Keyframes and Cardboard Props: The Cinematic Process Behind 'God of War'

[Music] hello and welcome to key frames and cardboard props a look inside god of war cinematic process my name is erica pinto and i'm the lead narrative animator at santa monica studio today i'm going to talk about everything that went into the creation of the scenes like the one i'm about to show you of course just a heads up there are spoilers for god of war ahead so if you haven't played the game i don't know if you want to leave or just let it be spoiled it is time my son look around at what you have done

[Music] um [Applause] come on we gotta go you saw there's no time look i have a plan [Music] jump [Music]

[Applause] that was your plan you're both tracked let's give it up for our cinematics team man they worked hard on that all right so at the beginning of this project our creative director corey barlock came to the cinematics team and said i have a vision i want to create a seamless immersive player experience and i want to do it with a camera that never cuts not anywhere in a cinematic not between gameplay and cinematic never so our question was how do we do that i'm going to tell you how we did that and i'm going to do it step by step using the scene i just showed you which we lovingly called the flying boat jump so named because kratos and atreus jump off of a giant flying boat

this was one of the most complex scenes in god of war running the gamut of our entire production pipeline so i'm going to be referring back to it throughout our presentation first i'd like to talk a little bit about the people involved in creating a cinematic at the top of our hierarchy of course we've got our creative director who provided the overarching vision of the story and oversaw the broad strokes of the cinematic production process we had our writers matt sophos and rich galbert who would present the director's vision in the form of scripts our director of photography doria rozzi who is who designed the detailed plan for executing that vision scene by scene with a consistent cinematic language and was the rest of our team such as our animation director bruno who provided the context for our character acting choices and we give feedback on the animation quality myself the animation lead responsible for the day-to-day production process and ensuring the animators had everything they needed to work to the best of their abilities also providing feedback all of our animators several of which aren't in this photo sadly but

they were expected to maintain a certain level of self-autonomy with ownership of their assigned scenes from start to finish they would work very closely with our cinematic artist who would wrangle the cameras and they would send all of that data over to our integration team to put the scenes into the game engine and of course we can't forget our support staff such as our producers and our outsource coordinator who made sure everything was running smoothly and getting done on time i'd like to break down uh our production into three main phases where we were able to streamline our streamline our workflow for no-cut cinematics pre-visualization or previous for short everything we did on set at the mocap stage and scene assembly and polish of all of that data so let's start with pre-visualization if you see the picture in the background you might get a little hint of where we went there let's start with a little history on previous god of war projects all of our layout was done in maya this is all right our camera language

was pretty simple we really only had one main rule which was to keep the camera alive so we didn't have any static shots you can see it might move to follow kratos's gaze it might push in a little bit to focus on his daughter as we come into the scene we would use cuts to show details and character reactions but there wasn't much attention paid to len's choice or anything this was pretty passable but we realized this method did not work with no cuts here's a very early test scene from this current project and i'm going to kind of rip it apart and talk about the failure points this is my scene so i can do that so you could see first of all the characters tended to freeze in place uh we didn't really know what to do with them and that forced the camera to swing around and convert traverse great distances without really any motivation to do so i was trying to get reaction shots on their faces as they talk to each other but again since i froze them in place i didn't really know what to do with the camera so it would move around kind of awkwardly it wasn't really grounded the way a real camera person would behave

if you look at the start of the scene you could see that the camera is just way too high a person would have to be floating in the air in order to get that shot and then it very quickly swings around and starts going backwards across an entire field and it was also just a very time consuming process for something that didn't yield very great results what we really needed was someone with experience in staging who could help us tackle runners in a more sophisticated way so that's when we hired doria rozzi and with dory on board we began to think about staging our scenes as a complex dance between actors and the camera we would often use top-down diagrams to plan the scenes most of the time this was just done on a whiteboard with some markers but here i've cleaned it up a little bit for you guys you can see here's our camera the red dot represents kratos and he's carrying a bore the green dot over here is atreus and the blue dot is freya and they're all going inside their giant turtle house let me go ahead and play this scene for you hello if my

laptop would cooperate hang on just a second come on don't break on me place him on the stave there you can see the camera follows himself and parks behind her as freya goes up to her shelf petraeus comes in from screen right it's better this way yeah my father doesn't like people either boy well you don't hold him back still before himself kind of moves off to one side and stays out of the way and you'll notice that the camera is constantly doing minor little movements to shift the focus from one character to another i need two more things fresh red root rose just behind the house can you pull a cluster [Music] we'll see atreus will go off screen and

