Serkis speaks

Take a look at actor Andy Serkis' thoughts on the process of creating PlayStation®3 epic Heavenly Sword.

Heavenly Sword is a game that pushes the boundaries of cinematic presentation and dramatic performance in a videogame. Part of the reason for the game's incredible atmosphere is the story by Rhianna Pratchett and performances by a talented cast under the direction of Andy Serkis. Serkis is no stranger to performance capture, having starred as Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings and, more recently as Kong in Peter Jackson's King Kong, but Heavenly Sword marks his first foray into dramatic direction and the videogame world.

"The job of dramatic director is quite wide ranging," says Serkis. "When you're casting you have the conceptual artwork so there's a pre-designed way the character is going to look, but you have to try and find the soul of the character."

And what characters they are - ranging from flame-headed heroine Nariko to Serkis' deranged King Bohan, and featuring snake women, deranged bird-men and obese monsters along the way. Far from limiting performances however, Serkis sees performance capture as being a liberating experience for actors.

"The interesting thing about motion capture is that you can play anything - you're not restricted by your own physicality or face, you are allowed to go anywhere."

Motion capture artists use up to 100 markers on the actor's face and every movement is picked up by 60 cameras filming everything at all times. Once the actor's performance has been captured, digital artists can then sculpt the characters' faces with a computer much in the same way as a traditional sculptor would. It's a technique that has yielded some incredible results on the big screen and one that lends itself well to the development of dramatic scenes in videogames.

"Before getting involved with the whole idea of cinematic games, I wasn't really a fan of them at all," he says. "But all that changed when I saw the trailer for Heavenly Sword and met the guys at Ninja Theory. I was immediately reminded of the feeling I got when I met Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh for The Lord Of The Rings - there were people here who had an extraordinary vision, and who had tapped into an area of performance that was moving forward and that really excited me."

So the next task was to convert Serkis. "They gave me Shadow Of The Colossus to play and that became my pilgrimage," he recalls with a grin. "I spent weeks and weeks galloping around on a horse fighting the colossi and by the end of it I was as excited as Ninja Theory at the prospect of raising the bar in games."

The key thing for Serkis in creating the dramatic direction for Heavenly Sword was to make the characters and story as real as possible. "We established early on that we needed a scriptwriter involved from the beginning, and we were very lucky to bring on board the fantastic Rhianna Pratchett. Thanks to her, we quickly established who the characters were, what they meant to each other and what the cause and effect of each cutscene would be, so that dramatically we could move the story on."

So being new to the world of videogames, did Serkis find differences between acting and directing for a game, and doing the same for a film or a play?

"The psychological process of creating a role is the same as playing a role on stage or screen. It really was a million miles away from saying 'I could come in here and make a few bucks by just doing a voice' - everyone involved was highly committed to developing their craft in a new arena and taking it as seriously as possible. We actually rehearsed it and performed the whole of Heavenly Sword as a play - the whole thing from beginning to end including all the gameplay. Which was interesting! But it was also incredibly useful as you could see the rhythm of the whole story; where the pace needed to pick up, when you needed to feel empathy for Nariko, where that cause didn't match the effect, so there was an enormous benefit to treating it like a dramatic endeavour."