Rainfall/Transcript

This is the transcript of "Rainfall," the second episode of Heavy Rain: Ten Years Later.

Transcript
(The PEGI 18 rating appears, followed by the Quantic Dream logo and David Cage sitting in a chair. Video footage of Cage is interspersed with development images and videos of Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Fahrenheit as he speaks.)

David Cage: Quantic Dream and motion capture, it's a long story that started on Nomad Soul back in 1997. At the time, motion capture was extremely experimental to say the least; it was a technology coming from hospitals, basically, and from science. I thought, I love this technology, having characters that move like real human beings is fascinating. I thought we-we need to own this, we need to have it at the studio because we want to experiment and play with it. So, for Fahrenheit we acquired a motion capture studio and started playing with it and trying to break it, and we did motion capture with dogs, we did motion capture with cable stunts and with crazy, crazy things.

("HEAVY RAIN: TEN YEARS LATER" appears on a black background, followed by "PART 2: RAINFALL." It fades out and is replaced by video footage of Leon Ockenden, which is interspersed with development images and videos of Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Leon Ockenden: I was super excited to be part of a video game, it's not something I'd ever done before. The last thing I did, I did, I think, Richard the Lionheart for the BBC... And then when I went over to have all the photos done of my face so they could get as much detail, I saw the room where all the concept art and all of the worlds they were building and the different levels, and my mind was blown and I was really, really excited to be a part of it. I think it's definitely the art form of the 21st century.

(An image of Pascal Langdale appears on a black background. An audio recording of his voice plays and is interspersed with video footage of Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Pascal Langdale: When I thought of video games, I didn't really think of anything greater than a very clunky script supporting, basically, fights. That's what it was. But I kind of had an inkling from the beginning that this was different territory, because even the script that they gave me for the casting was deeply human stuff. So I already knew that there was something different about it.

Grace: Why did you leave him, Ethan? Why? Wasn't it enough losing Jason?

(Video footage of David Cage appears, which is interspersed with development videos of Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Cage: Heavy Rain was very important regarding our approach to actors. On Fahrenheit the characters were a kind of patchwork, and the result was probably the result of three or four different people: one person doing the facial animation, the body animation, the voice... On Heavy Rain we said, "Okay, let's find actors who will have the right look, the right voice, the right personality, the right talent for the roles. And it was the first time we were doing this, and I think it was one of the first times in the industry where-where someone was trying this.

(Video footage of Jacqui Ainsley appears.)

Jacqui Ainsley: He was watching a convoy of trucks going by...

(The video fades out and is replaced by development images and videos of Heavy Rain.)

Langdale: I was really excited. I-I like new stuff. I really enjoy when technology and creativity meet. And in Heavy Rain and in what David's trying to do, that was a-a real pleasure. It was pretty quick that I cottoned on that this was something that was different.

(Video footage of David Cage appears, which is interspersed with development videos of Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Cage: Back then, very few actors had done motion capture before and we were all learning. We were really fortunate because we found, with our actors, people who were genuinely interested and curious and ready to experiment... The actor playing Ethan Mars especially because he had a very intense role and it was very challenging, very difficult. He had some very intense scenes. He opened my eyes on how far we could go with motion capture. I remember there is this scene where the character is supposed to cut his fingers. The performance that he delivered on stage is something I still remember; it was more than 10 years ago...

(An image of Pascal Langdale appears on a black background. An audio recording of his voice plays and is interspersed with video footage of Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Langdale: I mean, any actor will say, "Well, you don't have to cut your own finger off to know how it feels like to cut your own finger off," right? But on top of that, there's the stakes that the character is working under, there's the, what has happened before... So he's incredibly emotionally heightened. It was mind-bending, and so cool to do.

(Video footage of Leon Ockenden plays, which is interspersed with development videos and video footage of Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Ockenden: What's interesting is that I had no idea how this was going to turn out, or work out... You know, I could see stuff, I imagine, but it's not my world, I'm not an animator! And I think the best thing, the best thing about it is I feel, in a weird way, that I'm almost a kind of small version of video gaming royalty! Because this was such a big project. What I love about it now, you know, th-this many years on, is I feel like I've been immortalized in a brilliant way. When I told my daughter "I'm in a video game," just as she is discovering video games, her mouth was like "Uh?"

(The video fades out and is replaced by an advertisement for the Steam version of Heavy Rain.)