Thanks For the Violence.

As a video game "combat animator" I have often had ridiculous, violent tasks thrown my way: The laughable fatalities in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, super moves in X-Men: Next Dimension, and even an axe lodged in a woman's skull in Gun. During God of War III I animated a sequence that involved our protagonist, Kratos, violently ripping the head off of the sun god, Helios, with his bare hands. It will likely be the most talked about thing from my entire career as a game developer.

I've been an animator for a long time now and it seems that what I'm best at is violence. I'm not a violent person but when people ask what I do I jokingly tell them that I make people hurt each other. This is true to some extent but what I really do is help shape characters within a universe.

While I was not Kratos' main animator I did get to make him kill some of his enemies. Within these "context sensitive moves" Kratos still moves as Kratos. He still has the same rules for my cs moves that he has when our lead, Bruno, works on navigation animations or attacks. For the most part I always tried to keep Kratos true to form but the Helios head rip, while admittedly over the top, is flirting with being comical and outside the nature of Kratos. It's almost spectacle just for the sake of it, which I would have liked to change. At the very least it would have been nice to show that Helios' sight does, in fact, reveal hidden things beforehand but, hey, I ain't a designer.

The simple idea that there is a rule set for a character's movement is so important to telling a story using action without dialogue that I often have to wonder if other developers take this philosophy to heart. Since "narrative" seems to be the latest game developer catchphrase, let's call this "Corporeal Narration." It's wildly apparent in most 2d and 3d feature films that personality through motion is important but it seems as if the majority of games today are lacking this quality. This is becoming more and more evident with the rise of "plug and play" animations that have very little to do with personality and more to do with producers thinking mocap expedites animation time.

I am wary of writing about Ico because of how many others have done it before and done it better than I can but it has brilliant corporeal narrative. Ico also illustrates just how important character performance is. Many games these days use motion capture with such generic performances that it's, honestly, a little disheartening. Motion capture actors often over-emote, use their hands too much, and generally exaggerate their movements to excess, all the while managing to escape any sense of the character they are portraying. Ironically, motion capture excels at recreating exactly the opposite of what many actors do when put in a suit. All of the subtleties of motion as it relates to personality and character are typically unexplored. Admittedly, this even occurred in some of GOW III's cut scenes(I never want to see Kratos point at anything ever again).

Poor mocap performance exists in nearly every title that uses it but it's not the technology's fault; It's the actor's and it's also the director's. Sometimes it's the animator. Sometimes it's even production. A character may not be defined when mocap shoots are scheduled to happen. Sometimes there isn't even concept art for the actor to reference. Many things can limit a character's representation but poor performance results in watered down, generic character action.

My original thought for this post was to express how having to animate Kratos killing made me think about him as a character, how he behaves and how he moves, how he always travels directly towards his goal. In everything I worked on I tried to follow the rules of who he is and how that applies to motion. Even though I was required to break the rules by designers I stuck as close to them as I could. That same treatment should be true for every animator for any character. Everything a character does stems from a unique individual place, with motivations and decisions driven by their personality. Remember that characters are always performing, even during inaction.