Matthew Mercer Quotes

The difference between 'Resident Evil: Damnation' and 'Resident Evil 6' is in 'Resident Evil 6' we did facial mo-cap, along with the voice over. We had these little reflectors glued to our faces and these head pieces in this room filled with light with about 40 cameras.

Games are another place to find work, not only the voice stuff but in the motion capture stuff. It's exciting work.

What we do sometimes when we're in the sessions recording the dialogue is we'll set up a video camera and we'll video the whole session. So then the animator, if he wants, can draw upon those tapes to pull expressions, mouth shapes, maybe some gesturing that happens.

And because performing for a game involves real acting. The way they create a game is very similar now to how they create a film. I've always wanted to stretch my acting skills, and the timing being what it is, I couldn't say no.

Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?

Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.

I had a friend who had done the cinematics for 'Splinter Cell: Conviction,' so he kind of indoctrinated me into the series. I did a bunch of temp stuff for him - I roughed stuff in the game for him, playing about nine characters - just so he had some character templates to work from.

The most challenging roles were Disney's 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Mars Needs Moms' because they were both motion capture, so there was a lot of physical work involved.

What you do in film and television is really different than what you do in video games.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

Live-action has always been my focus and my passion. I love voice-over, and I definitely could see myself doing some voice-over, as much as I could, and even if I ended up doing only that for the rest of my life, and I could be successful at it, that would be great. But I think my real dream is to do films and live-action films.

For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.

When you do a voice in an animated film, you don't see the finished product at all. You're not animating. You're not doing the voice on the finished product. You're doing the voice long before.

In 'Uncharted,' we do the scenes the same way you would do a film or television show. The motion capture - the performance-capture process - is what makes such a difference for this franchise. So I don't approach it any differently. The other actors and I go in and rehearse scenes together, and then we go in the next day and perform.

Like, every couple of months you read, they rewrite, you come back in, they've animated more stuff - they usually videotape you while you're reading it - so they'll incorporate some gestures and some facial expressions into it.

The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially.

A live action movie is work, and an animated movie is you showing up in your pajamas once every three months, or in my case, just a splash of baby powder. It's not any kind of heavy lifting.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

I love animated movies in general. I like making them.

That's the thing with animated films - I often feel that puppets get the better parts compared to us normal actresses.

Originally when I went off to work on 'The Lord of The Rings' I got a call from my agent saying that I was just going to do a voice. But I couldn't really approach it like that. To get Gollum's voice I had to play the character.

I'm interested in animation. I actually feel like I've learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.

All the time that I'm acting with an animated character, I'm looking at a tennis ball or sticky tape or an eyeline or a man in a green suit. There's no real environment, just this electric green that's blaring into your brain.

As an actor, I always wondered what it would be like to watch an animated character with your voice behind it and see if it seems seamless or if it seems like your voice is isolated from the animation.

'Mars Needs Moms' was motion capture, where you walk into a space that's essentially a black box with cameras everywhere. It was so technical. You have these mandibles with cameras on your face and a helmet, and you have to hit certain marks. You couldn't shoot this stuff without the green-screen aspect.