Richard Dorton May Be the Most Prolific Video Game Actor You've Never Seen

Speaker 1: There is no such thing as mocap acting To me, acting is acting. We're working in a different medium. We have different rules. And once you learn those rules and you can adapt to them, the, the faster you'll get into this business. I'm Speaker 2: A superhero. Yes. Speaker 1: My name is Richard Jordan. I am an actor, a director, [00:00:30] and a stunt coordinator. If you've played a video game, you've probably killed me. I'm known as the Mocap Man. Motion capture is the process of being able to live, drive an animated character. It's basically taking my performance and putting it on digital character to bring it to life. Ready? Go, Speaker 2: [00:01:00] Go, go. Whoa, Speaker 3: This is always the fun part Speaker 1: Actually. Speaker 3: Ooh, you're in a haunted house. Speaker 1: Some of the details that you need to know when you're working on a video game are completely different than a movie. On a video game, I will be working with Apple boxes, tape some props, but for us actors, motion capture is pure imagination. So we have to create the sets, we have to create the costumes that we're wearing. [00:01:30] We don't have that luxury of having it, like in a, in a typical movie or TV show to get into this industry, the one thing that I always tell my students is, you have to be a good actor. Acting is what we do. That is your base skill. This is pure imagination, and you have to be able to play a man, a woman, a child, a monster, a creature, a zombie. Everything is open to you as a performer. Get your improv skills up. [00:02:00] Do weapons, learn everything about movement that you can. You have to be a well-rounded performer, and I think then you stand a chance of getting into the mocap world. Speaker 4: One question first, are you feeling anything that can be construed as explosive cell? Speaker 1: There's also different kinds of motion capture when you're talking about a video game. There's the in game process, which is where I'm playing the character in the video game that you are playing. I'm running, jumping, climbing, fighting. So we're building a move tree of [00:02:30] a thousand to 2000 moves. I'm going to get shot in the forehead, in the back of the head, in the side of the head, in the side of the head, the shoulder, shoulder, stomach, back, leg, leg, foot, foot. And then I'm gonna get shot again with a handgun, with a shotgun, with a rifle. And it's really hard on you physically. So that's in game. Then when we're talking about cinematics, that's all the trailer work that we do. It's all of the cut scenes, all of these small little quick times. It's our real performance. Speaker 1: [00:03:00] I got my start because I was a stunt performer and I always felt like being in a small market like dc, I have to be a stunt man in Hollywood. When I got to California, my audition was at this famous motion capture place called House of Moves. They had just done stunts for the movie Titanic where all the people falling off the boat. What's motion captured? So I thought, I'm gonna go to this place. I'm gonna meet some [00:03:30] great stunt people. This is what I'm gonna do. And I show up. And my audition was for Scooby Doo Night of a hundred Frights. It was a video game. I got to play Shaggy and all the villains in that game. The next client at House of Moves was told, Hey, look at this guy who can do everything. And they said, oh, if he can do all those characters, he can do Darth Vayner. I was in the right place at the right time and I haven't looked back. Speaker 5: So George is actually markering him up. We put markers, passive [00:04:00] markers onto Aly Suit, and we use these as landmarks to be able to capture data, but we use the marker locations to then determine his skeleton. And his skeleton is gonna give the most true to life a depiction of his movements in location in real time. So you can continue rolling when you lose 1, 2, 3, 10 markers. And the VI icon system is gonna be able to still solve that skeleton in real time. Speaker 1: Now [00:04:30] there are a lot of different kinds of motion capture systems, and it all depends on the budget. It all depends on the creativity, and it also depends on what's needed. Speaker 6: Our suit is a strap based system, so you can wear it over your clothes, you can wear anything you want. What's great about this is that it's all Velcro, so you can adjust it to any size for any person. Everything is internal to the suit. You don't need cameras, you don't need anything. You could take your laptop, [00:05:00] your neurons, go out to the park and do some motion capture. They use gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers to understand where everything is within the suit. You'll see what we're gonna do today as we're gonna add a hybrid system. As you can see, we have eight sis hybrid cameras. They're working in tandem with the sensors to give you location data. That's pretty cool. Speaker 2: [00:05:30] Here we go. Terrific. Hey, Speaker 7: See ya. Get them. Get him. Speaker 2: Yeah, you Speaker 1: Have to be, because I've been in the industry for so long, um, I also felt it was time for me to give back to the community that was so good to me. So I started teaching with the Mocap Falls. It was time for me to let, uh, as I tell my students, it's time for me to punch you [00:06:00] in the face instead of me. It was, it was my way of giving back to the community that was so good. Um, I started casting, I started directing, I started stunt coordinating, and I found just as much, uh, fulfillment and enjoyment out of that as I like to tell my friends, I'm making money with my brain instead of my body now. Um, but it's, it's been incredible to be a, to be an instructor and a mentor and to, um, share the volume with my students. That has been the, the greatest joy of my career.