then the camera moves and parks behind them again to let freya and kratos have their little heart-to-heart moment i know you're a god not of this realm but there's no mistaking it [Music] he doesn't know does he about your true nature or his own that is none of your community because of these realms don't take kindly to outsiders when they find you and they will they'll make things difficult and then for you film lovers out there this is our little homage to citizen kane whatever you're hiding you cannot protect a trace into the back that kept him in focus but you're right it doesn't concern me now if that staging diagram got a little crazy and looked a bit like spaghetti that's because well staging a water is very complicated all right so we had our diagrams and our staging ready but how do we actually create the previz well animators might recognize this sort of thing

we often shoot reference to see how our body mechanics work and get a sense of timing most often we just set a camera down somewhere and shoot ourselves this was sophie evans getting some cool kratos motion and this works great for our gameplay animators they use it to you know figure out new moves and the cinematics team is wondering well how could we leverage that for our cinematics could we take the camera off the tripod and start shooting scenes with it yes you can some of the benefits of this were we could easily test different styles of camera and dory wanted to try a documentary style you know more grounded and using handheld it took very little setup time you could just grab an slr grab a couple animators go outside and shoot it was very quick to review we could shoot in a couple hours do a review with corey and do reshoots within the same day you get a lot of surprising human interactions just riffing off each other from take to take that you might not think about when you were sitting at a camera at the computer doing layout in maya

plus it's just a lot of fun you know you get out of your chair you get a little exercise you look a little ridiculous you confuse all your neighbors around you it's pretty awesome some of the challenges of course are memorizing lots of lines we had several very chatty characters in this game plus learning that complex choreography i just showed you and since we had no cuts the animators had to keep all of that in mind while we were shooting at once what we were trying to do is establish accurate timing for the camera to figure out how much time was needed to transition from composition to composition and we also had to figure out how we were going to deal with characters of differing sizes you know we had little atreus and we had some dwarves and then we had normal-sized humans we had super-sized humans we had orcs and trolls and dragons and everything how are we gonna do that and finally how would the principal cast react to our acting i mean who are not professional actors or just animators and would they be influenced by our previews let me show you some videos of that live action reference

you can see as our solution for the characters of differing sizes we tended to just have the animators walking around on their knees they're the dwarf characters this helped us get accurate eye lines and composition for the camera for this scene we needed to shoot a vista and we happen to have a handy little overlook on our balcony down to the dev team floor never been this close to the mountain before thank you thank you one of the disadvantages of walking on your knees is you don't get a good sense of accurate timing for how long it takes to move around we can see our animator mic there but our principal cast was able to walk around freely so you can see syndra was a lot more active the dragon was a non-path that is [Applause] [Music]

this is one of our earliest tests when we had extra time so we went out of our way to build a giant ogre our animation director got in on the fun but even then we were still trying to get some real work done and dory wanted to test this camera move where he kind of snuck in between us and then we parked in front of them and it worked out pretty well [Music] so let's take a look at the live action reference for the flying boat jump action you can see we had a prop it's a tripod originally we were going to start the scene with some kind of a lever pull but in the end we ended up going with a player interact where you're trying to push off the broken piece of the ship here we're trying to get a sense of the timing of the vfx that mist that's coming up along the floor and sliding over to reveal zeus it is time my son following the mist over to the hallucination kratos

and with this previous we were able to quickly test whether this transition from third person camera to first person camera was going to work and back to third person obvi everybody was great very bewildered detracts and back to our first-person camera we gotta go never mind look and back to third person and when dory realized that this was going to work we all got really excited and it was it was great to be able to see it this early in our previous production process there's our barrels rolling down the street jump this also let us quickly figure out how many takes we were going to have to shoot on stage you can see right there we cut and that was going to be the end of the first part and then we would do the second part of the landing with some hand keyed stuff in the middle of the scene and up you guys go that was your plan

