If you had asked David Footman ten years ago if he wanted to work on video games, he might have laughed in your face.
Talking at Ottawa’s Animation Festival Sept. 22, Footman said that originally his dream was to direct movies.
However, after being assistant director on movies like The Day after Tomorrow and X-Men, Footman, who is now the cinematic director at Ubisoft, said that the experience of making movies and games is quite similar.
“I’m seeing much higher-quality performance… Games are not movies, but like movies, we make stories,” he said.
As cinematic director, Footman is in charge of motion capture for games, primarily cinematics. In layman’s terms, he records people moving. Those movements then get translated to characters in videogames, giving them realistic motion. Motion capture is also used in movies like Avatar to animate computer-generated characters.
During his talk, Footman showed how the current game he is working on, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, uses state-of-the-art equipment to capture movement from actors.
“We … built a motion capture studio at our Toronto facility, and it just has everything you need to get that sort of level of quality,” he said.
Showcasing a video, Footman showed how actor’s movements are translated into games. On one side the video showed people in black suits with little balls over their body and what resembled high-tech hockey masks, fighting each other in an empty room with cameras all around. On the other side, Sam Fisher, the main character of Splinter Cell, was interrogating a prisoner in a lab, throwing him through computer screens and glass. The scene was a cinematic, meaning that players would only watch it like a little movie, and not control it.
In his time, Footman said he’s seen cinematics grow and mature.
“I think in the beginning it was ‘oh look, we can make movies in games’, and now it’s like, ‘oh, why are we taking time away from gameplay to show you a movie’,” he said.
“I think we’re maturing and now we’re actually showing scenes that are more convention-based screenplay-type scenes, with change, revelation [and] conflict,” he added.
In addition, studios are bringing in more experienced people to operate cameras and edit sequences, he said.
“It used to be seven or eight years ago you’d bring in someone to do cameras that maybe had just got out of film school, nothing wrong with that, but you want to be working with people that have been doing this for years and that can bring something to the show.”
Working at Ubisoft’s studio in Toronto, Footman said that he’s surprised by the amount of studios that are located in Canada.
“I don’t know why we have so many game developers here, but it’s amazing. When I was in Vancouver, I would do a lot of work down the coast, but I was blown away by the number of studios we have [here],” he said.
“Being a Canadian I’m just really grateful I get to be here and work because I’d much rather shooting in Canada where my family lives.”
