Emotion gets a little more real in Splinter Cell: Blacklist

Sam Fisher was getting old. So Ubisoft gave the video game protagonist a make-over.

Starting in 2002, five of the first six games in the Tom Clancy–branded franchise were developed in Montreal, but Ubisoft Toronto—which opened in 2009—took the seventh, Splinter Cell: Blacklist (PS3, Wii U, Windows, Xbox 360), as its first project. One of the early decisions was to amp up the realism in the game, which will be released on August 20.

“The biggest challenge is believability,” said Scott Lee, art director on the project. By phone from Toronto, he told the Straight that the characters in Blacklist have an “incredible amount of function” in terms of facial expressions. Unlike other action games, Lee explained, the narrative-intense Splinter Cell games require some complicated emoting from their hero, Sam Fisher. And emotions aren’t conveyed through dialogue. “The strongest, most powerful moments are when there’s nothing being said and you’re looking at eyes and expressions and body language,” Lee said. “And all of that has to do with us being able to bring the actor’s performances through unfiltered.”

This required “pushing the boundaries” of what can be accomplished with performance capture. David Footman, who directed the actors for Blacklist, defines the process as the act of recording, at the same time, all aspects of a performance with up to 12 actors. That includes digital information about how bodies and faces move as well as dialogue recording. Upwards of 100 cameras are rigged throughout a sound stage to accomplish this, and actors either have markers on their faces or wear helmet cameras. The digitized movements are then used to animate the characters in the game.

Footman spoke with the Straight while stuck in traffic, trying to escape Toronto for the long weekend. He said that the innovation he brought to the performance capture process was adding a few regular cameras.

An editor takes the video footage from those reference cameras and selects and edits the best takes. For a game’s cinematic sequences, then, Footman ordered “frame-accurate” animations. “It means we can focus on animating the stuff we want, and not having to wade through everything,” he said.

The reference cameras also make performance capture less alien to actors. Unlike a film set, a performance capture stage is barren. Footman says this is “hostile” for the actors, who wear tight-fitting black outfits and don’t even have the luxury of wardrobe to help them get into character. If performers are used to acting to camera, Footman reasoned, it made sense to give them something to act to. It’s also why he spends time with them in rehearsal and on blocking and choreographing movements. “We’re trying to replicate all the successes they have on film and TV sets, and we do that by having all those fundamentals,” he said.

In creating the Sam Fisher that appears in Blacklist, Lee said his artists went “back to basics”. And while Fisher wasn’t modelled on the likeness of any real person, the fact that Eric Johnson’s physicality so closely matched that of the character is one reason Footman cast him.

Johnson, an Edmonton native, takes over the role from another Canadian actor, Michael Ironside. Johnson had never done motion capture before, and Lee said that was likely a benefit. “[The] Motion capture was very theatrical,” Lee said, requiring actors to exaggerate movements. But true performance capture is able to detect nuance. “We needed subtlety here, and we needed somebody who knew how to act on that level,” Lee stated. “There are some very powerful moments in our game.”