Acting in the Digital Age is a series that explores the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly changing industry. In this edition, Backstage looks at how a Guildford-based company is bringing Hollywood stars into home-grown video games.
Supermassive Games is a BAFTA-winning video game developer based in the UK, and the company’s slate of interactive projects has repeatedly attracted top-tier acting talent.
Their 2015 horror game Until Dawn featured a memorable performance from Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody, No Time To Die). Since then, Supermassive has launched The Dark Pictures Anthology, an ambitious franchise of loosely interlinked horror games where players control multiple characters, making decisions that can alter the story and its outcome. Actors involved in Dark Pictures include BAFTA-winner Will Poulter, a British actor with credits like The Revenant, Midsommer, and The Maze Runner jostling for space on his IMDb page.
Backstage spoke to Pete Samuels, executive producer of The Dark Pictures Anthology and Supermassive’s managing director, to find out what it’s like helping acting talent adapt to the video game world.
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You’ve worked with talent like Rami Malek and Will Poulter alongside many other actors in your games. What is your casting process?
We make character-driven branching narrative games that have strong acting performance at their core. So, when we are designing and creating the game concept, we often have an idea in mind of who we would want to star in the game (or certainly, the type of actor we would like). We create a wish-list and then reach out to casting agents to see if our choices are available. We have been incredibly lucky to get the cast of actors we have in our games – all our actors have been tremendous, and great fun to work with.
Do you find actors adapt easily to the world of video games or is there a learning curve?
There is a learning curve, but good actors get there pretty quickly. For a start, we tend to work faster than TV and film. There are far fewer stoppages to set lights and camera, no costume changes, and due to the branching nature of our games, the actors will often be recording several variations of scenes in quick succession.
There are different outcomes and scenes depending on the choices the player makes, and there is very little repetition. So, it’s important that the actors are able to adapt quickly to the situation their character may be in at any one time. It’s different, but most actors we work with will tell you that they had a lot of fun and found a good camaraderie with the rest of the cast on the stage.
We try, where possible, to have the cast spend time together before we shoot, in table-reads or full-on rehearsal, so that they build an understanding of the script, their character, and the other characters in the story. It’s a lot of fun from start to finish.
Acting in Video Games: Here Are 10 Expert Tips How was your experience of working with Will Poulter on Little Hope?
Will was fantastic to work with. We cast him to play three different parts, across three time periods with two very different accents. He had to flip from a northern English accent based on 17th-century English settlers in the US, to a modern-day east-coast US accent. He bought a fantastic performance to the game. Will’s incredibly personable too, and it was always a real joy to have him on set. An incredible talent, and modest with it, and amid all the hard work and apparent chaos of a mocap [motion capture] shoot, he took every opportunity to raise spirits and bring an energy to the whole cast and crew. Did I mention that he’s hilarious?
In terms of his “branching narrative” experience, I know that Will has said in various interviews that working on Bandersnatch [Black Mirror’s “choose your own adventure” episode] gave him at least some idea of what to expect. Filming for a game is different to other media, but he will have been used to the concept of filming different scenes based around an interactive choice a player may make.
Whatever level their experience, what kind of training do you give actors to help them adapt to your way of working?
In addition to providing full scripts for preparation, and the table-reads and rehearsals that precede the on-stage activity, there’s little or no additional training required, to be honest. We are big fans of the actors bringing their own interpretation to the characters, within the narrative requirements of course, whatever their previous experience might be.
We don’t presume to tell them how to execute their craft, other than to run them through the capture process, what we need from them to support it, and what we’ll do to support them with tele-prompts, dialogue coaches, technical support staff etc. to help them to do their best work. After that, they’re on a stage with the other actors as if performing a stage play. They’ve already trained for years to do that, and that’s pretty much all the training required.
Does much of your work with actors take place on a mocap stage? What are the issues with that?
Sometimes it’s a mocap stage. Other times it’s a sound stage. But the process is pretty much the same, just with different constraints. I’m sure that there are as many or more struggles on a film set as we don’t have to worry too much about lights, cameras, and marks.
Our process doesn’t require many issues as such, but we do rely on the actors being able to imagine their surroundings as there’s often no identifiable set or scenery to work with. Because we shoot at such a pace, our actors can take some convincing that our schedules are even feasible, and it’s important for us to monitor their energy throughout the day, and to make sure that we help them to look after their voices, hydration, nutrition etc.
Other than that, we have a few technical processes that we need to keep an eye on, mainly in relation to sound and data-capture, but we work with experienced and expert technical teams, so that’s rarely a struggle either.
Rami Malek in Until Dawn
What advice would you give actors about to embark on their first work in video games?
I think that depends on the type of work and, as with any work, who you’re working with. I’m aware that not all processes and teams are the same as ours, but if you work with us then expect a great deal of fun!
Most of the people we work with have never performed in an environment that’s quite like this, but if the teams that surround the performance are experienced, there’s really nothing at all to worry about.
So far, the actors that we’ve worked with have all made a point of telling us how much they enjoyed doing it. There is a great deal of camaraderie on set, lots of laughs, and lots of freedom to express themselves in ways they perhaps wouldn’t get in a typical working day.
More from Acting in the Digital Age:
- How Acting Is Evolving Thanks to Video Game Technology
- What Do Actors Need to Know About Virtual Production?
- Actors Can Learn From the Video Game Industry’s Lockdown Success
- How Acting + Video Games Are Merging in the UK and Beyond
- How to Find Work in Video Games in the UK
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