they're both cracked so for many scenes the live-action reference was actually enough previous to take directly to stage but some were a little bit more complex and we needed a way to actually visualize the game environment so for this we used rough motion capture or mocap we had the luxury of having our own vicon space within our studio but with warner's this actually became a necessity so some of the benefits of that was that we could actually work with characters of varying sizes without having to shuffle around on our knees we could see our actual sets and props to scale we could get more accurate plans for our principal shoot days we could figure out how many different mocap volumes we would need and figure out how we would divide up our environments to accomplish that all of that data could then be sent over to the stage to prep for our shoot and anything that we shoot could also be exported as a prototype to be put in the game engine some of the challenges of working with motion capture of course are learning to

operate a mocap system blade is not the most user-friendly piece of software and we would often have cameras issues getting all the cameras calibrated our virtual cameras monitor often shorted out due to cabling issues so we had some hardware difficulties motionbuilder was unstable with our plug-ins sometimes and tended to crash when we worked with a very large scene so stuff like that it was also a much slower iteration time than live action previews because you had to set up the volume you had to get the animator suited up we had to shoot the thing we had to tear it down then we had to assemble the scene then we had to render it so it was a little more difficult to iterate quickly at least a one day turn around just to shoot it tended to divert our animators away because they were getting in the suit and shooting and it was a lot of fun but then they were spending time shooting instead of animating when production ramped up significantly we would hire temp actors to fill in those roles but the concern was always that because the animator was not in the suit and and in the moment with the previous process they might have less creative input in

their ownership of their scenes so we were always concerned about that we're thinking of maybe ways to involve the main owner of the care of the scene but then hire temp actors to fill in the rest of the characters for the scene here are some examples of where we used rough motion capture for our previews this scene was important because we needed to see the relationship of the table and the characters and the location of the fireplace and the cauldron within her house so we really just wanted to see where everything was and also figure out how kratos was going to dunk the head in there and you'll see in the rough mocap the arm was kind of obscuring him so we opened their butt for the final shot this was a test of how we might shoot some very large characters we just marked up a cardboard box and puppeteered that guy around this was important to actually see the environment that face in the mountain and figure out where we were going to place our characters in relation to the scene it's everything so going back to flying boat jump again

this was our rough mocap previews zeus beat down take one this was shot pretty early uh in the production of this scene so you'll notice that the entrances and exits haven't been figured out yet kratos is coming in a strange location time to end this yes my son really the purpose of this test was to see how this composition would look with the two ghosts and the boat in the background and having atreya standing there and was everything going to get too busy or could we could we frame it so it looked really nice so we're really looking at this composition in particular yeah one of the things of having bike on in your own studio is that everyone can hear you thank you they were usually pretty good sports about it though i'd like to talk a little bit about the importance of business which is

basically giving your characters things to do this is something movie folks understand pretty implicitly but can sometimes be overlooked in games especially when we just have so much content we have to crank out you know hours and hours of content but again when we had no cuts it was very important to give our characters things to do because this gave us opportunities for the camera to look away from the characters again we can't do cutaways but having something for the camera to look at and motivate to look away from the character's face was important business would also provide motivation for getting the characters to move through the space and if you think back to our early tests where the characters were kind of freezing and that caused the camera to swing around and do weird stuff giving them business help move them finally you could get a lot of nice non-verbal insights into a character's personality by giving them stuff to do and this would help our actors get into character and stay in character throughout the scene and not worry about what to do with their body so these are some examples of giving our characters business you can see we put freya up on a ladder and messing around

with some herbs to help sell her character as a witch of the woods and syndrome and freaking about about carrying that here really also selling his nature as a craftsman being dedicated to his work his work has jumped and his work is just those things those things are accurate well you already soiled much i just love the idea of brock eating something and i won't spoil where he got that meat from but if you play the game you will find out what i'm offering not what i was on saw your brother again this is an example of getting the character to move through the space by using business we had all these cups and bowls and stuff on her table that she was using to cast her spell you didn't know she could go over there and work with that when word gets out there is free the wrath of odin won't be far behind here's an example of how we used a prop

to do you know something like that looks like a cutaway you can quickly move down and look at the knife and then come back up right then and again here we focus on freya and then we're using the bowl to kind of create a new composition yeah obvi everybody and using those effects to then draw the camera up to go up to kratos you may have noticed a big part of business is having props and you know sony sony's main motion capture studio has an entire prop building department but for previz we're on our own so we tended to gather whatever materials we could find from the mail room from trash cans leftover items in the hallways used lots of duct tape and created stuff like this we've got our tree we've got the big ogre some kind of deer sometimes we would use markers and marker up something like my mirror's head so that when we shot our rough mocap we could see it in the mocap space and finally for those scenes where we literally could not humanly shoot the

