Uncharted 2 Panel Recap

Who Was There: From Naughty Dog, there was creative director Amy Hennig, lead cinematics animator Josh Sherr, and video editor Taylor Kurosaki. Also on hand were voice actors Nolan North (Nathan Drake), Emily Rose (Elena Fisher), Claudia Black (Cloe Frazer), and Robin Atkin Downes (Atoq Navarro).

What They Talked About: The overall topic of the Uncharted 2 panel was the process that goes into recording voice work and physical movements from the actors and transferring it into the game. What makes the process different in Uncharted 2 is the sheer amount of work that goes into it. For one thing, the game’s voice actors also do motion capture, which often requires creating sets on the sound stage in order to give them a better idea of their physical locations. When reciting dialogue, the actors will often improvise their own material to the point where later scripts need to be updated in order to reflect dialogue changes made by the actors. Josh Sherr mentioned that they stopped doing storyboarding altogether because of this, despite the fact that storyboarding is an extremely common practice in game development. (As an example, they cited how flirty Drake and Cloe are during their first encounter in Uncharted 2, which was never called upon in the script.)

Once they record the raw mo-cap data, it’s up to the animators to go in and liven up the data. Sherr says that raw mo-cap data is a great starting point for character animation, but it has a vaguely robotic and floaty feel when left untouched. So the team of animators at Naughty Dog has to go in and exaggerate character movements. None of the facial animations are captured, so all of that has to be done entirely by the animation team. Altogether, the amount of work that goes into getting all this animation to look natural and lifelike is an extremely time-intensive process.

Aside from technical feats, it was refreshing to see what incredible chemistry the actors had with not only each other, but also with the members of Naughty Dog on stage. Jokes were constantly flying throughout the panel, letting you know that these are people who have a lot of fun working together. North and Black had a playful chemistry where Black teased that nothing would ever happen between them because they’re like twin siblings separated at birth, to which North responded “But I’m from the South!” Later, Emily Rose was talking about the trouble of explaining to her family that she acts in video games, which North quickly summarized with “What went wrong!” as a distressed family member might ask.

One of the better highlights was North answering a question about whether or not he ever gets recognized based purely on his voice. He responded with a story about chatting with a GameStop clerk about which games to buy for his son, but the clerk seemed strangely distracted the whole time. Just as North handed him his credit card, the clerk read his name and shouted “A-ha!” and threw the card right back at him just before grabbing a stack of Uncharted copies and asking him to sign each one.

Best Audience Question: Naughty Dog’s own Arne Meyer stood in line with fans to ask North to do his Christopher Walken impersonation. North responded with a spot-on impersonation in which he rambled on about how he likes to put eyes on cactuses because they look too threatening.

The runner-up was probably the audience member who asked the actors if they’d like to play themselves in the upcoming Uncharted movie. The general consensus from the actors seemed to be that they would genuinely love to, but they would completely understand if the people behind the film would rather cast more well-known actors.

Worst Audience Question: One audience member asked a two-part question, the second being “Can I high-five Nolan North?” If there’s one thing the preceding time proved, it’s that North is playful enough to just give a high-five; you don't need to ask for one. You just do it.

The Takeaway: We haven’t seen a Comic-Con panel yet where the people on stage seemed to have so much fun with each other. There were certainly some dry moments when they got into detail about engine enhancements, graphics shaders, and iterative design techniques, but most of the panel was great fun. It’s clear Naughty Dog puts a ridiculous amount of effort and resources into the cinematics of its games, but the results speak for themselves.