[LEVEL UP KL 2022] “Motion Capture Is Like a Brush” says Kenn McDonald, Senior Animation Manager At PS Studios Malaysia in Interview

During the Southeast Asian annual Game Developers Conference LEVEL UP KL 2022 that happened just last week, we had the pleasure to be able to chat with Kenn McDonald who is a Senior Animation Manager at PlayStation Studios Malaysia in an interview.

In our interview with Kenn, we asked him his thoughts on Motion Capture, Animation, applying at PlayStation studios and other technical aspects when working in Animation.

We’ve also previously attended his talk titled: Introduction to Motion Capture in Games and if you’re interested in reading about that, you can click on the link here.

[Interview is edited for clarity]

You have a very personal connection to Motion Capture, having been there from the early days of Beowulf and Polar Express. Considering the performances we’re getting nowadays with games like The Last of Us or Death Stranding, how do you feel about how far the medium has come?

I think it certainly has come a long way, and I think the motion capture that we’re getting in games now is on par with what we were getting in Beowulf. We got the animation talents, we got great actors, great performers that are playing these characters. A lot of them focus on doing game work and motion capture work, but we’re also getting a lot of actors crossing over from film and television who are working in games.

The technology I think has fully crossed over from visual effects, being up to par with the standards we usually see in movies. The only limitations that we have are the game engines, but I still think that the game engines that we have from the last generation have also come so far. What the consoles, game engines, and PC can do, I think it’s fully matured.

Do you think there’s any room for growth on that aspect then?

Oh yeah, there’s always room for growth, even in feature films and visual effects. I don’t think we’ve done a completely convincing and believable digital character. We’ve done very good digital characters that don’t feel weird or creepy but I think there’s still room to make it better.

When I see a digital character, I know immediately that I’m looking at one. Maybe that’s because I study it and I know what the little things are but I think we spend all our time interacting with everyday people and it only takes a little for you to realise that there’s something not quite right.

The day I can sit down and watch a movie and mistake you for a digital character, that’s when we really succeeded. But I don’t think it’s quite there yet, so we can keep improving.

When speaking to a lot of animators, they always says that it’s not about getting the frame by frame perfect rotoscope and that you still need to add the little things to make it more believable.

Straight perfect motion capture somehow feels kind of dead. A little bit of massaging by the animator, a little bit of pushing it or emphasising something. especially in facial performances goes a long way towards making a connection with the viewer.

Do you feel like audience, even the ones that didn’t go through artschool can appreciate all these little advancements?

I think it’s in their enjoyment of it, to be honest I don’t think they particularly care about the details of how we make these things. Some people do, they’re fans and they’re interested in the process but for the average person on the street, they just want to be entertained and want to lose themselves in a story. And if we’re creating characters that do that, then we’re doing our job and that’s what really comes down to.

The more they can connect with what’s happening on the screen, in that sense they appreciate it more but I don’t think about it much. Unless they complain about how terrible it was.

I think there’s one concern about motion capture in particular and it’s that it limits you into doing realistic things.

I don’t think so, you can use motion capture in other ways. Immediately after we did Polar Express, Sony did another motion capture project before Beowulf, it was a movie called Monster House. It was produced Robert Zemeckis and directed by Gil Kenan and they had these stylised and cartoony designs. They were made to look like stop motion puppets and they motion captured all of the character performers and re-target those performances onto those characterised performers. And I thought it worked really well, I thought it was really fun and the motion capture gave it an interesting stop motion kind of feel to it.

Dreamworks have been using motion capture for years with Shrek. They originally did motion capture tests for Shrek where they considered motion capture for that. They’ve been using motion capture for background characters and crowd scenes for a long time.

You can use and mix it with other kinds of animation with stylised performances and you can get some interesting effects with it. So I don’t think it has to be just for realistic action/adventure stuff.

So to put it in other words, it’s like a brush?

Yeah, it’s like a brush! Brad Bird, the director who did The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and the Mission Impossible movie talked about this quite a lot and he says in the United States, we’re talking about motion capture is squeezed into this and in the states, animation for many years is considered as a kid’s medium. And Brad’s point was that animation is a tool for making movies, not a genre as animated films can be all sorts of genres.

Animation is a vessel and the content inside the vessel is what kind of story you’re telling. And I think the same thing is true for motion capture since it’s a way of getting a performance onto a character but you can tell any kind of story with it.

