Kratos, the very fictional character brought to life by the popular God of War franchise, apparently needed a stunt double for the Santa Monica PlayStation 4 exclusive that dropped in 2018. One would think that a digital creation would be able to perform all of his/her “stunts” on their own but, that only goes to show how much we know. Video game creation is a lot more complicated than meets the eye, to the point where stunt doubles have become very necessary.
Eric Jacobus, who works as a stuntman and action director for movies and games, revealed having performed stunts for both Kratos and the annoying Norse God Baldur in GoW during a recent interview.
The stuntman co-founded a company called Super Alloy that does action design work for interactive media entities. And, speaking to Feed4gamers.com, he outlined why video game characters even need stunt doubles.
Jacobus explained that, since game actors don’t necessarily have the time to train as a character, their faces and voices are usually tacked onto a stuntman’s body (if that’s the case). And, depending on the requirements, several stuntmen can lend their movements to a single character.
“Training the actor like they do in John Wick is a huge time investment and most actors aren’t able to commit to that,” he said. “That’s a common bottleneck with film and action.
“In games, there’s much more freedom because the characters are computer-generated. A stuntman can be the body, a facial actor can be the head, a voice actor is the voice, and a model can be the 3D scan. Sometimes you’ll even have multiple stuntmen for one character depending on the requirements, or stuntmen will play multiple characters. I did 8 in-game characters for Mortal Kombat 11 and a ton of different bits of the cinematics.”
Stargate SG-1’s Christopher Judge, who voiced Kratos, also did the cinematic work for the game’s protagonist but Jacobus says he did the motion capture for both Kratos and Baldur.
“I did the in-game motion capture for both [Kratos and Baldur],” he added. “But for cinematics, I would play Baldur, and usually Chris J. would do Kratos, since they needed Baldur to be smaller. I ended up stunt coordinating a lot of these scenes too.”
Jacobus also explained that having actors gives devs more freedom as they can film pieces separately and stitch them together to make it look like it was a single piece.
“For example, if you need to stomp on someone’s head, this is a pretty difficult gag to achieve on film,” he said. “Usually they just cut away. In games, they can film the victim reacting, and the attacker can stand 10 feet away and mash his foot on a pad. Put the two together and it looks like they happened in the same space. It’s awesome stuff… though maybe that’s why games are so much more violent than movies – because they can be!”
Source: feed4gamers.com
