May 7, 2009

Motion Capturing with Resident Evil 5's Reuben Langdon
By Louis Bedigian

“For Resident Evil 5, our goal was to make it feel more realistic, like a documentary-style film.”

While playing games like Resident Evil 5 and Devil May Cry 4, few realize that, in addition to the endless hours spent programming the gameplay to perfection, a great deal of time and effort is dedicated to making the games look as beautiful as possible. As one of the most prominent motion capture actors, Reuben Langdon has been a part of this process for quite some time. You may have never realized it, but there's a good chance he's been in one (or several) of your favorite games.

"I got into motion capture about 11 years ago," Langdon told us during our recent interview. "My first mo-cap job, Resident Evil: CODE Veronica, at the time it was interesting technology. I had heard about it. They brought me on board and it was cool seeing myself as a computer-generated guy, who obviously looked different from the way I looked but had my moves.

"From there I moved back to the States. I was living in Japan at the time, and got contacted by John Tobias, [co-creator] of Mortal Kombat and he was putting together Tao Feng and was looking to get some martial artists. I had some motion capture experience so he asked me to be involved with that."

Langdon's opportunities grew from there, eventually leading to the development of Just Cause Productions, a full-service mo-cap and animation studio. "For Resident Evil 5, we did the motion capturing and the animation for the game cinematics. That's kind of what we do now, specialize in the whole package. Talent for motion capture, animation, voice-over and facial capture."

It's not all fun and games though. Langdon says that motion capturing is a "blessing and a curse because you get lazy as a performer. I just got off a live-action movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on the comic book. With motion capture, you can have the animator tweak something later. But with live-action you have to get it right on the spot.

"Scott Pilgrim is kind of a cult-classic comic/manga by Bryan Lee O'Malley. It's being directed by Edgar Wright, the guy who did Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. It was a blast. It probably won't be out for a while but the comics are great."

Chris Redfield comes to life with the help of Reuben Langdon.

I've heard that early on the mo-cap technology was very primitive and maybe even dangerous.

Reuben Langdon: The first mo-cap, which was for Resident Evil, was called the magnetic system. I guess because there was this giant magnet somewhere in the room, which gave everybody headaches, we literally couldn't be in the room for more than three hours 'cause everyone started getting dizzy and we had no idea what kind of brain tumors may have been developed. [Laughs] We all had to take breaks. Also, we were attached to these wires, so it was very limited space, and because of the wires we had to have a guy kind of follow us around and make sure we didn't get tangled up in the wires, which we often did. It was difficult to do complicated stunts because you'd get tangled up. It was pretty limited there.

Moving on, for the first test for the Tao Feng project, they actually, back in the day, had the optical system -- the reflective markers that are common today. They had these giant, bigger than a ping-pong ball markers, and that's how they used to be. They were really huge and they were made of wood. Instead of soft rubber which they are now made of, they were these big wooden balls. So every time we fell they'd leave big welts on our bodies. That kind of sucked. We told the guys who made it, 'We can't handle this,' landing on wooden chunks. They later started to make 'em out of rubber and now they're getting smaller and smaller and are hardly noticeable.

Now, Moven, the new system, is kind of a hybrid of the wires and markers. These suits, you don't even have to be in a studio. All you need is a laptop and the suit and you can pretty much do the motion capturing anywhere. That's kind of the future. Hopefully they'll get less and less bulky. The technology is really cool because you can do it outside. And you can wear [the suit] underneath your regular clothes.

Is it possible to merge that with traditional film? Let's say you want to make a movie that's sort of live-action, so you're filming a scenario, but then you're going to change the characters later to something computer-generated. Is it possible to combine all that to bypass some of the roundabout editing they typically go through?

RL: Tim Burton just finished Alice in Wonderland and that's kind of how they're doing it.

You've worked on motion capturing and have a company that does both it and animation. Which of them would you say has advanced faster?

