David Cage, studio head for Quantic Dream, shared his vision for the future today – ‘Kara’.
After the release of the studio’s previous title, Heavy Rain, fans have eagerly awaited the release of QD’s next. Cage, however, displayed only a tech demo created by his team. Kara only utilizes 50% of their new engine and was done a year ago, so it’s impressive to see how far the team has come since Heavy Rain.
“What we call full-performance capture is shooting the body, the voice and face at the same time,” explains Cage. “Most studios right now in the game industry use what we call split performance, which means you shoot the face and voice on one side and then you use the body, and not in one take.”
“It works okay; there have been some great games made using this process, and Heavy Rain was done this way. But we felt that if we wanted more emotion, and more performance from the actor, we needed to have everything from the same take, and we needed to shoot everything at the same time. So we invested a lot in our motion capture studio. Heavy Rain was shot with 28 cameras, and we’ve upgraded the studio to 65 cameras. Now we can shoot several actors – their bodies and their faces – at the same time. It’s not a small change, but at the same time, this is how Avatar and Tintin were shot, and it’s how the CG industry works because they know how much you gain from shooting face, voice and body at the same time.” added Cage.
Here’s a video to introduce you to Kara