"There are no sets to construct or move around, no lights, very basic furniture and equipment, and MoCap shoots in 360 3D all the time which means you only need one good shot for all your camera angles, all of which makes it incredibly easy to jump from one scene to the next. As a result, you get through a lot of lines in a day. You also need to stay focused while working in warehouses all day without sunlight, spouting numerous lines of dialogue and acting your heart out, while wearing a heavy helmet with a camera attached to it."
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
"GIVE ME MY OSCAR NOM!"
A week's worth of Hollywood-set-acting can be crammed into one day of motion capture, and that's a lot of running around playing professional pretend. It's obviously physically exhausting, but the emotional toll is heavy, too:
"I was working on on the AAA game Homefront: The Revolution. The first week of shoots was doing torture scenes. Me and the other actor basically took turns to act out horrific acts of torture on each other for four days, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The action was to fill out a vast cityscape of activity that could be viewed by the player depending on how they played. We spent the first morning watching a YouTube video about acts of torture reported by citizens from a particular country and that alone was depressing. It got very uncomfortable and very depressing very fast."
GetMotion Studios
"OK, we gotta watch Charlie Bit My Finger before the next one."
But hey, at least now they have crash pads to collapse on when the depression gets overwhelming.
Oliver Hollis-Leick is an actor specialising in performance capture. He is co-founder of The Mocap Vaults, an organisation set up to teach motion capture to all. Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist, interviewer, and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter.
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