I think there’s a big problem with how people measure the quality of animation, where they think “if it’s not a photo-realistic picture woman closing her eyes and screaming, it’s bad animation.” What do you say is the hallmark of good animation?

Good animation is animation that tells a story that connects with people and touches them. You could look at something and say that’s technically well animated, that’s proficient animation. But I’ve seen plenty of animation that’s very well done, but it feels dead, it lacks heart and soul to it. There’s more to it than just being technically good at it, whether you’re being able to do good drawings or being able to make a great model.

It’s the combination of story telling and performance of a story being told and the way people will react in their hearts to the animation.

There’s a great little film that’s probably 40 or 50 years old now called “Moonbird”. The film was done by a husband and wife animation team, and it was animated in a sort of child-like way, like a children’s drawing. The film was incredibly charming and very touching, I would still say it’s good animation even though it’s not slick and polished. It’s good animation because it draws you into the story of these little kids and tells you an emotional adventure.

So to me, there’s a lot to be said of knowing your tools, understand animation and knowing all the principles, and being able to use those to create beautiful animation. But to me, good animation is animation that captures the audiences entirely and moves them.

Just to clarify, when you said touching, it doesn’t always have to be about “Simba poking Mufasa’s dead body”, it can also be funny right?

It can be funny, something that’s just charming or it can be something that frightens you. It’s like I said, animation is a vessel, it’s a medium to tell a story, and you can tell any kind of story with it and be successful with it.

Going from features to games, what would you say is the biggest difference in the pipeline?

It really depends, the first few things I worked on in games were mostly doing cinematics and it was very similar to doing films. As I dove into it more, and got into positions where I was working within the development studio and overseeing a whole game, I had to learn a lot more about gameplay and working closely with level designers and programmers.

One game that I worked on was the new version of Hitman. I worked on the first season of that and when we started it. Hitman was a stealth game, there was fighting and killing but it is a stealth game at its core. So we took out time with the animation and see what happens if we them be really smooth. It looked really cool but it didn’t play well.

When we started putting it through for play testers to play test the game were annoyed because they had to wait for the animation sequence to finish. It was only a few frames but it was enough to make them crazy.

So we started to tighten up the animation, making the motions a little shorter and using blending transitions instead of animating transition. We still kept a very nice look to it, but it felt better to play with more interactions. So for me, that was the biggest thing when I went from doing animated films and visuals effects.

In visual effects, you have the scene length but you got a lot of room in there to move things around. If you’re making an animated feature, and you say I need another 3 seconds in the scene, generally you can just open it up and do it. But in a game, you really have to pay attention to how long actions take and how gameplay affects things.

The cinematics are the fun and sexy part of it, but the gameplay is the heart of it, and you have to make sure you’re paying attention to that. I think for me, that’s where I had the most learning to do when I started working in games more.

I remember in school where they were like “when you’re doing games, when you say it’s 60 frames, it’s 60 frames“

In games like Tekken or Mortal Kombat, it’s 12 frames and I got friends who are masters of those games. They know they need to hit this button and flip this paddle and hit that tab at frame number 8, of this action to trigger a certain combination. It’s completely insane, but it’s amazing and the animation has to work at that level.

It’s the exact number of frames and you have to be at this exact point in that motion to trigger the next motion that needs to comes out from that, so it’s incredible precise and technical and I think in general, animators that work in games and especially animators who focus on gameplay animation are really much more technical than your average animator working in visual effects. They have to be, because it’s so complex.

Does motion capture help at all when doing that kind of animation? Since you only ever hear about that in cinematic content.

Yeah. When we did Hitman, we did motion capture for all of his kills and his stunts. In other games I’ve worked on, we’ve done motion capture for all of the gameplay, animation and everything. But it gets very heavily edited and it gets manipulated a lot so you got a lot of good basis as it feels pretty natural but it gets edited a lot in order for it to work within the requirements of being gameplay animation. And especially so for fighting stuff and things like that, you have to tighten it up a little bit.

During your talk, I noticed a recurring theme that you’ve bought up like the quality and the technical aspects of animation. Because you mentioned the 4D scanning and how they’re able to scan a person’s face as a mesh.

For 4D scanning, they’re able to scan a person’s face and capture their facial texture at a super high resolution, full speed, 60 frames per second and have someone go through a range of expressions and performances. You can grab a person’ expressions and that becomes the basis for a blend shape for that expression, or maybe it’s going to be a joint-based rig but you use that as a target that you’re trying to hit with the joint based deformers. Or maybe you’re using a joint based rig but your corrective shapes that get triggered when you go into that pose.

