Quantic Dream's "Kara"

Welcome to Kara, the product of Quantic Dream's recent work on the PlayStation 3, and of its investment in new motion capture facilities. Again it's a one-woman show built around a slow tonal shift, again channelled through a strong and actorly central performance - but the distance between Kara and The Casting is as good a measure as any of the technical progress we've seen this generation, and of a shift in ambition and capability within Quantic Dream.

 

Kara's foundation is the studio's new engine, her purpose to reveal what it's capable of before the team embarked on its next game proper. "We really wanted to move forward and push the envelope on the new game," says Cage. "There were many things that we couldn't do on the old engine, so we decided to build a new one from scratch. Kara's the very first thing we've done with this brand new engine, so it's not optimized - it's got 50% of the features that we have right now, as Kara was done a year ago.

 

Kara's not just the product of new tech and a better understanding of the PlayStation 3's architecture - she's also the result of a new approach to motion capture at Quantic Dreams, and an investment in the more sophisticated techniques that have become the norm in Hollywood's CG industry as the studio moves across to using full-performance capture.

 

"What we call full-performance capture is shooting the body, the voice and face at the same time," explains Cage. "Most studios right now in the game industry use what we call split performance, which means you shoot the face and voice on one side and then you use the body, and not in one take.

 

"It works okay - there have been some great games made using this process, and Heavy Rain was done this way. But we felt that if we wanted more emotion, and more performance from the actor we needed to have everything from the same take, and we needed to shoot everything at the same time.

 

"So we invested a lot in our motion capture studio. Heavy Rain was shot with 28 cameras, and we've upgraded the studio to 65 cameras. Now we can shoot several actors - their body and their face - at the same time. It's not a small change, but at the same time this is how Avatar and Tintin were shot, and it's how the CG industry works because they know how much you gain from shooting face, voice and body at the same time."

 

Arriving in tandem with Quantic Dream's new full-performance capture facility is a new technical pipeline that allows performances captured in the morning to be viewed in-engine that afternoon. It allows for quick-fire iteration and brings the concept of working in a game studio a little closer to that of working on a film set, the director working through digital rushes after a day's virtual shoot.

 

Kara's played by Valorie Curry, formerly a regular on Veronica Mars and more recently a star of Twilight: Breaking Dawn, and she displays a remarkable range in her performance as Kara, moving from a robotic apathy through to a child's wonder and fear convincingly within six minutes. While Heavy Rain's female lead Jacqui Ainsley or The Casting's Aurélie Bancilhon were adequate, Curry's clearly an actor of a higher calibre - and it seems that tech that brings more fidelity to a performance demands performances of greater magnitude.

 

"In the past I was the main actor," says Cage. "In Fahrenheit I was Lucas Kane - I did the motion capture myself, but I'm not a very good actor. In Heavy Rain the quality in what we were trying made that impossible. We needed real actors, because we needed people with talent because the technology's reached the point where you can tell if someone's an actor and someone's not an actor.

 

"In Heavy Rain that was definitely the case. In Kara, you can't imagine the same scene having the same impact as someone who's not a talented actor. Technology becomes more precise and detailed and gives you more subtleties, so you need talent now. I'm not talking about getting a name in your game - I'm talking about getting talent in your game to improve the experience and get emotion in your game."

 

Valorie herself was picked from 100 hopefuls auditioning for Cage in Los Angeles - although the decision, in the end, was an easy one. "When Valorie entered the room - well, she looked like an android already. We didn't change her face, didn't change her haircut - and the performance that she delivered was so impressive in the casting session that it was truly obvious that it was her."

 

It's more than a performance, though. Kara's the focus of a touching sci-fi fable whose power comes not only from Curry but also from a script that suggests Cage has re-kindled his love for the fantastical. It's a love that was richly evident in Omikron and Fahrenheit, yet almost entirely absent in the misery-core of Heavy Rain, and with its pondering upon what humanity is Kara plays out like a Philip K. Dick story told by way of Chris Cunningham's video for All is Full of Love.

 

A key influence, Cage reveals, was Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, itself an extension of the idea popularized by Kurzweil's of an imminent moment when technology races outside of humanity's grasp. "My idea was thinking of the first machine that would be self-conscious, and that would feel something and believe that it's living and human," says Cage.

 

"For me I imagine that it'll happen like a bug in a factory, and it's something that should never happen - but it happened. It's the beginning of something, and you can easily imagine how more Karas can be built having this emotional sense and how the world could change based on that."