Though LA Noire has enjoyed considerable success, the game's writer and director Brendan McNamara has found himself embroiled in controversy following accusations of bad management and bullying at Team Bondi, the studio he founded. Now working on a new game with Australian studio KMM, we sat down with McNamara at the Bradford Animation Festival 2011 for his first interview since the closure of Team Bondi in which he discusses LA Noire's "torturous" development, the future of motion capture and MotionScan, and his take on the bitter fallout that followed the game's release.
MotionScan was new technology when you used it for LA Noire - what challenges did that present for the project?
There were lots. The first one was to try and convince people that it was worth doing. When we'd show people our rough demos the great part was you could see straight away that it was a real person, but people who didn't understand the process would say, 'I don't get it, I'm just looking at a video'. So conceptually it was difficult.
And the other thing was all the weird little add-on things that we had to do like making people's collars work because their necks change when they talk. And putting idle [animations] on people, because when you go back the low-poly head in the game – which every game does; _Uncharted_, you name it - it wasn't enough because having seen these characters alive people just didn't believe it. So we had to fix it. And we'd do it slightly differently if we were going to do it again, actually put little camera's on [the actors] while they're doing mocap and then capture their expressions and the other actor's reactions to what they say. Then we'd have those [recordings] on monitors around the MotionScan rig so actors can react to them.
The other thing was compressing all this stuff and getting it onto a console, because obviously it's a phenomenal amount of data – around 350 terabytes!
How did you get around that problem?
[Depth Analysis R&D head] Oliver Bao came up with this compression process that would work. Actually, it was the first thing we ever did, and I remember once he showed that to me I thought it was amazing and we knew that the whole thing might work because we had a way of actually getting it off the disk in time. Because the street furniture and shop fronts are so detailed in LA Noire, and you're trying to stream performance off of [the console] at the same time, the PlayStation 3 is good because you can use all of its cores.
How did the actors react to working with MotionScan?
We got them all to do motion capture before hand because there was a lot of material to get familiar with – in Aaron's case it was ridiculous – and I'd say 95 per cent of our actors had never done motion capture before. But the benefit of that process was that they all got familiar with the characters and how they play against each other. And we just did it like theatre in the round, and we actually built it like a set with desks and everything. So they'd get to know the material pretty well before they went into the MotionScan rig.
What areas of MotionScan would you like to improve?
We've had to make MotionScan suitable for other people's pipelines, whether that's a film pipeline or a game pipeline. Most people in games have a pretty established pipeline and way they like to work.
Was MotionScan's setup quite specific to Team Bondi's needs, then?
Oh yeah. I'm happy to trust what the actor does – if I see it when we're at capture and I'm happy with it, I'm going to use it. Whereas other people asked whether they could control people's eyes. I personally think that's a weird question, because an actor does what they do with their eyes and that's what makes them interesting. But we've added that now and you can cut out the eyes as well as track them, and the good part about that is that you can really focus in on eyes with an extreme close-ups like the one of Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West. And because we're tracking the eye movement, you can apply that data to your own model - if you didn't have the humanity of the way people move their eyes, you'd just be looking at a robot.
Did you ever miss the full-body scanning that other mocap processes have while making LA Noire? Did it feel like a compromise?
If you were a couple of years in the future and you could just do full-body MotionScan, that would be the best as the actors would feel really great because they're in their outfits. No matter what you say about it, they feel weird in their suits covered in balls – you get ball jokes for a month long! And some of them look good in that suit, and some of them don't – I'd look appalling in tight Lycra!
And I think the guys we worked with were genuinely excited that we were trying to do something new. When they saw the videos of our raw captures that we'd shot with people in the office, they asked, 'Is it going to look that good?' And I said, 'I think it's going to look better than that cause it will be lit properly' etc. And that's why Aaron [Staton] was fielding all these calls from other guys on Mad Men saying, 'I don't care what it is, just get me in it – I want to be part of it!'
And I didn't really know what that meant at the time because I didn't really know Madmen as a show. Since I've had some time to watch the series, it's funny; I'm just going, 'Wow, he's fucking amazing and we had him do such a small part!'
Comments
1I read that he just wished people would ring him and tell him to f*** off rather than say it elsewhere. Anyone know his number?
The way he treats people is an absolute disgrace.