Motion Capture Performance: An Actor's Approach

hi good afternoon first off I want to start out by thanking Mike wherever he is for bringing me in and allowing me to as I've realized as I've listened to all these talks today be the absolute dumbest person in the room no it's okay so thank you for bringing me in this has been really cool to just sit and listen to all the talks this talk is a little bit different I don't have a PowerPoint because I don't have a lot of cool technical stuff to show you this is actually a story that turns into an idea that then turns into a technique and kind of a nerdy obsession with what I am trying to do very well hopefully how I got into motion capture was in 2007 I was standing on us on a sand stage in Ohio doing an outdoor drama riding

horses fighting with swords I'm a certified stage combat instructor and fight director and I was standing on stage my phone rang and it was a number from New York and it was a guy named Chuck man jelly and he said in a deep New York accent he said hey are you available next week and I was like maybe and I turned to my director I was like do you want to bring me to New York to do motion capture for a video game can I go he was like yeah we got an understudy you go so I got on a 6:00 a.m. flight that next morning and I flew to New York for the first time and I got in a taxicab and I drove out to Long Island and I got out of the car and they put me in a suit and they put markers all over me and I walked into the studio and my friend who had recommended me to Tim because Tim was the first person who hired me so thank you brother I walked up to my friend in the volume and I said dude I don't know what the hell I'm doing and he goes don't worry nobody does he's like just listen pay attention and just do you and so I did I took his

advice I went out there I did me I got to play this character named Johnny Gat which was super cool I got to kind of get into what motion capture what and then when Saints Row 2 came out I've played the game and I was super pissed because I could see myself on screen and I thought that can't be right it can't be me it's got to be him how the hell do I do this and so then that kind of started the obsession coming back around going into Saints Row 3 with Zack Lowery who brought me in and started to make me play more characters we we got into this thing we called it the look where we would have someone in the in the studio and they wouldn't be able to do what he wanted him to do and he'd go and he'd look at me and I'd go and I knew that I

was going to be doing that tomorrow and so I realized that I could make myself more useful and more effective and more beneficial to the process if I could kind of become all of these people that I was trying to be and what I realized is doing motion capture performance I can be whoever I can truthfully move like it doesn't matter how tall I am how much I weigh what ethnicity I am I can play zombies I can play aliens I can play monsters I can play regular people I can play gangsters I can play whoever I can truthfully become within my own body and what I realized was no one is teaching actors how to do this style of acting and that's what it is it is a style of acting I went to school I got a bachelor's degree in theatre with an emphasis in acting I then went on to get a masters degree with an emphasis in stage combat and movement performance

and they taught me how to act on film and they taught me how to act on stage and what I see is typically motion capture performers coming in doing their first few jobs that's what they're doing they're just acting for the camera and that's really not what we're supposed to be doing so me being the academic nerd that I am when it comes to performance I said I'm gonna figure it out I'm gonna sit down and try and figure out technique because what we need as a performer is a base a structure to work within so that we can then be truthful and live within the moment we're supposed to be betraying so actors are not trained to work in this industry how do we train them to work in this industry and I started to sit down and think about what motion capture performance really is what I realized is I am puppeteering a rig of a character I have to become that character now how do I do that I have to

find a natural state in myself that matches up with the natural state of who that character is physically and I I started to figure this process out and I started to think what do I really need I need as much prep work as I can possibly get anything that can tell me personality movement style any type of particular I can get so I started looking at whether or not I could get any type of concept art before shoot and the guys of volition would would send me pictures and though this is what he looks like and I talked on the phone with the animation leads and and Zach would say yeah he's kind of like this and he's like this character and he you know when we were developing him we kind of thought that he was like a mix of these two people and like references that I could go off of so once I have my prep work and I start to think about who that character is the first thing I have to find is what I call the base and what that really is is the foot placement of where that character lives in their natural state and in acting we call it neutral body how we all stand when we're not doing anything I think in animation

you guys call it maybe an idol is that what it is yeah so an idol we call it neutral neutral body so I want to find neutral body and I started to realize that foot placement directly affects our center of gravity as human beings how I carry my body has a lot to do with my foot placement and how I find my base whether I tilt on to one hip whether or not I'm splay-footed because I might be a little bit overweight and I want to relieve pressure on the back or if I'm athletic I may be a little bit more pigeon toed and that tilts me a little bit forward moves my center of gravity up into my chest so once we find center of gravity I want to find with center and this is a really difficult thing for actors to find because it's not how we naturally move in everyday life so you're told in the studio yeah move naturally move naturally move naturally and then we move naturally and we cross our feet over and we screw up walks and turns right to left and we can't do these very

