The story plays a very important role in
the game. And there is a lot of story.
We have 60 hours of dialogues
and 3.5 hours of cutscenes played by more
than 50 actors. It's not just the writing
that's important, but also the
execution. So today we are going to talk
about how we brought the story into life.
It's not just a ninety page script that has a beginning,
middle and end. But it's a
whole world that can have any number of
certainly middles and ends and even
beginnings, all of which are in the hands
of the player. Games like this, and films
and TV shows and plays, all kind of start
and end with a brilliant story and
a brilliant script. And if you don't have those,
it's kind of a waste of everybody's time
whatever the media is. And I think
in this instance fortunately one of the
reasons I want to do it is because I think
the script is really good and the characters are
brilliant, and Henry particularly is a character
I feel very passionate about. And I think
that's mostly because of the passion
for this world and these characters in the heads
of the creators, that they know the world
inside out, they know the history of
certainly the Czech Republic, and Prague
specifically, much better than I do
clearly. And they have a real fire in
their belly for that - for
those characters in that world.
It's a very human three-dimensional
credible story and that's what got me
excited about it.
What you see is
is an incredible story that is made even
more incredible by virtue of the fact
that it happened for the most part,
as you've said, there's some
characters that have been kind of created
to drive the story along,
but the background of it is all true.
Alright,
Let's see what kind of job
the master in Sasau did for us.
Look at that, lad.
Now that's what I call craftsmanship.
What does the inscription mean?
Damned if I know.
It doesn't look like Czech to me, Latin maybe.
Lord Radzig ordered it.
This will be the finest sword I've ever made.
This is one of the cutscenes for the game and
you can see that in order to make them
great we needed good actors - lots of them.
There are lots of big Hollywood
productions shooting in Prague
so there are also a lots of good
English speaking actors, but it was still
not enough for us. So we did casting in
both Prague and London and we auditioned
more than 200 people.
We needed to make
a lot of tough decisions. Will we go with
archaic Shakespearean English, more
accessible modern English or American
English? Each choice limited our choice
of actors. And is it okay to have
American and UK actors play together with
different regional accents in the same
medieval setting?
*** something about Cardiff... ***
After weeks of searching we finally found what we were
looking for in Tom, Luke, Matthew,
Brian, Peter and some 50 others.
Capturing so many cutscenes required a huge amount
of time, so we decided it will be more
efficient and cost-effective to build
our own motion capture studio and do all the
cutscenes in-house here in Prague.
We also decided to capture sound and
motion at the same time because we
believe that
this way the performance will be much more
natural and dynamic than first shooting
the movement and then having different
actors record the voiceovers later in
the studio.
Here was something new. You're
doing something new. And it was history.
It is based on history. That's exciting and
educational. I think you've got something
new and original. The thing is - the script
is brilliant. It is well written
and it is written in English in rather
a classical style because of history.
History always has a smattering of
historical kind of flow and energy.
We also considered using facial
motion capture helmets but then decided
not to because it would greatly
complicate the process with questionable
results. We also decided to scan the
actors and use their facial features for
the game characters and for that our
character department built our own
proprietary 3D scanner. And we didn't
scan only the actor features but also
their facial expressions. Each actor is
scanned 24 times and from these scans we
can generate 60 different expressions
that we use then when generating
lip sync and for facial animation.
Directing a game is a very specific thing.
The actors are moving around in very small
empty space, in which objects are only
represented by weird wire constructions
because the cameras need to see through
everything. The actors can't touch each
other too much either because
motion capture doesn't much like things
like wrestling or hugging and not to
mention sex scenes. Simply anything where the
cameras don't have a clear view on the
actor from every angle. Each shooting day we
first rehearsed the scenes. Then there were
quite long preparations because the
motion capture must be calibrated,
the actors dressed in the suits and the set
prepared. And then we were shooting
6 hours a day for more than a month.
We shot 5 -10 minutes a day which
is a pretty diabolical pace.
