When one mentions that a video game takes its cues from Hollywood, one is usually referring to over-the-top cinematics and lavish cameos, not to the behind-the-scenes staff. However, "Baldur's Gate 3" employs an intimacy coordinator, a professional who supports actors in explicit scenes and manages the staging of romance between characters.
As we have already seen, the romance in "Baldur's Gate 3" can get quite spicy, and Larian used motion capture with actors to create that cinematics, as we saw in the cinematics explanation video a few years ago. There was a lot of sex to capture, as well as fighting and talking. For this reason, Larian called in professionals,
according to SAG-AFTRA, "Intimacy coordinators are advocates, liaisons, movement coaches and choreographers between actors and production regarding nudity, simulated sex and other intimate, highly revealing scenes."
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Unlike in film and television, video game mo-cap actors do not disrobe for intimate scenes, but rather dress in equipment. This includes bear positions.
Larian's use of professional coordinators was also discussed in a recent BBC interview with two cast members of Baldur's Gate 3: Jennifer English, who played Shadowheart, and Devorah Wilde, who played LaEzer.
Regarding the bear scene, BBS stated that Wilde found it funny.
"I didn't know how hard it would be to create this whole universe before we started," English said of the time it took to shoot all of Shadowheart's many recurring scenes. 'It's not your everyday kitchen-sink drama. You have to build that up in your own imagination."
The BBC's "Shadow Heart" is a "very different kind of drama.
In the words of the BBC, English said that "strange things happened during the recording" regarding the sex scenes, but that the story never "went too far." In English's own words, there was absolutely nothing in the recording that felt "yucky." I have a pretty low threshold for 'yuck.'"
According to the BBC, Larian believes this is one of the first fully-rendered game productions to use the intimacy coordinator, and hopes others will follow suit.
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