simple things that we do in regular life because it's not exactly what the animators need to create the character so I thought what's the problem because I sat in a studio and I watched all of my friends who I work with try and turn left and they just everyone we kept screwing it up no one could turn left we kept falling crossing our feet and it was like no you need to turn left and open up your hip it was like okay how do we do this and I started watching and I realized that when we walk we fall forward and we catch ourselves it's a controlled fall but if I'm gonna turn like that I can't do a controlled fall I must control my Center I must keep my Center so essentially I have to create an axis that goes down through my center line and splits my base so that my feet are always evenly distributing weight as I walk and it's a very small kind of minut thing that probably doesn't show up anywhere but it allows me to move in

any direction possible at any time so I found base and I found balance once I find base and balance I allow myself to develop a character out through the extremities how does he he or she hold their head their arms chest shoulders all the way out to finger articulation even if that's not even being captured I want to have it as part of my performance so that it's fully immersive so breathe life into the character I want to find natural structure going back we go into Saints Row 3 Zack starts throwing more characters at me I'm thinking about Saints Row 2 where I watched myself in a game and it irritated me so I start to develop this technique and I start to play different characters and I realized that I was on to something because I could switch and you start

getting thrown into scenes and they go well we're going to do one pass and you're gonna play this character and then we'll do another pass and you'll play this character and they're actually going to interact at one point but we'll handle that and we start working through different scenes and I'm in buy more and more characters as we go through Saints Row 3 and Saints Row 4 so in my mind I'm thinking okay this is there's legs to this it's working but I'm still not satisfied right so we move into Saints Row 4 then we go into get out of hell and I finally get to put this to work the way I think that it can kind of kind of culminate it into one single scene and it was a scene where we had a fight and it was six demons and Johnny Gat and I walk into the studio and it's just me in the studio and I'm like what are we doing and he's like oh you're playing everybody okay yeah tight budget

you're playing everybody and so we we developed this fight choreograph the fight I'm swinging through air here's where the demons gonna be back hand here's where the demons gonna be throw a kick and we do all this choreography and then I go through and they marked on the floor where I got hit and they put a crash pad down and I'd come in and I'd do all the reactions just one after another each character being a different person and then I see the final product that they stitched together and I'm fighting six different versions of me which for an actor is quite the ego trip to be able to fight six versions of yourself but I still go back to the technique I need to become better at becoming other people so I start to get more immersed into the technique of a motion capture and what I realized later on as we move into agents of mayhem is

if I have eyes on the front of my face I'm a hunter so that's where my movement my instinct to move starts is the eyes but the movement of the body generates from the base through the extremities so I start to develop characters and all the movement comes from the feet out through the body so if I need to lift a shoulder more it's not about lifting the shoulder more it's about finding the instinct in the body and bringing enough energy through the shoulder so that we get the right movement and I start to look into a deeper and deeper and and Wiimote we move into pages of mayhem and as we start working all of these characters are have distinct personalities weapons styles distinct movement and I'm playing more and more every time I go to the studio oh you're gonna play this guy now you're gonna play that guy now you're gonna play this guy now and I know that these characters are actually playable

so they're on screen way more than like a boss or you know a non-playable character that's a hinge Minh that you're gonna kill right away that you're catching like a couple of motions on so then I get in my head and Michael can II do need to do more I need to do more I start to find these characters personalities within the movement find the feet find the center find the base and then I find the character I'm working off the voice-over that adds to it so I have these little fidgets that I find in the voice that allows me to build on that character so the whole point of me being here is to really ask a question and be here to talk to a lot of you about the problems that you have with performance what are the hang-ups and what are the things that you're not finding because

as actors we're still trying to figure out what this is and I think I have a good idea of what it's supposed to be but it's it's it's a difficult thing because we're I'm I'm trying to create the base of what this is supposed to be without any real knowledge of the other side of it I've realized through conversations with friends of mine who are animators that animators and actors are very much on two different sides of the same coin where we're trying to breathe life and create these characters and be truthful to these characters but sometimes our communication doesn't really link up and we need to find a way to better communicate with one another in the space and before we get in the space so that we can become an asset to the project more of an asset to the project I believe that creative collaboration is

one of the greatest parts of my work is I get to work with other people who do wonderful art and I get to add my art to it and create something that is better and complete we come together and create something together and without communication we're never going to find that we're never going to find that so basically that is my process for motion capture performance that's where I am at this point I'm playing Mike how many characters 20 different 20 different characters on agents of mayhem that range from playable characters to bosses it's pretty much every male character on the game and constantly trying trying to figure out how to make them more unique and more truthful to themselves trying to find that base so that I can live on

