The man who’s played Gollum, King Kong, and Supreme Leader Snoke is undoubtedly the best performance capture artist in the world. A new video from the Academy Awards features Andy Serkis talking about how his craft has changed over the last decade.
In the video above, Serkis explains how, out of necessity, his early work had to break up motion capture (or mo-cap) and facial capture into separate parts. He then explains how technological advancements combined the two into one holistic piece and opines that, from a craft perspective, acting that a capture suit with dots painted on one’s face isn’t any different than not using those things.
The award-winning actor made other videos a few months back to demonstrate the current possibilities of performance capture.
Of course, Serkis has been a chief proselytizer about mo-cap since the tech’s earliest days and founded his own Imaginarium studio in the United Kingdom that specializes in creating games and other media using performance capture. Still, it’s good to hear him look back at how far things have come since the days of “My Preciousssss.”
