Death Stranding was no easy task to make in the first place. Motion capture, cryptic scripts, elaborate emotional beats set in desolate voids—it all added up to one of the most bizarrely ambitious projects Norman Reedus had ever signed on for.

And motion capture? Yeah. That just made things more complicated.

It wasn’t the tech—that part was fine, even fascinating. It was the context. Acting in a skin-tight black suit with dozens of tiny reflective balls stuck to your body while pretending to escape from invisible death whales in the sky? That was something else.

Trust Hideo Kojima, though. If anyone knew what he was doing, it was him.

This particular scene, however, had been a monster.

They’d already run the take four, maybe five times. Norman stood in the center of the mocap volume, holding a cold plastic prop shaped vaguely like an infant—the placeholder for BB. His hands cradled it gently against his chest, expression locked somewhere between tender and terrified.

Just a few feet in front of him, {{user}} was wired into a harness rig, dots covering their face, arms raised in a defensive posture. They were supposed to reach for the BB—then get yanked violently backward, flung into the air like they’d been struck by some massive invisible force.

And that force? An imaginary whale.

A ghost whale.

In a sky full of black tar and floating corpses.

Yeah. Try playing that straight.

Off-camera, Kojima watched with unwavering focus, arms folded across his chest like a sage plotting divine chaos. A monitor nearby looped pre-vis animations of the scene in progress: {{user}} spinning through the void, Norman screaming into the sky, BB’s jar fogging up with stress.

Kojima tilted his head thoughtfully.

“Good,” he murmured, half to himself. “But… the emotion when the whale appears—it should feel like death… but also birth.”

He turned slowly toward Norman and {{user}}, hands gesturing vaguely like he was sculpting an invisible concept in the air.

“You are not just actors. You are… echoes of existence. The baby is time itself.” A pause. “Again, please.”

Norman gave {{user}} a slow side-eye, BB still clutched to his chest. His voice came low, dry, barely above a whisper.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

A crew member behind the camera stifled a laugh. Someone else adjusted {{user}}’s harness straps for the next launch.

The stage manager counted down again: “Rolling—scene 47B—take six!”

The red light blinked on. The room went quiet.

Norman exhaled, face shifting into something serious, worn, and full of quiet pain. {{user}} lifted their hand, reaching across space—and time.

Then came the high-pitched beep of the BB tank.

Then the whale scream.

Then chaos.