The Witcher 3 mocap team Alpha 7 is all about play and family

In front of me, inside a large open room, two performers dressed in motion capture suits are receiving a countdown. Everyone in the room is locked in; the performers focused on their timing, those holding the safety rigging braced with ropes held. After a count of three, ‘action’ is called. With a burst of energy, they each leap through the air, jumping to superhuman heights, clashing swords whilst screaming a war cry. The stunt is over in a couple of seconds. After each has landed safely on their feet, the room erupts in laughter and good humour.

What’s on display from Alpha 7 inside the Platige mocap studio in Warsaw, Poland, isn’t just high calibre action and coordination utilised by video game companies across the world, it’s a feeling of family. It’s a closeness that millions of teams wish they had. There’s a passion that runs through this team that is infectious, as those involved set out to create scenes that will stay in the minds of video game players forever.

Alpha 7 is the motion capture unit responsible for so many of the action scenes you’ve watched in your favourite games. It’s this team that scripted and performed some of Geralt’s moments of heroism in The Witcher 3; they’ve also wrapped scenes for the cinematic trailer for The Witcher 4. The team has had a hand in so many blockbuster games, it boggles the mind.

Alpha 7

Above the main studio, where the action is taking place, is a comfortable room where I sit with Maciej Kwiatkowski, the founder of Alpha 7, still wearing his motion capture suit. Behind him, a large glass window shows the rest of his team setting up equipment and rigging for the next stunt. Lining the wall are rows of screens showcasing trailers and cutscenes for the games they’ve worked on, including the likes of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Exoborne, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, and Star Wars: Outlaws.

Maciej is constantly smiling. He’s a ball of energy who doesn’t seem to be able to, or even want to, sit still. He first started working in motion capture back in 2005, and it began with The Witcher and CD Projekt RED. At the time, Maciej didn’t realise that this moment would revolutionise his life, and the lives of his friends. They simply went for an audition to perform and create the fighting style of Geralt of Rivia, and it was here when he fell in love with the practice of the art form.

“From that moment I discovered motion capture, or I guess, motion capture discovered me,” he explains. Maciej goes on to tell me about the work he’s done since, which has taken him across the world. “I've completed more than 80 motion capture projects,” he says, “having more than 1,200 days in the volume, doing motion capture and working in Montreal, Japan, all over Europe, UK, France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, [and] Poland.”

When we met earlier in the day, Maciej was running on only a couple of hours of sleep after getting home from work on a Polish detective series. After the shoot today, his team were flying directly to Lithuania to start stunt work on a film. Alpha 7 is in high demand, and from what I see during my day in the studio, it’s clear why that’s the case.

Alpha 7

My day opened with the performers putting on helmet cameras to capture their expressions, before they set about launching through the air, swinging plastic swords at each other. Soon after, several members of Alpha 7 are in motion capture suits and rigged into wires, creating impressive athletic leaps. The rest of the day saw steep slopes built from scaffolding with the performers tumbling down it after enacting a fist fight. Acrobatics mixed with parkour came next, before the day ended with a Witcher sword fight.

I’m watching this from a couple of metres away, and behind me, a screen shows the feeds from the countless cameras dotted around the room, reflecting the performers as wireframe models, which would usually be used in a video game engine. Today, the performance is simply for fun and practice.

Alpha 7 comprises friends and family, and over the years, they’ve learned a great deal by simply doing. If there’s one thing I take away from Maciej while speaking, it’s how much he’s learned and wants to pass on to others in the field. “I was able to gather a lot of knowledge, far beyond just performance,” he explains. “In the animation field, in hardware fields, things that happen on set, from the early design stages. I went through this process so many times. So there was a moment when I said, ‘Okay, I would just love to share this knowledge,’ with clients, with developers.”

Maciej considers himself a perfectionist, and in this line of work, you have to. Each member of the team holds the safety of others in their hands, but beyond that, they want to deliver the very best performances to make each action scene feel extraordinary. “It’s our goal to create beautiful art and amazing experiences,” Maciej says with pride.

