This might sound obvious, but when you make a game that’s based on a movie or a TV show, your main aim with the characters is to create a 3D model that looks as similar to the source material as possible. The model and the textures (the skin, face, hair and so on) become a huge part of how that game is perceived. If you’ve seen the recent CG movie Beowulf you’ll know that Angelina Jolie’s face has been recreated unbelievably accurately. I don’t know if the effort involved was worth it, but it’s very impressive.

There are other sources, of course – what if you’re not working from people, but from a 2D animation series or a comic book? In this case, there is a whole other set of problems that can make you uncomfortable with its relationship to the original. Not least because 2D models are usually very stylized, with proportions that lend themselves to effects like silhouette, and when this is translated into 3D you often get an unusual and unnatural-looking result. Simple things like hair can become unrecognizable in 3D, and it requires a really skilled designer to reshape it or rethink these elements without losing the core of the character.

So let’s say you’ve been lucky enough to find that skilled designer: they get the design right, you’ve modeled it, and added the textures. Now we’re looking good! But there’s another problem – moving it. If you’re making a character based on an actor, perhaps you could use motion capture so that mapping ‘realistic’ human movements becomes easier. But what about our original 2D character? The average Japanese animation might have eight to 12 frames per second: Disney, by comparison, works with 24fps. Japanese animations also often use computers to ‘deform’ the image, such as when moving an arm upwards. Disney is all hand-drawn, of course, so this is impossible for its movies.

But the other day I was surprised by Disney’s movie Enchanted. Watching Amy Adams acting the role of Princess Giselle, I couldn’t see anything but a true Disney princess in motion: the overreactions, the motions before and after a movement, etc. It was like Adams was taken straight out of a Disney animation. It’s no exaggeration to say that the quality and success of this movie is directly linked to her casting. If you consider Disney classics like Cinderella or Snow White, those princes and princesses were based on reference footage from actors. This made me realize that the influence can flow both ways, and made me think about animating a 2D character using motion capture as a starting point: I think this might have a lot of potential.

So now I’m looking for actors who could do this job for Japanese animation. Despite the eight to 12fps refresh, I’m pretty sure the game and animation industries would fight for his or her talent. That’s what I want! If you think you might have such a talent, you have to come and use it for the good of the game industry right now.

Now, something totally different. Recently, I was stunned to learn of Mr Katsuya Nagae’s death. Because of the type of games he was involved with, he isn’t very famous outside Japan. He was the creator of the Jikkyo Powerful Pro Yakyu (Live Powerful Pro Baseball) franchise at Konami, which was the rival of Namco’s Family Stadium, but westerners may better know him as the producer of the Super Famicom’s International Superstar Soccer Deluxe.

He had left Konami and joined the Osaka Denki Tsushin University where he was lecturing on gaming. I can’t say he was a really good friend of mine but he was a familiar face at work, and I’m shocked by this news because he was just 47 years old. He was not in contact with the latest trends in game development but he had this inner fire to guide young people who were attracted by the industry.

The videogame industry is a relatively young one, and we are not familiar meeting death around us. I’m sure Nagae’s death has been a shock for the rest of the Japanese industry, and I’d like to pay tribute to him from the bottom of my heart.

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