Druckmann took a stab at explaining: ""Since
Uncharted 4, we've done facial capture. You have cameras kind of in front of your face. That means I can only get this close to a person before their camera collides with my camera." He was gesturing a distance several inches from his face.
"So we had to take the cameras off and do it old-school like we've done in the past and shoot reference footage and animate something from scratch. But the animators always ask, 'Can you give us something?' Because the face is so complex. So then we had to put the cameras back on and have them turn to the sides—Ashley [Johnson] and Shannon [Woodward]—and pretend like they're kissing but they're just kissing the air. And if it sounds awkward, it's really freaking awkward there when you're trying to give direction on the set about how they should move their faces!
"But then we have like, soft mods, the way soft skin can collide with another person's soft skin. We have joins on the nose. We have what's called sticky lips which is how when your lips separate they don't separate evenly, they kind of stick on the edges. [This is] all tech developed to make our performances more subtle and allowing us to do something like a close-up kiss." He said it allows the game's writing to be more subtle, because it lets them include subtext that goes behind a character's eyes. Johnson and Woodward
recounted their own experiences of the mo-cap session at an E3 panel earlier today, and it does sound like it was a novel challenge.
