DEVELOPING THE VISION

Eric Jacobus delves further into the world of action sequences and stunts

Can you tell us about Superalloy?

Action design is all in the process. In film, you can create great action or comedy, but someone else down the assembly line can then destroy it – a bland camera angle, a bad edit, a misplaced sound effect. So we not only create the action for the director’s vision, but we develop a process with the team to ensure the action vision survives through to the end.

What elements are essential to a great video game action sequence?

We can create great moves, cool choreography, insane weapons and huge production design, but if story isn’t driving the action scene at every moment, then it’s just movement for movement’s sake. If story drives the scene, like a Zatoichi fight or Sergio Leone gun battle, you can deliver an entire scene with a single move. Everything must support the story.

What advice can you give to artists that want to follow in your footsteps?

Look at steel. An iron worker saw the potential in combining iron with other elements like titanium and manganese. He alloyed iron with other elements and developed steel, which became an entire new economy. Humans don’t really create anything, we combine and innovate. That’s what comedy is: alloying two seemingly unrelated things together for the first time in a logical way that makes sense.

Does motion capture change how you approach action and stunts?

Motion capturing a game’s cinematic cutscene is like filmmaking. You might need to imagine where the camera is, and you can fix attack animations in post, so you can be ten feet from your opponent and still hit him. Obviously, though, if we don’t know where the camera is we can’t play to it. For in-game mocap, the camera is fixed and the entire moveset plays to that camera angle. Every piece of action is a single move or combo that has exact parameters. That precision makes it an awesome challenge.