scene we went back to traditional layout the big benefit of this is you can do anything so we could craft those big super epic god of war moments the challenge of course is that it is super time consuming to create and iterate on and it's hard to establish real world timing because you're not physically doing the actions with your body but let's take a look at some of the cool scenes we did [Music] uh [Music] you can see how much the pose of the snake and the competition change the previous and finals and also having kratos pick up the axe with his other hand all right we have a small clip of

traditional previews for the flying boat jump and originally this was going to be almost a different scene entirely so we had this whole moment where these icicles were going to break down and break off the front part of the ship but then the rest of it is pretty similar to what we ended up shooting and animating for the final product we've got the barrels rolling down or whatever that is and then they crash and an interesting thing to note here in the original previz is that kratos jumps first so it was it was a cool change to have atreus lead the way in the final version all right so once you've got your previews all done you've got it approved it is time to go on set all right on previous projects we would sometimes do our set construction our rehearsal even our shoots all on the same day we didn't have a virtual camera because we were doing all the camera work in maya so there was a little bit of room for

choreography experiments letting the actors run around and see what they could you know come up with but again no cuts means it's not really great to try improv this scene was really the only time we were on stage and didn't have previz ready so we just kind of winged it and you can start to see some of the same failure points you encountered in our early tests what is it a very unmotivated camera motions because the actors had frozen and dory needed to go and see their faces so we just kind of swung around to try to get their reactions and then we had to swing back around because we had to get back to game camera angry so there wasn't really any motivation for that move either but we wanted to see a trace's face and we needed to get back to the game in the end this data i don't know we just didn't like it so we ended up throwing it out and we did a proper previous pass and we came back to the stage later it also helped to have more context for where the scene was taking place and it was taking place in a boat i said nothing all right let's shoot some

previews for the boat you can see here we were able to figure out how to get the actors to face the camera you don't hear that dory was able to do some more thinking about how he wanted to do the lensing and we would do a zoom in and get a really nice intimate shot here lots of voices angry you really didn't hear that we had this nice moment with them it felt evil [Music] and then we could use the motion of atreus turning to sit back down on the boat as motivation for the camera to move and get back into the camera so again every scene had to be meticulously planned so no more winging it on the set have previz every single time another big aspect of not winging it was breaking up our mocap shoots and having a specific tech day so no actors on set just the animators and dory and everybody who needed to be there to review our exported data in our

videos from the previous process with the stage crew discussing and reviewing any props we would need for the shoot day dividing up our volume space figuring out what sets we wanted to construct laying down tape for all our major choreography beasts and this was useful when we had our mocap previews we could actually measure that in motionbuilder and get that all down and finally just go over our shot list finalize any last minute details so that when the actors showed up they were ready to go and we could just start rehearsing now getting those assets to the stage for tech day posed a little bit of a challenge and that's where we had our tech artists give us an assist they wrote a tool for us which we called the maya to motionbuilder tool and that allowed our animators to export our proprietary animation rigs into motionbuilder at the correct scale and orientation and we didn't need to bake atoms or anything so that saved us a lot of time one of the big pain points however was exporting our environments in a motionbuilder see on our project we use a proprietary thing called ref nodes which are similar

to like unity prefabs and those need to be converted to regular geometry in order to be compatible with motionbuilder and this was a very slow process i mean there's just hundreds or thousands of assets in just this one piece alone the house that converted geo then needed to be parented under a node so that it could be moved from world space to the mocap space which is like that green space there at the origin and then back again after the shoot and this was all done by hand so there was lots of room for human error especially when onboarding new team members so we're now developing an automation tool similar to maya to motionbuilder but for converting environment geometry once we're on the set there were quite a few people there we had our creative director of course our writers a director of photography was there the animation director was there the animation lead was there our producers were there a dialogue coordinator the stage crew and animators lots of cooks in the kitchen so it was very important to define roles on the set so the actors weren't getting overwhelmed by feedback coming from too

