While Cara Delevingne is helping Activision promote Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 game through TV commercials, the actual video game campaign features the first-ever female lead character in the series (brought to life by veteran Hollywood actress Abby Brammell) and features a strong performance by Battlestar Galactica veteran Katee Sackhoff as Sara Hall. Both actresses logged substantial time geared up with performance capture suits and facial capture cameras to bring life to their virtual characters.
Sakhoff, who provides a voice in the upcoming CCP Games Eve Valkyrie virtual reality game, said performance capture is one of the things that drew her to this game.
“I read Sara’s stuff and where they wanted this character to go and I was emotionally drawn to her story and what she was going through, and also what the rest of her team was going through,” Sackhoff said. “It tugged at my heart. For a video game, it really made me feel this emotional connection to her. I felt that that was such an interesting thing to bring into this world and this medium. I don’t know if my 14-year-old nephew will cry when he’s playing this game, but I did.”
Brammell, who played an special ops wife in TV series, “The Unit”, got to actually kick some ass in the new Black Ops 3 game.
“When I was on stage with the suit, my first thought was, ‘Wow, this is a whole new medium for actors,’” Brammell said. “There’s film and television, theater, and now you this motion capture world for video games. It’s incredible, you have to have a deep understanding of how your body moves in space because your being captured by cameras 360-degrees around you. In that way, it’s almost like a stage production where you’re doing something like theater in the round where the audience is completely surrounding you.”
Actress Abby Brammell, who portrays Call of Duty’s first female lead.
Sackhoff agreed that working on the campaign’s story with other live actors on the performance capture stage is much like a theatrical production.
“Your performances are a bit bigger,” Sackhoff said. “You tend to have to make your movements a bit more broad so the computer can pick up on it, which is what you do when you’re on stage so that the old lady in the back can hear you and see you.”
“It’s not quite theater, it’s something else,” Brammell said. “I was fascinated to begin to play with it and explore it. I really had to cut myself some slack and be like, ‘Hey, just have an open mind, a lot of curiosity, and be as fully embodied as you can be. Then let the tech guys do their work too.’ You’re almost being sculpted. This is my first video game and I hope to do some more because I think the sky’s the limit.”
Sackhoff has been a part of sci-fi franchises in television with Battlestar Galactica and on the big screen with Riddick. But she’s never seen her virtual doppelganger in a game before.
“It’s different because as much as it is me, it’s not me,” Sackhoff said. “She looks like me, but there are certain things about her that are very different. There are scars. They’ve changed the way that she looks just slightly compared to the way that I look right now. It’s really, really interesting just to see the way that she moves.”
Abby Brammell and Katee Sackhoff
Brammell isn’t a gamer, at least not since her early days on Nintendo. But she did spend time in college watching her boyfriend play games like Halo. And she’s seen how far games like Call of Duty have come.
“They put you right in the action,” Brammell said. “I watched some gameplay when we were doing some voice-over work and I was so adrenalized, I was so floored by the excitement of the experience. Something chemical happens when you begin to engage with the screen, but it’s also what you’re choosing to do with the screen. It’s really fascinating, it brings up all kinds of strange sci-fi images in my mind, it’s like, ‘what is even going on in reality.’”
Becoming part of the very small class of actors who have starred in a Call of Duty game is all part of the gameplay for Sackhoff.
“I always have said from the beginning of my career that I was going for the ‘Geek Trifecta’ because I’m such a total geek,” Sackhoff said. “I want to be in everything that has to do with the things that I enjoyed when I was a kid, which was Battlestar Galactica, and being in Big Bang Theory, and being in video games. These are things that I would’ve thought were cool when I was a kid, and things that I enjoy as an adult. I’m just working at it at this point to just do everything that my dad and I would’ve swooned over when I was a kid.”
Brammell didn’t even know she was auditioning for Call of Duty when she went to her casting call, which her agent said was for a big video game franchise. Now she’s made history as the first playable female protagonist in a Call of Duty game.
“I read somewhere on the Internet a guy talking about how he really enjoyed hearing women’s voices mixed in with all that’s going on in the game,” Brammell said. “I thought, ‘Yeah!’ because it really is a huge piece of our world. Women have entered into war since the beginning of agriculture societies, probably before that even. Women hold a place in this landscape. Now we’re allowing this feminine piece in with these mass productions of these games, so it’s really nice to see.”
