L.A. Noire magnifies video game acting with new technology

Actor Aaron Staton plays voices Det. Cole Phelps, left, in 'L.A. Noire.' ASSOCIATED PRESS Enlarge

LOS ANGELES -- Aaron Staton doesn't like watching himself on Mad Men.

It makes the 33-year-old actor uneasy when it comes time to step back in front of the boozy AMC drama's cameras to portray slick ad account executive Ken Cosgrove. That's not the case when he's played as himself in L.A. Noire, Rockstar Games' upcoming murder-mystery saga set in 1947 Los Angeles and starring Staton as ambitious police detective Cole Phelps.

"I think it's because there was all of this technology involved," said Staton, who has played about 20 minutes of the game, which was released Tuesday. "I feel removed enough that I can appreciate all the elements. There are portions of the final product incorporated in a way that tell the story of a moment in a way that I couldn't have predicted."

Staton's performance was digitized using two different methods. The blond, blue-eyed actor's face and voice were captured with MotionScan, a new system that more accurately records the human face than previous technologies. It required him to sit in a chair and recite his lines while being watched by 32 cameras and only moving his head in 45-degree angles.

To capture Staton's motion -- walking, jumping, and punching, for example -- the actor separately performed scenes in a skintight suit that cameras could detect and digitize, a method commonly used in effects-laden films such as Avatar. At the end of filming each scene, the motion-capture system required Staton to stand straight with his arms outstretched.

"It's funny because I worked on that for quite a few months leading up to the first day on set of Mad Men for Season Four," Staton said. "After the first scene, they said cut, and I had the impulse to do a T-pose. It's just a funny thing how different those worlds are. If I had done that, I think everybody would've looked at me like, 'What are you doing?' "

Staton, a self-professed gamer who appreciates Super Mario Bros. as much as Call of Duty, had little time to prepare for his leading role as Phelps, a World War II veteran who returns to the United States and rises through the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department throughout the game. He was offered the job on a Friday and started work the next Monday.

"There wasn't a lot of time with a 2,200 page script," Staton said. "I saw the test footage, and they sent me a character description, the full journey and context of the world. I'm somewhat familiar with the noir genre and L.A. Confidential, which is a great reference point for the feel of this game."

The L.A. Noire developers from Team Bondi in Sydney and New York-based Rockstar Games set out to recreate an 8-square-mile stretch of Los Angeles, reaching from downtown to the Hollywood district, where Phelps investigates crime scenes, tracks suspects, and interrogates witnesses. That last part makes up the bulk of the L.A. Noire gameplay.

In one case, dubbed "The Silk Stocking Murder," Phelps and his partner investigate the death of a young woman whose mutilated body was found in a parking lot. Clues at the crime scene could lead Phelps to the victim's boarding house, where players can interview the noisy landlady who knows several seedy details about the dead woman's personal life.

Developers said more than 400 actors portrayed various characters populating their virtual post-war Los Angeles. During investigations, players are tasked with probing witnesses and deciding after each prompt if they're being truthful based on their tone and facial tics. If players want to cast doubt, they can press a button to further press a witness.

The murder-mystery game 'L.A. Noire' is set in 1947 Los Angeles. ASSOCIATED PRESS Enlarge

"To do that, we had to have believable performances," said Brendan McNamara, the game's director. "We had to have technology that allowed actors to do their thing without any level of interpretation. No one can animate an actor's face better than the actor. The key thing that makes this game different from others is that it's about human interaction."

While games long have used real actors to create virtual action, most games rely solely on voices recorded in a sound booth and physical movement captured on a soundstage, with the performances later combined and enhanced by animators inside a computer. MotionScan, created by technology firm Depth Analysis, eliminates the need for much of that tweaking.

"I think there's more animated footage in this game than any of the other games we've done -- and we don't make small games," said Rob Nelson, art director at Rockstar Games. "We were shooting forever. You could use this technology on much smaller-scale games and get believable performances out of it. We just chose to do something very ambitious with it."

The result is a more linear and cinematic experience than Rockstar's open-world Western shoot-'em-up Red Dead Redemption and sprawling action-adventure Grand Theft Auto gangster series. The developers said the game's plot rarely deviates from the main storyline, and there's not much reason to explore the virtual Los Angeles beyond curiosity.

Because of the interactive nature of video games, Staton and the game's other actors recorded several lines and scenes that some players might never experience, depending on how they direct Phelps. Staton said to achieve his most authentic delivery possible, he performed each moment of the storyline as if it existed in a separate reality from the others.

Early during his work on the game, Staton delivered his lines to a red X in front of him, but the developers later replaced it with a small picture of Mona Lisa "to give me a set of eyes to look into." He said the sterile surroundings provided a "constant awareness of the perimeters" but he found the unconventional acting environment "really exciting."

"It was a cool challenge," Staton said. "As I did it, I definitely became more and more comfortable in there. It's a new thing. It's a different thing. I found myself working through those perimeters. Maybe I became more comfortable midway through or at the end of the process. I don't know. Probably, in three years, the process will be completely different."