00:00In Mafia the Old Country our story is actually very grounded, it's a very kind of personal story.
00:22It's really important that those characters do feel believable, they feel like they live in that world.
00:27For anybody working on story-driven cinematic games, the casting process is always hugely important.
00:42Father, it's so good to see you.
00:45The actors are going to help you bring the emotions that you want the player to feel to screen.
00:50To friendship.
00:51We've been very lucky, we found our core characters, our central five or six characters, all just popped out from the screen as soon as we saw them.
00:58Are you going to tell me the truth? Or are you going to accuse me of having a wild imagination like everyone else?
01:05The first time I saw Ricardo on the screen I had an immediate strong instinct that this was going to be our guy, this was our Enzo.
01:11I thought family was supposed to mean something, how can you do that to him?
01:14I had a relationship with Enzo before Ricardo, the actor, got involved, right? Because we understand his journey in the game.
01:21I had a different idea to who Enzo was going to be, and it's really interesting to see what the actor brings to the character.
01:28Because a character in a video game passes through a lot of hands, from the writers, to myself as AD, to the character artists, to the animators.
01:36Everybody brings something to the character, and Enzo absolutely evolved across that process.
01:42He started as a sort of a younger guy, in a way, that was maybe even more naive and fresh-faced than you see him in the game.
01:50I'm going far away from this place, Gaetano. Never coming back.
01:54Enzo is a badass, right? Enzo is a dangerous guy. But he also has this other side to him where he's very human and approachable.
02:01He's trying to figure some of this stuff out in the same way players are as they encounter him in the game.
02:06Ricardo still has a lot of that. He has that naivety, has a quality to him and his performance.
02:11We needed somebody very, very special for that role, and yeah, we were lucky that Ricardo came knocking.
02:21We are trying to listen to our actors and to their ideas, because in the end you could enrich the experience that the player has while playing the game.
02:30And it's them who play the role at the end of the day, so they need to feel comfortable with what we are asking them to do.
02:36All of the men in this room are bound by blood.
02:40So we cast great actors for the role. Our job is to take those performances, their talent, and put it on the screen.
02:48It's not always straightforward. There is so much work and effort that goes into translating what we all take for granted,
02:54which we see every day in the nuanced actions, behaviors, movements of real people.
02:59The emotions that they convey really comes across in the detail of those performances when you see them in the game itself.
03:06The wanderer returns. Where have you been? No way. Been busy.
03:14I think that the biggest challenge for an actor that's not used to acting in the motion capture stage is the emptiness of the motion capture stage.
03:21The actors need to be able to imagine a lot.
03:25We are supporting them by the props, explaining what each prop means, what the set looks like.
03:31And then we are also showing them the virtual world on the screen.
03:36We are having like two studios, one in Brno, Czech Republic.
03:42We use this mostly for the systemic animation, for all the player locomotion, NPC locomotion, the word interaction, all the non-spoken events in the game.
03:51For the cinematics and narrative and spoken parts of the game, we are using the California 2K Games motion capture studio in Petaluma, which is really huge.
04:02This studio allows us to capture, we call it teacup, like total capture, which means that we can record not only the body animation, but also the facial expressions and the audio of the actors.
04:14Actors, they are enjoying playing and imagining the world, you know, so it's a blessing to work with them, you know.
04:25They all love to do so.
04:26My precious.
04:29Getting the imagination out of their head may sound challenging for them, it's kind of also freedom for them, you know.
04:36Chemistry between the actors, particularly Enzo and Isabella, has been really, really amazing. It's a real pleasure to watch.
04:41People might talk.
04:43And what would they say?
04:45The way that we tie together the music and the performances and the location and all these things to produce, hopefully, a very memorable introduction into Sicily and to Enzo's experience.
04:59That's there to really make players form a relationship with the cast, you can form a relationship with the experience, I think is fantastic.
