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Shortcuts: Video games: Lights, action - performance capture!
[November 17, 2013]

Shortcuts: Video games: Lights, action - performance capture!


(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Take that! Actors perform a fight scene that is used in the video game Ryse: Son of Rome Amid the debate about television stealing the film industry's thunder, another entertainment form has crept up unnoticed, further threatening Hollywood's creative hegemony: video games. With a new, much more powerful generation of games consoles poised to arrive - Microsoft's Xbox One goes on sale on Friday, with Sony's PlayStation 4 due a week later - the games companies reckon they finally have the ammunition to shake off the perception that their digital epics are inferior to movies.



I'm in a place that could not reinforce that impression more emphatically: the historic Ealing studios, where classics such as The Ladykillers were filmed. But I'm here to experience the process of making a video game called Ryse: Son of Rome, an epic tale charting the Roman conquest of Britain, which will be a launch title for the Xbox One. And the studio is nowadays home to The Imaginarium, an outfit co-founded by Andy Serkis, who - as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings - is perhaps the world's leading exponent of performance-capture, in which every nuance of an actor's performance is recorded and mapped on to a video game character.

Serkis says: "There was probably a time when people in the games industry wanted to emulate films, but now it's very much the other way around. Many of the tools we use in the film industry have come out of the games industry." Peter Gornstein, global cinematic director at Ryse: Son of Rome developer Crytek, argues that the sheer power contained within the Xbox One finally allows what techies call the "uncanny valley" - the idea that, in computer-generated realism, little details that are slightly off render proceedings creepily unrealistic - to be bridged.


I quiz actor John Hopkins (familiar to devotees of Midsomer Murders and the RSC), who plays the game's heroic lead, about the process, which he very much enjoys. There are cameras at every angle, "so a five-minute scene with eight actors, which would take a day or two to shoot conventionally, can be done in five minutes. It becomes a much more theatrical experience." "I was listening to Classic FM this morning," adds Serkis: "and the third top-ranked piece of music created uproar, because it was from a video game. It just goes to show where convergence is at. Video game technology and video games are acknowledged by Bafta now, and are rightly getting credit for what they are, which is extraordinary pieces of art." Steve Boxer (c) 2013 Guardian Newspapers Limited.

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