At last month’s Cannes Film Festival, actor Andy Serkis came to town to announce the creation of The Imaginarium, a performance capture facility based in London that he said aimed to bring performance capture within the reach of independent filmmakers. Serkis, who helped legitimise performance capture in the early 2000s through playing Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy, sat down with IGN to talk about the technology and we couldn’t help but quiz him on his two big upcoming performance capture projects, Tintin and The Hobbit. More..
Category: Andy Serkis
The actor Andy Serkis, who so memorably played Gollum and King Kong using performance capture, has announced the UK’s first studio specialising in the technique. As he told a recent British Screen Advisory Council discussion on working with digital film technology, Serkis caught the bug of “cyber-thespianism” working with Peter Jackson at his Weta studios in New Zealand, first on The Lord of the Rings trilogy and then on King Kong. He has since directed performance capture for two video games, one in America and one in New Zealand. That made him wonder why the same facility wasn’t available in Britain, when so much of the original technology was developed out of Oxford and Cambridge. More..
Short Films and Feature Animation Branch governor Bill Kroyer will lead an evening focused on two Oscar-winning films – “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) and “Avatar” (2009) – to demonstrate how innovations in performance-capture technology, digital doubles, digital makeup, photorealism and image manipulation are affecting actors. “Acting in the Digital Age” will feature a panel of cast and crew members from both films who will discuss the challenges and opportunities that come with these changing technologies. The program includes film clips and behind-the-scenes footage of the actors at work. More..
Andy Serkis has been describing life as Gollum and praising the talents of friend and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. The British actor is reprising his most famous role in the film adaption of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit, due to be released in 2011. Serkis thinks the magic of the character comes, partly from the motion capture techniques used to make the film. “The really key moment really was Peter’s understanding that drama is what happens between two beings,” the 45-year-old said. More..
Linuxelf continues to load up the YouTube library of yesteryear. Heading up today’s entries is fun New Zealand television coverage from our own “Return of the One Party”. They (channel 3) call it the “Three Ring Party” and later refer to it as New Line’s party, never quite catching on that it was a fan organized gathering. But they did talk to site friend and expert costumer Judy (look for the beard) and reported from our stage while Emerald Rose is playing.
After the video below are links to fun interviews with the likes of Peter Jackson, Orlando Bloom & Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Andy Serkis, Ian McKellen, Billy Boyd, Elijah Wood and John Rhys-Davies as well as footage of fans touring Edoras.
Claire sends us a news story from the Empire Awards. Ian McKellen got an Empire Icon award and Andy Serkis received an Inspiration Award. There’s more on the BBC’s website and Empire’s own website.