A month ago, Bryan Dechart and Amelia Rose Blare Dechart teamed up to take on Monarch Solutions in their first full playthrough of Quantum Break, spanning five Sundays.
What makes this playthrough special is that Amelia is the brilliant actor behind Amy Ferrero, the university campaigner who stands up for the Riverport Library as it is threatened by demolition. While the game was released in April 2016, the duo only recently bought an Xbox, allowing them to jump into the adventure for the first time.
Ahead of their livestream, they've admitted that they "intentionally left ourselves in the dark with Quantum Break. Amelia knows what she recorded on set but it was a long time ago."
At the start of the livesteam, Amelia spoke about her experience on set, prompted by behind-the-scenes photographs.
In her introduction, she talked about her previous acting revealing that "prior to working on Quantum Break, I [had] never been in a video game. I didn't even know anything besides that video games were a thing that people played. I had a Guitar Hero growing up and that was the extent of my gaming. I got this incredible opportunity to get to go, fly to Helsinki in Finland, and I got to go there twice, and do a bunch of facial capture and get scanned into their machines, which was so trippy and so cool! And so futuristic.... So, I got to go to Finland twice, [the] first time I took my Dad because I had never been that far from home and so I invited him to come with me. And it was a really cool experience... The first time I went was in the middle of winter and the sun only was only up for four hours a day, which was pretty trippy. I remember my Dad came with this huge, huge winter coat, and he came to meet some of the people who worked at Remedy and they were all giggling with me afterwards, like 'your Dad looks like he's walking around in a giant tent. "
After her introduction, Bryan brought up the photos she had previously collected, allowing her to showcase and talk more in-depth about her experience acting in the new medium.
The first photograph featured a younger Amelia wearing a black motion capture suit with patches of colour. She wears a bulky facial capture helmet with two clear lights attached, highlighting her features.
The image is taken as a portrait, showing the shoulders up. She smiles as she recalls the first time on set, "this was my first time doing performance capture. So we did, performance capture where they were getting our whole body and our face at the same time. And then we also did just facial capture which is what I did when I went to Finland. So this was... I actually think it was in MarVista or something, in California, and this is my headpiece which was quite large, and we had a camera on the front and we had these two little things on the side were lights. I had never worn a headpiece like this before, and it was heavy! So after a good amount of time, my head and my neck were just like oof, because you have to move very differently... So this was pretty exciting and also mindblowing because it was my first time doing this kind of stuff... I want to say this was 2014."
After Amelia's description, Bryan switches to the next photograph featuring Amelia in her motion capture suit (minus the helmet) standing in her trailer. We have a clear image of the suit. "This is also during performance capture. I was wearing that sexy suit and this was before I had the headpiece on so this was me in my trailer just a little bit in disbelief of what I was about to do. And yeah, this was my outfit!"
The final photo shown was taken at the Remedy offices in Helsinki...
In the image, Amelia is holding onto a railing and positioned in front of a green screen with her hair pulled back. "So, this was when we in Finland, we were doing facial capture and, as you can see, I'm holding a bar and what we were doing- they were capturing just my facial movements and my performance of my face. I couldn't move my body essentially. I had to keep completely still and I also couldn't move my head very much because they were trying to capture everything in a super, super closeup, and it was incredibly challenging because I didn't realise how much I move when I'm acting or when I'm speaking, and I also had a lot of very high stake material that I was doing. So, I would start to cry, and they could come up to me and be like 'Amelia, I am so sorry. You can't actually cry because it's going to look like your eye is leaking. So, we need you to not cry, to just hold it all in.' And so this bar that I was holding was this pressure bar, so if I wanted to move instead, I would squeeze the bar and, you can't see it but behind my head was a tennis ball and I had to keep my head up against this tennis ball, and it was very challenging but also really cool experience."
You can watch the couple's introduction and full playthrough of Quantum Break, HERE!
