Identify: Facial Animation in Video Games

Facial animation is one of the most crucial elements of any sort of animation. Faces often define characters and facial expression is what communicates what a character is thinking or feeling at any one time. Good facial animation is surprisingly rare in the video game industry, with characters either coming across as bug-eyed or treading too close to the uncanny valley. Some games decide to forgo facial animation entirely by hiding their characters behind space helmets or setting the game in first person, but a game with good facial animation can have as much impact on the player as any television drama or film. 

Silent Hill 2, released in 2001, was in my opinion one of the first games to do facial animation right. Character designer Sato Takayoshi based the primary cast of characters on their performers and refrained from using facial capture in order to achieve more naturalistic facial movement. Sato's approach was more akin to traditional animation, posing in front of mirrors and manually keying facial movemeny. Footage of the performers was used for reference but only reference. This allowed the team to craft personal and unique performances based off personal drawings and sketches while also retaining a structure to build off. His reasoning for doing this, Sato claims, was because the facial motion capture technology of the time only took the position of the skin on the face and not the muscle structure, which Sato claims is key to a more naturalistic performance. 

Fast forward just over a decade and Naughty Dog is using the same technique for the performances in the critically acclaimed The Last Of Us. Naughty Dog are the masters of performance capture in video games, but even then The Last Of Us is something special. Like Team Silent, Naughty Dog refrains from using facial motion capture in it's cutscenes, instead opting for a combination of motion capture for bodily movements and manual keying for character's performances. Naughty Dogs reasoning for adopting this technique is in order to extenuate certain aspects of a performance, as even in 2013, motion capture technology still sometimes treads towards the uncanny valley. The result is a stylised form of animation with a slick attention to detail that steers clear of uncanny valley territory, while also feeling uniquely naturalistic and fluent. Muscles on the face contract and stretch making them feel very much real and grounded.

Like in Silent Hill 2, Joel and Ellie retain certain elements of their performers appearances, while also remaining unique and memorable designs in and of themselves, something that could not have been achieved had the designers opted to use just motion capture. Joel and Ellie have unique facial structures retain aspects of their performers but are separate from them, making them feel more like real people. The Last of Us received a lot of critical acclaim when it released back in 2013, and part of that was thanks to the believable performances of Joel and Ellie. But I feel that just is much praise is due for the animators who brought those two characters to life and were so integral to the drama of the game. The Last Of Us is as close to a critically acclaimed 10-part HBO drama video games have and as technology improves, so to will the ability to craft thoughtful and introspective performances.