You can use that geometry in many ways. For example, you can use the texture and geometries to generate wrinkle maps, where you can get all these incredible references that you can use, and in some ways very directed usable to generate blend shapes.

With the rigs are appearing more often, and a lot of that is really being used in visual effects and it hasn’t made its way as deeply into games because the game engines are still somewhat limited as it needs to be rendered in real time and you can’t have 150 corrective blend shapes on a face rig.

We’re getting there, and it’s useful as reference and in a way to get the character expressions you want and targets to aim for with your real time rigs. And I find it to be amazing, because you can take a really quick scan of the metahuman and texture that you’ve done, put it in there a have a rig working in a few hours.

What do you think about performance capture being that easy? Because we have a whole industry of Vtubers who literally have a phone pointed at a person and it maps their actions onto the phone?

I think it’s amazing. You could go out and buy these helmets, these cameras and their rigs cost thousands of dollars. When I see people with a bicycle helmet where they have a pole here and an iPhone here, and they’re doing facial capture, I feel really happy about it.

I think that’s fantastic and that opens up this technology to people who are on a budget, you can start seeing it being used in small games and indie games. I think that’s amazing and I’m all for it, any kind of hacking that you can do to get the technology to be more available for people because then, people are going to start doing things with it that you wouldn’t expect.

PlayStation is undoubtedly considered the studio that makes these really good and realistic performances. I think if your new animator friend coming out of school might be a little bit intimidating to even want to apply and work in PlayStation.

It’s funny you say that, we do internships and we’ve done really well with them. We recently had 4 people go through internships and all 4 of them transitioned into full time employees. We also have three more interns who just started this week.

I’ll admit, we’re very particular about the people that we accept for our internships. We bring in people that we look at their work, and when we talk to them, we see their passion and the good skills that they’ve learned at school, we believe that there’s a really good chance that they’ll be successful.

But I’ve heard that some of the younger animators that we’ve hired into the studio as associated animators or mid level animators, they were very intimidated to apply. They almost didn’t apply because they thought there was no way they were going to hired at PlayStation. But they did.

They sent us their work and we look through them and saw that they had potential, we then called them up for an interview and they had a great attitude. You can see when someone was really passionate about what they do, have a set of skills and they want to learn. Those are the kind of people that we’re looking for, so nobody should be afraid of applying to PlayStation.

As someone who was on the job hunt before, there’s always this fear that your application was so bad that not only that they reject you but they also tell everyone else to reject you too.

I don’t know about that. Early in my career, I went through times when I put my portfolio in a place which was met with a really harsh review from somebody. I felt really terrible and two weeks later, somebody saw my portfolio and said “this is great! Why don’t you come work with us?”

I would just encourage everybody to just try, and don’t give up.

Before we wrap up, do you have anything you want to add and say to others?

Yeah. Figure out what it is that you’re passionate about, and what it is you care about. Animating, making games, making movies, it’s all pretty hard work, you don’t always need to work 80 hours a week but sometimes you work a lot of hours, it requires a lot of intense focus and there’s a lot of pressure. So you need to be passionate about it and you need to care and figure out what it is. If you love animation, what kind of animation you would like, what you like animating.

When I was a kid, there was a TV show called Johnny Quest that I loved. It was an original TV show from the early 60s, which revolves around Johnny Quest, his scientist father and his friends as they go on these crazy adventures. It was just this action/adventure genre and a lot of projects that I worked on over the years have been in that vein because I love the genre and stories they tell. And that was something that really motivated me, it started my love for movies, comic books and animation, and it stuck with me.

I always ask people when I’m interviewing them, tell me your origin story and what got you into this. Why did you want to be an animator, what’s something you saw whether if its a movie or a TV show, something that you saw and made you say “I want to do that” or “I wish I animated that”.

And if you can answer that, then you’re well on your way. But that’s an important one, knowing what it is. If you’re just going through the motions, you’re going to have a tougher time, animating takes a lot of passion.

We’d like to thank Kenn McDonald for taking time to answer our questions.

PlayStation Studios Malaysia are currently recruiting for more people to join their team to further contribute to the development of games and creating quality AAA masterpieces. For those who are interested in joining them, you can apply and submit your resume by clicking on the link here.

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