Marshawn Lynch is going to play the role of a villain in the new video game, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, later this year. So recently, ESPN The Magazine followed Beast Mode—who is a BIG COD fan—to the Activision Motion Capture Studio in Los Angeles to create his character. And it was…an experience.
As much as he loves COD, Lynch didn't seem to know much about how motion capture works. It led to this hilarious exchange between him and the game's creators when they attempted to use cameras to capture his image:
Lynch takes a seat at the center of a cocoon-shaped light stage where 16 cameras will capture a 360-degree image of his skin texture and features. "This looks scary," he says, before grilling the shadowy figures who line a row of monitors. "How many lights you got on here?" (6,280 LEDs.) "You counting them little s---- too?" (Yes, even the little lights.) "Is this healthy?" (Sure, Kevin Spacey went through the same process for his role in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.) "Who? The dude from The Jetsons? The spaceman?" (No, the dude from House of Cards.) "That's a show? What they do?" (Politics.) One last question. "Can y'all make me an app right quick?"
It also led to this exchange that featured Lynch asking if he was going to suffer from brain damage when the creators used a scanner to capture images of his face:
"Am I gonna leave this thing with brain damage, or is this gonna make me smart?" Lynch asks. More like option C: The mechanical arms rotating around Lynch's head are capturing 3-D mesh data of his skull and facial muscles, which, when wrapped with the skin data, produces a complete down-to-the-pore representation of his head. "Y'all trying to kill me," he says.
And at one point when the creators started using more than 60 cameras to capture his actual movements, he caught a glimpse of the grayscale rendering of his body on a monitor and wondered why it looked like he was naked:
Lynch, meanwhile, is baffled by his grayscale rendering, which makes it appear as though he's naked. "What the hell is this?! Am I playing a stripper?"
Ha! The ESPN The Magazine piece isn't long. But it's worth a read because there are more exchanges like these scattered throughout it. Despite Lynch's confusion, Activision got the job done:
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Black Ops III will hit stores in November. You buying it?
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[via ESPN]
