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Video game production has gone a long way. As graphics and character renders have become more complex and realistic, actors and video game studios have had to evolve in order to keep up. Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are two great examples of that. Rockstar has embraced motion capture technology, making their characters more lifelike.

If you aren’t familiar with motion capture technology, it involves an actor wearing a suit that feeds their movement data into a computer. That is then used to generate character moments in a video game. Keep in mind, this is an oversimplified version of a process that is very complicated. Throughout 2024, the Grand Theft Auto V cast visited various conventions, sharing their experiences with motion capture. It turns out that the actors do far more than any of us might have expected.

“When you say recording, you’ve got to remember that we’re not recording, we’re filming. We’re actually filming like we’re on a real movie set. We’re really acting out all those scenes you see,” Shawn Fonteno said during an appearance at Phoenix Game On Expo 2024.

The experience was new to the actors, who didn’t realize their roles required motion capture until their first day on set.

“We didn’t even know we were doing motion capture,” Ned Luke said during an appearance at Sci-Fi Valley Con 2024. “We showed up first day on the set, and this dude Alan hands me a wetsuit. And I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ And he goes, ‘That’s what we’ve got to do today. You have to put this on.’ So, we get into these motion capture suits, which are not flattering, and they put balls all over you. So now you’ve got hard balls all over your body and reflector markers. They’re everywhere man and it’s brutal.”

Luke elaborated on this during an appearance at Nostalgia Con Houston 2024.

“We wore the weights during the Paleto Bay Score, where we come out in the big body armor. When you’re doing these things, it’s all imagination. Nothing is really there. What they did was they took 25-pound weights, like sandbags, and put them on our ankles, so that way when we came out of there, we felt the weight of that stuff. We had to run in that stuff. My calves were killing me at the end of that day. It was brutal.”

However, motion capture means each action has to be completed from start to finish. In other words, it isn’t like Hollywood where you can slice different scenes together. This means that the actors have to do everything in one take or start over again.

“It was like playing GTA 4. If you screw up the mission, you’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning and replay it,” Luke said, speaking to a crowd at Phoenix Game On Expo 2024.

“It’s so fun, what we go through to create that fucking game,” Fonteno said to the Phoenix crowd. “Y’all think it’s just like we sit in a booth, and we’ve got a mic and we’re reading papers. It’s a lot of performing goes into it, and it’s a lot of us putting the hard work into it for three and half years, and trust me man, it paid off, because you all have been here supporting us.”

Speaking to the Nostalgia Con Houston crowd, Luke told everyone just how much work really goes into it.

“People don’t realize, the video game world is so entrusted in voice acting, it’s really developed into a lot more than that. It’s a performance now. It’s performance capture. You’re wearing these suits with balls all over them and it’s motion capture.”

“Everything you see us do, the characters do, that’s us doing it, which made it a lot more fun, because it felt more like acting than voice acting. We were 100+ hours in the booth doing voice, but all the cutscenes and everything you see, all that stuff, that’s us. Three years of that stuff. It was a blast. What an experience.”

Remember, GTA 5 was released in 2013. If this is what video game production was like a decade ago, then the future is looking bright. Let’s see if Rockstar keeps up that innovation with Grand Theft Auto VI.   

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