my instincts as an actor I think a lot of people get into motion capture and they get overwhelmed by the kind of otherworldly nough some what it is compared to where we normally perform and they get freaked out and then they start to overthink and I as I teach I tell actors all this time to stay out of your head once we are aware of what our instinct is it ceases to be an instinct and so then our performance seems forced and it seems staged and you see falseness within the performance and I'm sure you guys who have worked with motion capture actors I've seen that before where the performance doesn't seem natural it doesn't seem real or truthful and typically it's because the actor is overthinking what they're trying to do but the only way to not overthink it is to have natural structure and the character a structure that that lives truthfully on my body but is truthful to

who that character is physically and once you find that then you can kind of relax and you get into that character and then you're not you anymore you're them and you move like them and you walk like them and you are able to add 300 pounds of weight to your body make yourself seem like you're three maybe three feet taller than you actually are but it's a it's a process and it's in its work that the actors need to be informed of and I think that we can get better performances out of motion capture because again we've never been trained to do this and we're trying to figure it out as we go along so yeah that's basically what I've got I wanted to leave time for questions and not just questions but for me because this is a process that is very new and I'm trying to figure it out I'd really like to hear problems that you've had things hang-ups

that you have things that have not worked when you're in the motion capture studio with actors so that I have a sense of where I need to go with it I travel all over the country and I do stage combat workshops and they always want me to teach motion capture performance classes and I want to be able to give young actors who are in college who want to come into this business and work with you guys on these games I want them to understand what's going to be expected of them and I want them to not be blindsided and not walk into a studio and go I don't know what the hell I'm doing and have that terrifying moment where the door opens and you're afraid it might shut immediately so I'm I'm very interested if there are any questions anything any information that you can give me anything that you have a question about that I might be able to clear up from the actors mentality because we are not we we have a different way of thinking

so the microphones are open if you have any questions anything hello I'm actually very curious and want to try to visualize can you transform into some distinct characters and move and talk us through how we're doing right now yeah like right now well okay I'll start out with GATT because he's kind of the probably the most famous character that I've played the big thing that got with me about GATT was when I saw the first design the first picture of him when Tim showed me the first pictures like this is the guy you're gonna play he had this fleur-de-lis tattoo on his neck and so when I when I kind of found him I found him with this like tilt to his head because I thought if someone has a tattoo on their neck then they're gonna want to show that off so that's kind of the focal point of who they are and then when I heard Daniel dead Kim's voice over he does he's really amazing kind of his this crazy cool speech pattern in these little inhalations and so I

started to get all these like little shoulder shrugs and this little head nod here and he always had this kind of like aggressive energy that felt like it was just gonna pop out at you at any time and I thought that was very important because he kills like millions of people in the world that he's in and I thought he should always feel a little unstable but in a really cool way and so it started with just that that tilt to the head and finding this structure and being able to balance that structure and then you could kind of play off of that and I could play off of Daniels voiceover which was when you have a good voiceover actor and you've got that voiceover and you can play off of it and let the voice kind of move the body it's an it's it's an absolute luxury to have that so voiceover actors are like I love it when when I have the performance to work on in the studio but that's I hope that helped yeah hey so if if when you're on a mote cap stage if you could the animator or director by the shoulders and shake them and tell them

like one thing about how they are failing to direct you what would that one thing be tell me what you want for real at AI it's something I had to go through Tim and EV our cinematics director like EV has a tell when he wants something and he isn't getting it he does this and I picked up on it so every time he does this I go EV what do you want just tell me what you want because I we want to do what you want but I feel like there's a there's a mindset of yeah that's fine we'll fix the rest of it later and and I personally don't want that to be the case I want to give you as much as I possibly can as an actor so that you have less work to do so that you have a stronger base to start with because it's never my performance on the game ever it's always added and pulled and stretched and moved and exaggerated in ways to make me look way cooler than