Having Dan in the room
has been great because there's that
feeling as actors, that while you're doing the scenes -
he knows what he wants,
he knows what these characters are, what
the stories are, he has an ownership of
all that. So for him to be giving you
the direction or helping out giving the
direction has been invaluable really.
In the end there were three directors. I took
care of performance, our cinematic director
Martin Klekner was responsible for
the movement and stunts and our English
writer John Comer, himself an
experienced actor, was shadowing me
to make sure that the lines were correct in English.
We have got a very reliable
team who know the world infinitely
better than we ever could because
they've been working on it for three years.
And they will brief you - we have
a briefing in the morning, they'll describe
what's going on and scene, what
the context is, what the environment looks
like and I've just relied incredibly
heavily on them.
Will the actors with the experience from big movies and TV shows
accept recording in funny elastic suits with
ridiculous props made from wires
and sticks under the supervision of
a geek with little experience?
Luckily they did and I think that in the
end it went pretty well.
And at the end of the day, once you've got, the hilarious
you know, lycra bodysuits
with the spots and all that stuff which of course
in the first instance is kind of hilarious and
ridiculous. But you very quickly
forget those and at the end of the
day then it's just about playing
the scene honestly with another actor.
And then you go into the other room and you get
into your - this is the best bit -
you get into your - is it spandex?
I don't know. But whatever it is - it's a
black suit it and then they put all
these little dots on you and
it's very strange but I feel like
it's like you're going into
the matrix, I feel like Neo. And all
I do whenever there's downtime and no
one's doing anything important I'm just
looking at myself on the screen just
pretending to be Neo, it's great.
The task of the cinematic department was to bring
what was written in the script into the
game in the form of cutscenes. And since
we were shooting on an empty
motion capture stage, every day we had to
make sure the actors knew exactly what
they were looking at.
For example, when Henry was supposed to
be lying in bed while some other
character woke him up, started talking
to him and then left the room, I had to
measure the size of the actual room in
the game, indicate its size on the
motion capture stage, find out the height
and position of the bed,
position of the door,
simply put - recreate the room on the mocap.
And then explain that to the actors who
needed to know where they should walk,
look or what they could touch.
Unfortunately a lot of times the game
environments were too big to fit into our
motion capture. Or the props were too
complicated to make by just stacking up
metal platforms.
That's when we needed to improvise.
When we had the actors' performances, we took
the data, put it into our computers and
started assembling the whole scene,
create cameras and the overall edit,
while the animations were being polished.
In the end it was all about how to best
balance the technical side of the
process and Dan Vávra's idea about how the
actors performances should look. Plus how
to narrate the epic story in our very
limited conditions.
We don't have only cutscenes, there are also ingame
dialogues and barks. Altogether there are
almost 60 hours of voiceovers in the game
and the majority of that is short barks
like greetings, NPC chit chat or shouts
for the combat and crime system.
Shoot him!
Shoot the f*cker!
And we need to record all those with each actor
because every NPC can say any of those
lines. That means recording the same
2000 lines fifty times over and over again.
Each session took at least
4 hours. But we needed to pay the same
attention to those dialogues as we did
to the cutscenes, because the
player will hear them repeatedly and we
didn't want to, well, take an arrow to the knee.
Recording dialogue for the quest
is more fun but it's still a tough job.
Currently we are recording simultaneously
in two studios for weeks and
all our designers are taking shifts in
the director's chair so as not to go
mad, because recording grunts, groans,
panting and wheezing in combat for days
on end can soon kind of make you
go nuts.
So as you can see we took great care to
bring the story to life. I believe that
despite all the challenges the end
result is worth it and we have an awesome
cast that has made the story shine.
That's what attracted me - I think, if you're
doing something new and I like to be
there when people are creating something
new, it's an adventure.
I see everything as Mount Everest and
I see this project as Mount Everest.
For more infomation >> Random Overwatch Highlights - Episode 24 - Duration: 4:06. 
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