you know opening a door or or pulling a lever or something like that we would know that the player where the player would be and where the camera would be so that helped with getting into into cinematics the ones that were more challenging were when you were just walking in a certain open area um so for those we had to do some careful planning of the level uh layout where you would kind of get funneled into a certain area by the by the art you know where you as you were walking and um and we had a bit of tech that would sort of take over the character over the player without really you know trying to make it as non-intrusive to the player but definitely there's moments where you can walk backwards into a scene and the game would kind of take over and like spin you around slowly and walk you into the scene um so you know

hopefully people didn't do that too much um probably in the second playthrough when you can anticipate when there's a scene coming you could probably mess with that a bit but yeah it was just it was just careful planning uh knowing um trying to use the interacts as much as possible and kind of limiting those funnel points uh where the tech would take over and kind of steer the player into the scene did you actually take control of the player to move it into a position so basically seamlessly to control from the player and move it to that point so we actually did yeah we try to make it as subtle and non-intrusive as possible very quickly um and within a reasonable radius so that you didn't feel that you were being cheated you were like getting pulled when you're like oh what's going on my controller's not responding anymore so we try to make it that's why the funnel points were very important where like if you're already walking down a hallway you already the player already felt like okay well that's where i meant to go anyway yeah and sorry i asked one

question okay so how many mock-up sessions you ended up recording in this project oh mocap sessions oh wow uh i don't have number right on top of my head but i think we had around 30 shoot days for cinematics alone yeah it was quite a bit okay hey so you mentioned earlier that when you know characters were off the ground that it was key framed animation so does that mean all the valkyrie animations which were stellar were those all like hand keyed then yeah so a great majority of those uh were done by dennis pena and yes there were keyframe yeah that's awesome yeah tell me did a great job oh yeah i will i will for sure i have a quick question on facial animation i hope that's not it's probably done another talk but i just curious about some of the biggest lessons learned on getting those facial expressions to read

in cinematics yeah so um we worked with the really great partner cubic motion and we were able to send the rl data with them to get processed you know from the high res videos um so what we did is once we got the actors performance back um we did an enhanced pass where we wanted to push a couple of things here and there so we we did we did spend a lot of time uh some scenes were just you know perfect as is be driven by the actors performance this is why it's just really critical to get uh really good um actors to work with you but uh definitely we wanted to in certain cases push it a little more so we did we did some work to keyframe on top of that as well yeah well made y'all decided to go with the like staggered peter jackson style shot in that previz mocap scene as opposed to just having you all right next to each other and fixing it in post oh so

that particular one uh you're talking about like how we were how it was being cross dissolved yeah oh that was just for um i wanted the talk to be under an hour so um yeah but that is actually like a um that take is actually done um we do we did have one transition that we did while we were doing the previous but that most of our most of our takes were done like live action takes we're done like the one that i showed with the uh the guys on his knees you know we're like pretty much all in one take uh that particular one with the ogre yeah was uh was cut down for time but in addition to that that did have a natural process solved uh just because we were just learning like learning how to do this stuff yeah that was one of the early early ones that we shot thank you yeah you're welcome any other questions yes and then if there's no other

questions uh we are hiring so please please supply if any of you guys are interested um but yeah i this is amazing i'm really happy to have been part of the animation boot camp finally and i'm definitely gonna enjoy the rest of the talks for the rest of the day and i hope you guys do as well thank you very much for coming i really appreciate it thank you