Moving On Up

Audiomotion's Mick Morris on outsourcing, dev costs and why the industry needs to present itself more effectively

Feature by Phil Elliott Contributor

Published on Oct. 22, 2009

Motion capture specialist Audiomotion has worked on some of the industry's key titles in the past few years, as well as a host of well-known TV commercials and Hollywood movies.

Here, the company's MD Mick Morris gives his views on how outsourcing - and specifically motion capture - has developed over the years, the rising cost of making games and why the industry needs to show a more representative face to the public.

GamesIndustry.biz Consumers won't often necessarily know, when they play a videogame, the company that created it - and even less so a company that's created a component of a game, as with Audiomotion. It's part of the business, but does that frustrate you sometimes?

Mick Morris

Well, it is part of the business really, and it doesn't annoy me that much, because the actual work we do - I wouldn't say we're unsung heroes, but for example some of the film work, if anybody were to spot that those characters in Poseidon were CG, then somebody hasn't done their job properly.

And the same for Prince Caspian, with all the horses and centaurs - the work is supposed to be unseen in that respect, so sure, getting credit when it's due is nice, but quite often it's not the case. But we're not really in it for credit, we're in it because we love it.

GamesIndustry.biz So where did Audiomotion come from?

Mick Morris

We started in 1997 as part of the Jeff Brown Holdings, so sister companies were Silicon Dreams (who did all the football titles), ATD, Pivotal Games, and a few others. We were set up at the time to service those companies, and Jeff Brown at the time had enough foresight to realise that motion capture was going to become an integral part of games and the CG industry.

We started up in Banbury (UK) with about 17 cameras, but in 2001 the group started to get itself in a bit of trouble, and in 2003 we effectively put together a management buy-out... so really you can take our history from there, with the current management team as it is now.

We got rid of the audio studio - hence the name Audiomotion - and everything else was hived off so we just ran with the motion capture, and we still do just that today. We're not going back down the road of being fully CG - our clients come to us with whatever their needs are, and we then deliver back to the next specialist, be it an animation studio, a post-production company, or game developer. It's a ridiculously niche business.

GamesIndustry.biz Since 2003 the game industry has turned next-gen... how has the business developed in that time?

Mick Morris

We went from 17 cameras and very few clients then, and we've just been building slowly but surely since then. We've now got 130 cameras, which means we can do lots of things. We can be shooting here in Oxford as well as on location in Barcelona or wherever. As the industry itself matures, and demand for more realistic performances increases, we're responding.

In some things we're innovating, but quite a lot of it is in response to the needs of game developers, so you're not going to get away with shoddy animation any more because the critics are going to pan it. You're not going to get away with poor storylines and poor performances from your characters, so that does drive the whole performance capture route.

Being able to capture faces, and fingers, and full audio - all in one sitting - with directors that come from the theatre, directors with film experience, writers, screenwriters... all of that stuff is now coming together quite nicely, and hopefully the end result is a more compelling experience for the gamer.

But then I guess you've got the whole argument about having to sit through cutscenes in the first place, which is that ever becomes a winning argument our revenue is set to fall somewhat... but we'll innovate and find a new route.

GamesIndustry.biz I remember a conversation I had last year with Glenn Entis from EA in which we talked about the Uncanny Valley - that's a classic barrier between virtual and reality in terms of visuals, but does performance capture bridge that gap?

Mick Morris

I wouldn't say that it does. A few people in the industry have made the claim that they've crossed the Uncanny Valley - it's a very interesting concept in itself, and I can totally understand that the closer a character becomes to being photo-realistic, the more repulsive in a way it becomes.

I think a lot of people avoid that by going for something that's a little bit more stylised, and I think ultimately that's always a little bit more interesting than this pursuit of photo-real. People who don't know anything about the industry at all sometimes ask why do any of this, when you can just film real people... but then when you show them space marines and funky stuff like that, they start to get it.