IGN: The Heavy Rain demo was definitely one of the more impressive games in Sony's booth at E3, how long had the team been working on it prior to the show?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: In fact, we spent less than three months to put the demo together from scratch, which includes developing the PS3 engine, writing the script, making the auditions to find the actress, defining the Mo-Cap techniques and doing some basic R&D for the tongue and hair.

Initially, this demo was a purely internal technical prototype that was not supposed to be shown outside the company. Our original goal was just to define if it was possible to create a next-gen character able to express complex emotions and what it would take on a technical point of view. David Cage wrote a script where the actress would go through different emotions in just a couple of minutes, from the very shy and naïve actress of the beginning to the drama at the end with real-time tears. He also wanted to know if we could make the audience listen to her, care for her and react to her emotions in a similar way than with a real actress.

Sony saw our work-in-progress and asked us for the permission to show it in its booth at E3 to show what could be done in matter of virtual actors on a PlayStation 3. The challenge was that we were only a few weeks away from E3 when the request came in and had not planned to finalize "The Casting" before the end of June.

This video is thus just a technical demo showing only what we were able to create in a limited amount of time. We expect to significantly raise the quality of our characters for our next games. We usually do this type of internal prototype to learn something. The Casting showed us that having a real acting performance with a strong emotional component was now something achievable, although we still have a lot of work to reach the quality bar we are aiming for.