many directions what we ended up doing was having our creative director or writers focus with the actors on their performance notes our director of photography would focus on staging notes and our animation director would focus on any kind of body mechanics notes so if anybody else had feedback to give for any of these things they could go to our point people and give them the feedback and then they could relay it to the actors so the actors knew who to go to when they needed feedback and what would the animators do on set oh we could use them as stage hands again they were owning their scenes so they know it and they know all the elements within it so they really were helpful in being able to present the previous videos and talk through it they could inform and other people about any entrances exits key poses props that were needed they could assist with any stand-in work any kind of extra bodies needed that we didn't have anybody suited up for and of course they were taking notes on any info coming out of the shoot so that when they got the data back they were ready to hit the ground running here's a few examples of animators as

stagehands i'm playing a dead body yep and you can see our creative director writers and our dialogue coordinator in the back making sure everything's running smoothly well done this is a scene that actually got cut from the game but i had a lot of fun playing this creature in the water and then our stage crew did an awesome job building this boat for us that could move around and act like it was on the water oh sit down this is not a game here you can see our boat rig being used for a more intense scene this is the introduction of yorman gander the giant world serpent coming out of the water and i'd like to take this moment to talk a little bit about multiple motion capture spaces and i'm going to pause it here and you can see we've got our main actors in the boat here and you've got me in the corner and what the heck am i doing with this little thing here it's kind of hard to see but you can see

a monitor of what dory's seeing through his virtual camera and here's kratos and atreus and we've got this giant snake now obviously we couldn't build a giant snake it wouldn't fit in the mocap space so what we used was a tiny little box with markers on it and i was acting as sort of a puppeteer of the snake and then we would take that data and offset it in real time so that from dory's point of view he could see the snake in the right place and then this little green spot being held by bruno our animation director was being held up so that the actors would know where to look to represent where the snake would be a little complex but we made it work all right here we've got some onset footage from the flying boat jump since this was a pretty physical uh scene we ended up using stunt actors here we have one of our our stunt actors acting as kratos and he would also double as the ghost kratos and you might see dory over there kind of offset he we wanted to keep him out of the way of the stunt actor so he would not get punched in the face

and also it allowed him to get in and really get that first person camera without interrupting the actors so he's being offset as well like i mentioned when we did our live action previews we were going to break it up into multiple pieces so we'll see the second take where we've got our observers we've got a stunt stand in for sunny has atreus and then we've got kratos in the back there what the hell is that and since we had already shot the data for the ghost we could see that within the virtual camera we gotta go there's no time look we hadn't animated the barrels yet so we

just kind of there you go i got a plan and then here's where we cut and we go to the traditional animation for the big fall and then we have our final take where they land and you know the rest of that scene what is your plan all right so after everything is done and shot it's time to get all that data back and assemble it and polish it and the first part of that is editing i know what you're thinking what editing why are you editing a winner it's all one shot well we tried to avoid editing as often as possible because it's exponentially more difficult to blend two takes together versus cutting but sometimes you have to account for multi-volume scenes for very large environments sometimes you have to think about unintentional mistakes that might have happened on set maybe you're getting a really good take but then there's just one line that the actor flub so you want to just do a little insert there where they get the line right and then you'll just merge those two bests together

sometimes we need inserts for clarity or script rewrites occasionally we'd have a play test where the players would give feedback that they didn't understand what was going on so we might do some rewrites and and shoot something to help clarify that scene also timing passes in case a scene was running long or needed some extra time we would insert or cut things down cut yeah also any changes to level design or environment art like you you saw in in the mocap previz we hadn't figured out the entrances or exits so sometimes once we nailed that down we would do a quick reshoot and get those entrances nailed down and blend that all together challenges of heading editing we've had some limitations with maya because blending takes together is hard we weren't having too much luck with the tracks editor so what we ended up doing was using motionbuilder's story tool which let us edit pretty quickly and get some macro edits going and then once we were happy with the rough timing we could then work on atom layers and constraints now there's a bit of an art to choosing

where to edit you're trying to find the best blend and what you're looking for is character position and pose whether they match pretty closely across two different takes of course also the camera position again because we're not cutting you need to make sure the camera is in a pretty safe place so that you're not getting some weird motion once you're going between the two takes it's a bonus if your carriages are off screen when you're doing the edit because then you don't have to worry about blending them together let's take a look at our story tool for flying boat jump i know it looks a little crazy let me break it down for you these two tracks represent the ghost kratos and zeus and what we were doing here was working and getting those punches looking really good and physical so we did a bunch of edits for timing up here we've got a traceus this is about the moment when he pushes through the two ghosts so we oh no why is my battery not i'm sorry let's plug that in all right here we go this is where trace was pushing through the two ghosts we would make sure that felt very physical here we actually ran out of data so we