I ever could in real life but the more I can give you to start out with I think the better the end product can be so the big thing is tell me what you want and I will do everything I can to make it happen and if I can't make it happen then you know that's where we are yeah yes I just had a question if you've ever had to play a character so far different from yourself like a humanoid alien or something similar and do you go about doing anything different to get into that role yeah yes aliens and and zombies and all sorts of crazy things that have played before I did Zegna con st. er of four and I just tried I what I understood I started to understand about characters that were larger than me is that as long as they're proportional they're not larger than me because I can make myself appear as large as I need to be in that rig so if I can move the rig in a truthful way then I'm as heavy as I

need to be for that character and most of the time larger characters are kind of otherworldly characters things that are not quite the same as my structure it's about just kind of understanding why they need to move way they move and again I find that from the base normally if I can find the right foot placement it's weird I've become obsessed with how people walk my wife gets mad at me and she's like stop looking at people's feet but it's but it's because I realized that the way people use their feet really affects the rest of their body and it all kind of starts from there so if I can find that I'm typically in a good spot quick follow-up uh is bigger smaller characters harder to play or the same for you it's yes as long as I can find the structure man it's it's like thank you no problem thank you all right so my question is about you mentioned how you had to modify the way you walk with your center of gravity so that you could do the turns without having problems etc yes but you also mention how you had had

your background and the fight curve so there's some athletic background you have yes and now you want to shoot a fight scene you're you're trying to adjust that Sports knowledge so to speak to a more cat performance I'm interested in how do you do that like what is there a particular process or any tips you have for like you know how to play basketball and then you want to make it more careful for you making a shot like how do you adjust that well it's funny because the fight stuff it's actually how we move when we create combat is how I'm walking in a mocap studio and and keeping my centerline we talk about grounding and centering the body when we fight because if I'm in a fight I have to be able to move any direction at the drop of a dime right or I'll die yeah I got to get out of the way of the sword so tilting my weight all onto one foot it really puts me at a disadvantage if I'm in physical altercation so you're

constantly trying to find balance so what I did was when I realized that I already had that training I just applied it to everyday movement so that I could control the movement better but not look like I was controlling the movement with acting we want the technique to disappear if you see the technique we're screwed because then it looks false but if I can make the technique disappear let the technique be the base and move naturally within the technique and in natural structure natural structure meaning I don't want to hold a character in my muscles if I hold a character in my muscles it's very hard to find that character because if my muscles are sword you know I haven't worked out as much or I've worked out too much it's gonna be a little different but if I can find character in my natural structure of my body and allowed myself to find how the arms hang then I can play from natural structure as opposed to unnatural structure but but the fighting stuff really actually helped me was that yep wonderful thank you yes sometimes we

have to make animations that are going to be applied and used on just tons and tons of different characters as evenly have you ever had to record animations that are supposed to be generic to when you do like how do you since you don't have that one character to find how do you go about that well it's actually it's actually pretty easy normally I'll I have references that I use if it's a if it's like like a general male character like an everyday male character I'll just use myself I'm 510 I weigh about 180 pounds I'm a white male in my 30s I just use myself and then I have other friends if it's an athletic male I have friends who are very athletic and very small and I just it's about for me it's about prep work I'm constantly watching the way people move and just putting it in the bank and watching people speed and luckily I teach movements so I'm constantly watching people develop the performance movement and that helps tremendously too but with generic stuff it's like I find a character that I consider kind of

generic and and I go from there cool thank you yeah you had talked about instances where vocal delivery informs your performance yes and I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the interaction between two performances that go into making one character and are there any instances where your physical performance is informing the vocal performance or where you wish if that were the case I I can't speak on whether or not the physical performance changes the vocal performance because I never been on the other side of that but I know that as an actor we learned voice and body is connected voice drives the body and the body drives a voice and it's like this circle so the way someone speaks is going to affect the way they move and the way they move actually affects the way they speak if you've ever seen hip-hop artists and the way they move their body to get a certain

sound to come out of their voice it's it's kind of a circle and it's always connected so yeah I hope that answered some of your questions last question over here because I'm about to wrap up so just to elaborate what you said about obviously the obvious tell me what you need is there anything beforehand or the kind of the CLE the key clear bits of information you want about character before and during the shoot yeah I mean answer and I know that we live in a world where everything tries to get leaked on the internet so everybody is very secure about the information that they give out but anything that I can get that can tell me who that character is tendencies weapons style fighting styles what characters I've already played that they interact with and how they interact with them within the story will help me kind of develop a personality and then I can start to play with who that person is because I'm I'm doing movement but I'm I hear the voice I understand the personality and so

therefore I'm trying to create the full character even though all that's being captured is the movement so I make noise in the space I try and vocalize because if I can vocalize then it'll help me move a little bit more natural and more realistic and get a better a better shot so yeah really anything any information that the actor can get can help them just be more informed because if they're not informed in there then they're trying to catch up in the in the space and a lot of them a lot of people won't they'll just check out and Ogun okay I'll do that I'll do what they say and then I'll go home and I just I I personally want more than that I want the performance to mean more want the project to be good and I want to be a healthy part of the process so any information any prep information really helps okay thank you yeah I think I'm done thank you guys so much for allowing me to come into your community and talk this has been wonderful