To bring these characters to life, IO Interactive turned to Hollywood. Hitman: Absolution features a dozen Hollywood actors from film and television. The actors provided full performance capture for the game, which means when you see Keith Carradine’s villain Blake Dexter walking around in the game, the actor’s motions were captured digitally.
“Blake Dexter is a pretty complex character,” said Blystad. “He’s introduced at the very beginning of the game and then follows through the entire story, which is rather lengthy. He’s one of the characters that appears most throughout the story and has the most difficult scenes.”
Carradine, who stars in Universal Pictures’ Cowboys & Aliens this summer, was up for the challenge of performing in a video game. Some scenes had as many as seven actors performing together in full motion-capture suits.
“Acting always reduces down to the same basic tenets: know your character and tell the truth,” said Carradine. “In that regard, performance capture is no different than any other ‘capture’ of the actor’s work, whether it be film, video, digital, or the consciousness of a live audience.”
Once the acting was captured digitally, Blystad said his team had an insane amount of flexibility in working with the scenes inside the virtual set. While the actors were back working on film and TV projects, Blystad’s team was tweaking their performances, trimming scenes, and perfecting their virtual faces to create a cinematic experience.
“We also have a mo-cap camera set-up in our studio, so we’re able to go back and capture a scene using a digital camera,” explained Blystad. “This adds another layer of believability on top of the performances, because our camera in the game is not static. It’s panning and moving around, just like it would on a film or TV show.”
Bringing all aspects of a virtual character to life stuck with actress Marsha Thomason (“White Collar”), who makes her video game debut as Diana Burnwood in Hitman: Absolution.
“Actors would die to be the voice for a character on an animated film or TV show,” said Thomason. “It’s a dream and this is a spin-off of that. I would love to play a regular on a video game. It would be great. It keeps it fresh. It keeps it interesting.”
IO Interactive hopes new fans will find Hitman: Absolution interesting when Square Enix launches the action adventure game next year.
Poor Tore, he had to hit that hornet's nest.
Good Bye 47.