Alpha 7

Because he and the rest of Alpha 7 have such a rich history in TV and film, it’s interesting to hear how much motion capture differs from the stunt work they’ve done on projects like Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur. Describing working on cutscenes, Maciej compares it closely to working on film. “The workflow is really close at this point, really close to a regular movie set. We just capture it in the studio, not on location, but so many elements are the same as in the cinema.” When it comes to gameplay, like stunt work, idle animations, or general character movement, “This is just another planet,” says Maciej.

“Gameplay is all the animations we deliver for the game. Whenever the player controls the character in the game, we just have to cover all possible movements of all the characters. No one did it before games existed,” he explains, emphasising that everything has to be thought of on the fly. “There is no script, because the player can do whatever, right?” asks Maciej, visibly excited as he breaks down his process.

Usually, character movement is broken down into fragments, then stitched together by the developers to create a fluid movement. “We have to cover all possibilities, all possible movements of the character,” he tells me. “The easiest way to do it, and the most common way to capture gameplay, is just creating the smallest, smallest bricks there are. So if you have the character's motion, you just chop it into tiny, tiny elements, like a simple step or just a pose.”

Alpha 7

Here, he tries to show a simple pose, despite being sat on a stool. He switches positions to show that motion capture means capturing from every angle, and while he’s moving, he’s still talking animatedly. “This is a completely different approach between design and performance. But, first, you design emotion, right? You need to think in one second timings, and in this one second you have to be the character you're playing and construct all the elements that exist in this emotion.”

Creating the movement in such incremental slices means that when the developer gets the wireframe footage, they can speed up or slow down the body, splicing it together for the smoothest transitions for the player, making it more responsive. Beyond the technical side of things, it seems motion capture allows for creativity through a form of play.

As Maciej explains, “It's like a child's dream. It’s being a little kid, running with guns or swords and doing fight choreographies in fantastical worlds, whether it's sci-fi or fantasy. We, in motion capture, in video games, are creating those worlds and then performing these characters. And we call it work.” He says this last sentence with a wry smile. This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken about how this work feels more like having a laugh with your mates, but Maciej is quick to point out that safety is a top priority for his team as it can be easy to lose sight of this when you’re in the moment and the adrenaline is pumping.

Alpha 7

“We never forget that everything needs to stay safe,” he notes, continuing, “When the atmosphere gets too loose, it's easy for accidents to happen, so we use fun as a tool, mostly to keep a nice atmosphere on the set, to be more creative, because that's what really works for everyone.”

This is said not long before I watch as Maciej rolls down a 10-metre slope, dropping another four metres to the padded floor. He lies face down on the ground, taking a moment, before he hops up to his feet and smiles at his friends. A discussion happens in Polish, and suddenly they’re back at the top of the slope, ready to go again.

I comment that the team feels like a family, and the trust they have in each other, and the process, is felt throughout the building. To this, he smiles and replies, “We’ve known each other for at least 20 years, some for longer, one of them is my cousin.” Between stunts and takes, there’s a gentle joking with each other, plenty of hugs, hands held out to pick each other up. “It is amazing that at some point in our life, we just met each other, whether in school or in the neighbourhood, and we had the same passion, and the passion joined us together,” Maciej says as he looks out on his team in the studio below us.

The team is obviously doing something right, as they are working on several projects at any given time, whether that’s stepping into fantasy worlds and swinging swords, or wielding overly large plastic sniper rifles for capturing moments of war. Games companies have learned to trust this team with creating terrific set pieces combining stunts and acrobatics learned over the years.

Despite being part of some of the biggest games in the world, such as Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, and its sequel, Maciej has bigger projects in mind. “I've done quite a few massive projects, and those are the most fun. I feel that we are ready for the big ones.” He takes a moment to think before adding, “We are just waiting for the opportunities, and the bigger opportunity there is, the bigger scene we're gonna do, and more fun we will have, right?”