Heavy Rain developer ‘Quantic Dream” released a glimpse of their latest project: Kara.
This short film about “Kara” isn’t a trailer of Quantic Dream’s next game but it serves more as a techdemo that shows off the abilities that the studio has to offer. “Kara” is a good example where Quantic Dream uses new techniques and equipment to realize “Full performance capture”. Full Performance Capture is a process in wich a real actor’s body, face, and voice simultaneously are recorded that will be used to form animations ( a virtual actor). Quantic Dream also released a kind of tech demo to tease for their game ” Heavy Rain” to show off their possibilities of making a game for the playstation 3. This video is called ” The casting” demo that you can watch below :
What makes this techdemo really interesting is to see what Quantic Dream is capable off with their new engine. When we look at this demo, you could see a couple of important aspects: all the footage in this demonstration has been capured real-time on a Playstation 3. This means that the video isn’t pre-rendered like you see in a standard cutscene of a game. Quantic dream lets the viewers know that this footage is from their first version of their newest engine and they also confirmed that they have already advanced to version three.
CEO David Cage tells us that 70 actresses auditioned for the role of “Kara”. All the motion capture and voice work is the work of an actress named Valorie Curry. Everything you see or hear is the hard work of this one actress except for the scene where “Kara” says something in foreign languages. These foreign recordings were the audio of two other actresses that auditioned for “Kara”.
Cage stresses the importance of virtual actors because he believes that virtual actors can bring the game’s story to a higher and more interesting level thanks to the evolution of “full performance capture” -technology.
Just relax and enjoy this piece of technological art:
Let’s hope they don’t waste that GREAT engine on a generic shooter… I haven’t played Heavy Rain but for what I have seen of it it looks fantastic! Hopefuly they keep it up with that kind of games!
The Kara demo was fantastic. Its a shame that it wont be made a full story. But if that can run in game Im looking forward to what Quantic Dream will come up with next.