Serkis: No Respect for Motion-Capture

In an article from Digital Spy, The Hobbit's Andy Serkis talks about the lack of respect he gets for his motion capture work. Hollywood as a whole treats motion capture with about the same amount of respect as they do animation...which is none. Examples of Serkis' work include Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films, King Kong, and Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. When done right, motion capture is essentially the actor in a digitally created costume. Just because the costume isn't real doesn't it make it any less of a performance but most in Hollywood, who tend to be techno ignorant, would disagree.

He told The Daily Telegraph: "I am a bit evangelical, I know, but performance-capture is still misunderstood. Ten years down the line, people say, 'Oh, so you did the voice of Gollum?' Or people go, 'You did the movements for Kong?' It's frustrating, because I play Gollum and I play Kong. It is acting."

"Originally when I went off to work on The Lord of The Rings I got a call from my agent saying that I was just going to do a voice. But I couldn't really approach it like that. To get Gollum's voice I had to play the character.

"I told Peter that was how I'd like to do it and when he was watching me moving around on set he said, 'Stop everything. We are going to film Andy's performance and then we are going to experiment with performance-capture'."