were copying and pasting extra punches yeah and here we've got a little take of atreus this is probably an old screenshot and they were probably going to insert that up here to help atreus slide and let's go ahead and play this shot and you can watch it go along with it here's those physical punches here we've got a trace's push through coming in extra punches bam and this take of a tray is sliding down all right some results of that of course the idea was always to get our scenes nailed down with one perfect take but it ended up that over 50 of our cinematics needed major editing or reshoots or merges and all of our cinematics required at least some minor edits to accommodate

our finalized environments make sure our posts were matching etc that's not a great track record so how can we get that percentage down really what we need to do is focus on our tools and communication to make sure we have everything we need before we go on stage and after we go on stage to help us get our workflow moving more quickly oh yes animation it's time to do the fun stuff it's time to animate those cool creatures and those crazy stunts and also the not so fun stuff like bandages and chains and ropes and vines and all those spline ik everybody loves to do yeah when you're using cuts it's often simpler to carpet compartmentalize your thoughts into smaller task chunks and focus on one shot at a time such as this you know 150 frames that's not too bad you can keep track of what your curves are doing there but with very long runners like god of war had the animators had to keep the entire scene in mind while they're making edits because if you're working on a layer and you make a change and you forget that you made that change it might ripple down the entire scene so if

you're not keeping track hours of your work can get wrecked the actual process of animating is the same as it's been for years but the mental focus required grew quite a bit so let's take a look at some of our awesome animations [Music] i got to do that one in between all my meetings and spreadsheets stay behind here protect our flag yes sir and of course our flying boat job [Applause] [Music] all right some quick numbers about our animation team we had an internal team size of about seven animators at peak production we had three different outsource teams two vendors helping clean up our body and one vendor for facial solving

but our internal animators would have ownership of all the scenes including our outsourced ones so that they could assemble the outsourced data and make sure everything got integrated and keeping track of the debugging process in hindsight we wish we'd had a larger internal team because as our contractors rolled off we would have to transfer ownership of all those scenes to all our remaining team members and we had over 100 cut scenes to keep track of so that was a lot also just tracking the sheer amount of content in scope creep we had a lot of level design asks that weren't originally in the script but we would you know we would need to help tell the story of level design as well so now we take into consideration all of our narrative moments and not just cinematics as we work out our scope and our schedule on to our polish we had what we called the buttery smooth pack what this was was just really troubleshooting those seamless transitions between gameplay and cinematics to make sure our no cut language was working the main things we were looking for was pose matching and that seems pretty obvious but it's important to establish

those standard poses and anytime it's changed make sure you communicate them widely across the team make sure your pose library is updated and see if you can find some tools that helps the animators match poses and animations across your scenes and characters matching the velocity of the gameplay animation into a cinematic and back out each of our characters had a zero joint that indicated their position in the game and in the case of kratos the player the camera is also attached to that zero joint so any kind of errant motion was going to cause some weird jarring camera blends the zero joint's velocity also informs the engine of what state the character should be in whether he's walking or running or idle so if it's not matching the actual action of the scene if you've animated your cinematics so kratos is running out but your zero joint is frozen then the game engine thinks he's standing so that you're going to see him pop into an idle pose at the end of the scene finally thinking about metrics for any interactable objects such as doors or levers we need to get those exact metrics set by the gameplay team for how close the player should be to that

object at the start of a cinematic here are some issues with buttery smoothness you can see this magical door we hadn't figured out the metrics of where the players should stand so you'll see kratos actually walk backwards as he's starting the cinematic oh or not let me do that again here we go yep little lerp there still can't get the doors open huh quiet here you can see some of our debugging tools you can see there's a little arrow down here showing the velocity of the zero joint at any time we're trying to debug why those pose mitch matches are happening this scene you'll notice that the log and kratos become out of sync what's that sliding all about let's go into that debugging tool and you'll see that at some point the logs zero joints stopped moving so it thought that it should not be moving forward while kratos kept walking along so just taking care to

