Oh boy! A chance to ramble on about one of my favorite pieces of video game trivia: Kojima's infamous mocap actor swap!
During the production of MGS3, there were two motion-capture actors for Snake. One handled the action-y stuff like the combat rolls, gunplay, and CQC. The other handled the dramatic, interpersonal scenes. These two clearly had completely different skill sets and backgrounds.
Which is why, without warning, Hideo Kojima would arrive on the set and demand that they swap places.
This may sound like some weird, Kubrickian, power-tripping director insanity, but his reasoning was pretty ingenious.
At the time of this story, Snake is an awkward, socially-inept twentysomething who has spent almost his entire life being trained to be an incredibly capable soldier. He is not the suave, charismatic, impossibly skilled leader we all know at this point.
To drive this home, Kojima pulled the actor swap to highlight this inexperienced awkwardness. The action guy wasn't used to doing one-on-one, touchy-feely scenes and his nervousness naturally reflected in his performance. Supposedly there was even an entire scene changed because the actor reflexively pulled away from a kiss during a scene with EVA instead of following through as written. Kojima felt that this fit the character far more than being the suave ladies' man-type of super spy.
On the other hand, you had the dramatic actor attempting combat maneuvers. Of course, these were imperfect and clumsy. Again, this is exactly what Kojima wanted. Those imperfections were needed to show that, though he's already badass in his own right, this is far before Snake becomes the untouchable soldier of legend. He's still human, and those flubbed combat rolls and awkward reloads are meant to highlight this.
Tl;dr: Kojima told two mocap actors "you bitches switching" and is a goddamn genius for doing so.
daeset555 on September 6th, 2019 at 02:19 UTC »
This makes my snake solid
MightyMrFish on September 6th, 2019 at 03:03 UTC »
Sure, yeah.
But what about the ladder?
FullScrim on September 6th, 2019 at 08:44 UTC »
Oh boy! A chance to ramble on about one of my favorite pieces of video game trivia: Kojima's infamous mocap actor swap!
During the production of MGS3, there were two motion-capture actors for Snake. One handled the action-y stuff like the combat rolls, gunplay, and CQC. The other handled the dramatic, interpersonal scenes. These two clearly had completely different skill sets and backgrounds.
Which is why, without warning, Hideo Kojima would arrive on the set and demand that they swap places.
This may sound like some weird, Kubrickian, power-tripping director insanity, but his reasoning was pretty ingenious.
At the time of this story, Snake is an awkward, socially-inept twentysomething who has spent almost his entire life being trained to be an incredibly capable soldier. He is not the suave, charismatic, impossibly skilled leader we all know at this point.
To drive this home, Kojima pulled the actor swap to highlight this inexperienced awkwardness. The action guy wasn't used to doing one-on-one, touchy-feely scenes and his nervousness naturally reflected in his performance. Supposedly there was even an entire scene changed because the actor reflexively pulled away from a kiss during a scene with EVA instead of following through as written. Kojima felt that this fit the character far more than being the suave ladies' man-type of super spy.
On the other hand, you had the dramatic actor attempting combat maneuvers. Of course, these were imperfect and clumsy. Again, this is exactly what Kojima wanted. Those imperfections were needed to show that, though he's already badass in his own right, this is far before Snake becomes the untouchable soldier of legend. He's still human, and those flubbed combat rolls and awkward reloads are meant to highlight this.
Tl;dr: Kojima told two mocap actors "you bitches switching" and is a goddamn genius for doing so.