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The messaging and understanding what performance capture is has been difficult to explain to the general public.
You are literally driving a digital mask.
The way he described it to me was, We want an actor to play Gollum on set.
The character is going to be manifested as CG.
At that point, he started to talk about this technology called motion capture.
Later, he filmed the characters physical movements in a mo-cap studio.
It was all my physicality that was captured.
But in 2004, Jackson came back to the actor with an offer too good to pass up.
Ive just been playing a three-and-a-half-foot Hobbit.
Now, Im playing a 25-foot gorilla.
It means that this technology allows you to play anything, Serkis says.
Of course, in the five years since the two had last collaborated, motion-capture technology had vastly improved.
Beyond simply cataloguing an actors physical movements, new innovations allowed for highly detailed facial-performance capture.
That was my first facial capture sort of like the Stage Two of this, he says.
There wasnt a head-mounted camera at that point.
But there was an array of cameras, which was like 180 degrees.
Theyre just angled at slightly below so that theyre not in between you and the other actor.
Or youd end up hooking cameras.
Its like,camera kissing, dink!
The productions great technological leap forward?
The actor received a Critics Choice award for Best Supporting Actor.
Its not animation driven.
Its not a committee of animators deciding what the character is doing.
Its one actor who is on set working with a director from page 1 to 120.
Working on the character and becoming that emotional guiding point for and the facilitator and author of the role.
Update: an earlier version of this story erroneously identifiedMowgli: Legend of the Jungleas Serkis directorial debut.
It is his first motion-capture film as director.