do all of that buttery smoothness here are some issues with the flying boat jump there was kind of a position misalignment and we didn't have any transitional motion to get the player into the place where they needed to be and also for some reason it wanted to play that part twice i don't know at the end the lighting hadn't been put in yet but you can see that there's a pose mismatch here between the normal idle and the combat idol in this particular iteration kratos flew off into space and then and then aligned up with the ship the zero joint also uh if it wasn't in sync with the body sometimes there were clock physics problems because it thought the character was somewhere else so you would see his skirt would flip out there and again pose mismatches this was always the pops between the end of the cinematic and the gameplay here you might see the characters drop

drop down that might be because ik or collision is turning back on and we haven't quite aligned them to the ground plane so we're trying to figure out where that's going another big part of polishing our scenes were armor variants kratos has many armors and again because we can't cut we can't hide any armor swaps on a cut to get into our cinematics some problems with that were of course obstructing your face we need to be able to see kratos face during certain cinematics but certain pauldrons would obstruct it and you know that's troubling penetrations you'd have stuff going into other parts of the body other parts of the armor this was a pretty extreme example i don't think this was ever actually in any cinematic some solutions to this were making slight body adjustments to fix our penetrations we could often cheat the camera so that if an offending object if from the camera view it doesn't look like it's penetrating then it's resting properly on different armors such as when he's resting his hand on his on his bracers

from a specific camera angle it looks fine and when all those fails we plead with character art can you please just adjust this pauldron a little bit so i don't have to deal with it anymore of course there was one scene in particular that was a beast and you might recognize this one the road are you not better kratos had to sling a rope over his shoulder and you couldn't hide it it's close up on the camera all the pauldrons were clipping through what tech art ended up doing was rigging up a rope for us with four different joint chains and four different rope meshes and our animator placed them at different heights to cover the range of variation between our different shoulder pads then the integration team would script the visibility on each of those rope meshes to turn on and off depending on what the player had equipped at the time yes why'd you say nothing

another thing here is our [ __ ] simply rest his elbow on it but this particular pommel had a blade oh man okay for this one we just tweaked the animation to have sendry wrap his arm around the blade and any other palm will it still look like he was resting his elbow on it but our favorite one and one we probably got the most bugs for were what we lovingly called the kratos nip slip what is that yeah that was an easy fix you just rotate the clavicle a little bit but just it happened so many times we got so many bugs about that there we go fixing all the bugs all right let's wrap it up so although we encountered many challenges on the path to realizing this vision of a no-cut narrative language overall we felt our new pipeline helped us achieve success our final cinematics looked pretty close to our previs even when it was shot in

live action and we were able to create smooth blends between gameplay and cinematics so let's take one more look at the flying boat jump and the many pieces that came to crit together to create it it is time my son look around at what you have done [Music] [Music] uh

come on we gotta go you saw there's no time look i have a plan [Music] jump [Music] [Music] [Applause] that was your plan you're both tracked thank you very much for coming

we have some time for q a so we've got a couple microphones here if you want to come up and ask me any questions anybody all right hi hello thank you for your presentation thank you i'm christian um [Music] so i had a question two questions one did you guys use vcam um like all the way through to the final cut scenes um yeah uh yes when we shot live action reference we wouldn't have the v cam we would just be using in slr but anytime we were using rough mocap and on the stage we would always have a virtual camera onset yes yeah did did the the virtual camera actually help you guys translate what you were doing with the vcam to the the final cut scene you would get in the game yes i mean the data was being recorded from the virtual camera and then dory could take that and and he and the

cinematic artist would take that data and they would do some cleanup by hand in motionbuilder to get the final look and do some minor adjustments here and there but the the raw data from the virtual camera was always the baseline for that cool and then um as far as studio wise like do you guys enjoy this process with the motion capture of the vcam and will you use it again on future projects i think it's a lot of fun i think now that we've got our pipeline set up it's definitely a tool we can use in our pocket whenever we can it's really helped streamline our previous process and helping us iterate as quickly as possible so it's definitely something i want to keep using yeah cool thank you thank you yes hi thank you for the talk um another question about vcam can you tell uh like say something quickly about this deciding between like shooting v cam with the actors on stage or shooting it offset from the actors or shooting it separately

