Hi everyone.
I’m Uchi, an animator here at PlatinumGames.

Is everyone having fun with Bayonetta?

I joined the Bayonetta team towards the end of the project, and my main job was working on the in-game animations. You’ve already heard about the player and enemy animations from some of the more senior members of the team, but I’d like to tell you a little about what I was in charge of: the dance movie.

During the game, Bayonetta puts on quite a few of her own magnificent dance shows, but these dances are mainly based off of dance data we motion captured. Motion capture allows us to use computers to play back in real-time data we captured of a real person moving, so we filmed a wide variety of motion capture actors for the game, whether they were dancers, actors, or martial artists, and then matched their data up to a character model/situation in the game.
For Bayonetta, we held auditions, and then found and motion captured a professional dancer who fit Bayonetta to a T. We used this dancer’s data in a variety of areas, from when Bayonetta summons an Infernal Demon to her dances during the game’s cutscenes.

This is a test video for the dance movie using this motion capture data. This is after we’ve imported the motion capture data and set our camera positions, but it still needs some touch-ups to the animation. We wanted to stay faithful to the dancer’s original motions for the dance video, so we were extremely careful while touching-up the data; however, on Kamiya-san’s orders we accentuated the movements of her waist and butt to make it over-the-top in the sexiness department. For small details like her fingers, we didn’t use the capture data, and instead animated all of these areas by hand in post-production.

I think there are probably some of you who have already completed the game, but if you haven’t, you can look forward to seeing this dance movie in the game itself. Unfortunately, I don’t want to spoil things, so I can’t share all the details here, but the cutscenes in the game (including this dance movie) have some really incredible sections that I think you will find to your liking, so I really encourage you to pick up the game and find out for yourself!