RL: Animation is amazing. I haven't been in that world until recently, just kind of watching it from afar. But seeing the advancement as far as shortcuts, and being able to create Hollywood-level animation on your laptop, I think that is amazing. Computing power has gotten so good and the animating techniques have gotten so good that you don't need to have huge rendering machines. It's more accessible. It's like going from film [to the digital format]. Before, everyone had to shoot on film and it was this big, expensive process. Now, if you have the time and techniques, anyone can do it at home on their laptop. That's the greatest achievement in advancement. Motion capture technology has been a tool to help that. But I think animation has had greater advancements in the past 10 years.

Where is the animation being done?

RL: We have a studio in Japan. For Resident Evil 5 we did [the animation] here in the US. We hired a team of animators here, some of the guys from Avatar, the movie James Cameron has been working on. So we put together a team here as well as some of the guys from Japan to form kind of a mix-matched team. For our current project we built a studio in Japan to do the animation, whereas we do all the motion capture stuff here in the States. All the talent is here, and there's more space here. There are mo-cap studios in Japan but they're relatively small because space is a commodity out there. Shipping the talent out there is costly, so it just makes more sense to do everything in here. Data is a lot easier to ship than people these days.

Do you hire artists on a full-time basis or a per-project basis like you did with RE5?

RL: Kind of both. We have a full-time staff, a small staff, and then of course we have to crew up for projects, depending on the size of the project.

With each new RE and Devil May Cry, they get much more intense weapons-wise, fighting-wise. It becomes more and more surreal. Do you have to continue training yourself and advancing yourself for each game?

RL: It's a combination. You have training and skills, looking for something unique. But that's true of the story of the characters, the genre. Of the two, Devil May Cry has the option for more outrageous, crazy ideas, whereas Resident Evil you have to be more grounded. It's pushing the limit for the genre you're in. For something like Devil May Cry, there pretty much are no limits. Games like Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Blade, they're crazy, over-the-top action, and those [kinds of games] are so much fun to work on because there's really no limit. Resident Evil has to be more realistic, and that's the challenge, trying to keep it as real as possible but still keep it entertaining.

How does your work on RE5 compare to the other Resident Evil games? What was different about the experience?

RL: For Resident Evil 5, our goal was to make it feel more realistic, like a documentary-style film. Capcom [was really influenced by] films like Black Hawk Down and [the show] 24. That kind of handheld, 3D, documentary-style camerawork. That was one of the requests, one of the major differences. The rest, as far as Chris and Wesker and Jill and Sheva, they were all military-trained and had an arsenal of real-world weapons. To stay true to movements, we had an advisor to make sure we carried the weapons right. We put everyone through weapons training and tactical training. We were trying to stay as real as possible.

Did they motion capture the zombies as well?

RL: Yeah, everything in the cut scenes we motion captured except for some of the odd non-human characters like the spider.

While actually playing as Chris, were any of the motion capture moves implemented?

RL: That I'm not sure. We did do some things. Capcom was on board for all the motion capturing, and they would request certain moves and things. But I think a lot of it was keyframes or mo-cap on Capcom's side. They have their own in-house studio as well.

What is the most satisfying and most difficult aspect of the job?

RL: Most satisfying: it's seeing the final project. You do mo-cap, you're in a studio with cameras and you and nothing else. [There might be] cardboard boxes and set pieces. So now with real-time capturing you can get an idea of how it's going to look later. But the most satisfying aspect is actually seeing the final animation. You're just like, 'Wow, that's awesome. I was a part of that. That's my movement on that guy!'

The most difficult, or maybe the downside of that, is, comparing it to live action: with live-action it's you, it's your face, the world knows it's you. For motion capture and animation, the world sees it as that character. Not me. They don't necessarily see your face. They don't make that connection that it's you. So that's probably the only downside.

Do you have any other mo-cap projects coming up?

RL: I do. Always do. But I can't really talk about 'em. Probably the biggest one is Avatar, which has been announced. I've been working on that almost three years now. Hopefully that'll be hitting theaters soon. Again, I did a lot of work in that but you're not going to know it's me. [Laughs] Maybe in the credits when the DVD comes out.

The projects that you can't talk about – are those game-related?

RL: Yes, we're working on some games at our studio in Japan and our studio in LA. I think [you'll] find out very soon what those projects are.

Thank you for your time.

RL: Sure, no problem.

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