most of the time we would try to keep the virtual camera in lockstep with the actors in actual space for flying boat jump it was just an issue of dory really wanted to get into the the shot he wanted for the first person thing so that's what he requested an offset so he didn't have to be like right on top of the stunt actors while they were doing their stunts but most of the time the camera and the actors were in the actual space we wanted them to be in cool thanks um are you using a facial capture are you using motion builder story mode to blend both facial capture and body capture together uh the question was were we using motion builder also for the facial capture no we did mostly body cleanup in motionbuilder and then we would do all of the facial cleanup and pasting in maya oh okay and then um also um what was the frames per second when you're making the cinematics in maya or motion builder we would shoot at 30 frames per second yeah thank you i thank you again for for the talk was

super informative um how much of the team came from more of like a cinema background and how much interplay was there between cinema and games and what kind of challenges from the game side versus maybe a more cinema side that did you have to kind of consider for our animators we tried to hire specifically for cinematics so people if they hadn't gone through film score or anything that they at least worked in cinematics on previous games but our real rock star was doria rozzi he comes from film and he's done a bunch of stuff and he had the eye for doing it so he was really driving the look and feel of our scenes hi uh could you tell me a little bit about uh why you created the tool for maya into motionbuilder a little more familiar with like motionbuilder and maya but yeah because most of the time we're animating in my all the gameplay animators work in maya and all of our rigs are set up to work with maya and we have several tools and just the way that the rigs are built to work with those tools it makes it a little more proprietary and harder to

translate directly into motionbuilder one for one so the tool was just a way to get those proprietary nodes kind of stripped out and locked down and putting it into motionbuilder and it also goes both ways so we would go then from motionbuilder once we cleaned up back into maya and back onto our proprietary rig so we could keep working so like easier for pose mashing and uh yeah in motion and also our rigs in maya are at a different scale they're not one to one in meters or whatever so we would have to scale everything up when we brought it into motionbuilder and scale it back down when we came into maya okay thank you hi i have a question because i noticed that the stunt was the woman and the main actor for uh atreus was a child and did you have some trouble with the difference of the performance this is the first question right the second one is atrius actor main actor is a child so i would like to know if you had the problem with because the child is growing up really fast and during the shooting it could be a problem

yes the the question was about the challenges of working with child actors versus the stunt actor who was an adult yeah uh i mean as much as possible we tried to use sunny uh occasionally he would have to be in school for certain hours so we would bring in a stand-in while he was in school and we would try to hire actors who could mimic the emotions of a child as much as possible but of course there there is advantages of using an actual child after you it does look a little different so we would then have the animators kind of try to match the data across and try to create a consistent workflow as for sunny growing throughout the production process that that was a concern uh it didn't affect us too much he did grow an inch or two but it was it wasn't enough to cause a big problem for us yeah thank you all right before i let oh yep go ahead hi one last question um great talk um you mentioned cinematic artists i believe doing cameras how big was that team how many how many people

um i mean dory was doing a lot of work and then he was able to bring in a second person to help him out we had a third person who was helping out with the v cam on set and then the the other one was focused mainly on motion builder cleanup yeah thank you hi um my question maybe would have been better for dory but like maybe you can help me out with it because i was wondering with the single cuts like with the no cut directing that you had like that tends to be kind of exhausting for long periods of time like as a as a spectator so like what did um like how did you guys like sort of make it so that you could actually play the game for you know the way people play which is several hours generally if you can like you get into the story and not have you be exhausted by the time you're finished yeah i mean dory's right there you can come talk to him afterwards but i think it's just about having yeah

having enough interesting things happening on the stage and making sure that the staging is very interesting and the characters are moving around and having things to do to keep the eye going and and as for viewer fatigue i guess dory might be the guy yeah because like that's mostly because i'm thinking you know um for example in the haunting hill house they have that one episode that's just no cuts for like 20 minutes and by the time you finish you you just want to die it's exhausting and depressing and very sad so like yeah it might be that once you're back in game play you feel like you're in control again so maybe that helps alleviate some of that as well right yeah yeah okay well thank you yeah thank you all right just before i let you go we are hiring we have many positions open so make sure you check out our website you can talk to me leave business cards especially animators if you have what it takes uh come see me or i think we have a recruiting booth downstairs but yeah thank you again for coming [Applause]