The technology allows the actor’s transformation to be limitless, but the acting, with its associated emotion, is faithfully reproduced. I think it would have been a cruel twist.”. “We just make it look like a camera so people are comfortable with it.” “If you want to do a POV shot, you just put markers on your head and tell the computer to look at everything through your eyes,” says Orsten. Awards Circuit Community Awards. Print + digital, only £19 for a year. Serkis conceived The Imaginarium after shooting King Kong. “We can make a movie like this, from story to visual effects, for a TV-show budget,” says Cavendish. Not being on set gives you incredible clarity–you really listen and your senses are alert,” Serkis says. He saw a crudely rendered, greyscale version of Gollum. Director Rupert Wyatt and Andy Serkis Talk About the Motion Capture Technology Used in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES By Rob Vaux Published Jul 11, 2011 Share Share Tweet Email Comment “When we first got together on that stage, Andy suddenly said we should just improvise,” says Terry Notary, who plays Rocket, Caesar’s right-hand ape. By As Wyatt explained: “We had a choice: we could use live apes or we could use performance capture technology. Using tennis balls and a stick, I’d then have to act with a pretend Elijah Wood and a pretend Sean Astin.Here, this is the first film that uses performance capture on a live-action set. We immediately set about exploring both options, and we very quickly put to bed the idea of using live apes for all sorts of reasons. Showing all 41 wins and 56 nominations. The actor was nervous when he came in, but by the time they were finished he was completely immersed in his character. Caesar is now a leader of a troop of apes living in a redwood forest north of San Francisco. Starring James Franco, Tom Felton, Freida Pinto, Brian Cox, John Lithgow, and the aforementioned Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes hits theaters on August 5th. “We not only do our own productions, but we’re servicing film companies on lots of big film franchises – that we can’t talk about.”, They play a trailer for a documentary about a retired particle physicist who discovers a parallel universe inhabited by pixies and fairies. Caesar this time was more mature, perplexed and a bigger leader and Serkis has succeeded in bringing in all that in to the body language and words of Caesar. Andy Serkis, who is the chimpanzee Caesar in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” has become the face of motion-capture performance. They experimented with weights, and a sound system that made his voice louder. During downtime while shooting Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in New Orleans last year, Serkis would direct rehearsals at The Imaginarium via Skype. No conversation about motion capture in the movies can be conducted without mentioning Andy Serkis.. So before meeting Serkis, Reeves asked Weta Digital, the New Zealand-based company responsible, to show him footage of the performance without computer-generated effects. “But the most powerful moments that Caesar has are the moments where he’s at his stillest, as with Gollum. Reeves would sometimes be among them, just observing. By Those markers would be recorded on a stage surrounded by infrared cameras known as the Volume, and that image translated into an avatar. “With King Kong, we got Andy’s body and face together.”, Serkis’s work was beginning to make others in the industry embrace performance capture. Apes director Rupert Wyatt headlined a panel that included visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, Diane Fossey Foundation representative Clare Richardson and CalTech professor of philosophy Steve R. Quartz, as well as actor Andy Serkis via Skype from London. This site uses cookies to improve your experience and deliver personalised advertising. Ranking Andy Serkis' Motion Capture Roles From Worst To Best Top left: Serkis wears a performance- capture suit dotted with LED markers. Lucrezia Bisignani, In partnership with “So I got on the plane immediately.” For two weeks, he followed a group of wild mountain gorillas. Wyatt also showed a number of clips from the film which depicted Serkis’s Caesar being raised in secret by a benevolent scientist, only to be shown first-hand the cruelty that humanity is capable of. This isn’t the first time that a Serkis performance has caused confusion: when The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was released in 2002, he had to remind journalists that he didn’t just voice his character, Gollum: he had physically played the slimy ring-addicted former Hobbit. Gian Volpicelli, By Serkis – who has become the go-to performer for motion-capture roles – explained that such a notion wouldn’t have been possible just a few years ago: “When we first started working on Gollum, it was a sort of freakish activity that people didn’t really understand… I would actually shoot the scenes on set, and my performances were shot on 35mm. “We wanted to make this version much more like a huge silverback gorilla.” Serkis spent four months on the live-action set acting off-camera opposite Naomi Watts, who played Ann Darrow, dressed in a gorilla muscle suit on top of cherry pickers that were placed at the right height. “We combine technology, storytelling and the character-creating skills that Andy pioneered,” says Cavendish. “It just has all the actors in their performance suits and the crazy thing is that it is still an incredibly emotional experience.”. Will Bedingfield and Amit Katwala. Then the director can just come into the Volume with his virtual camera and play it back over and over and cut it as he pleases.”, Farrell demonstrates the virtual camera, a contraption made from a screen, a battery and off-the-shelf components to hold it together. “I can’t tell you who it is, but it’s a great role in a very high-profile movie. 2015 Nominee ACCA: ... For his work in the Planet of the Apes series. And that’s OK': Neil Gaiman on Trump, Brexit and the death of social media, Wonder Woman 1984 is cheesy, fun and utterly doomed, This physicist keeps the science in Marvel’s movies accurate (ish), The best horror movies everyone should watch at least once, The Black Panther effect is changing the face of Hollywood, Why legacy companies are best placed to innovate, Brexit negotiations aren’t ready for the coronavirus pandemic, You should declare your own climate emergency. “As Caesar, he was the leader and we followed him. For me, I find that much more restrictive… performance capture allows you to just play intention without being encumbered in any way.”. He then did two months’ filming wearing a performance-capture suit. “Then, in New Orleans, there was 100 per cent humidity and you’re nearly passing out every day because you’re carrying a lot of electric equipment, which heats up on your back.” The actors wore head-mounted cameras to record their facial expressions and live LED markers on their suits so that cameras hung on trees could track their movements. Hit the jump for a recap of the panel that includes quotes from both Wyatt and Serkis. In 2017, Fox commissioned an adventure game to accompany War for the Planet of the Apes called Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier. On the screens, his avatar – a Roman legionnaire – is shown in consecutive states of rendering, its movements reflecting the actor’s. The Imaginarium is not only Serkis’s laboratory to explore new ways of telling stories, but also a school where he can teach acting with performance capture. “It’s a camera operator’s worse nightmare,” Farrell adds. Because of Reeves’s inexperience with the technique, Serkis and his Imaginarium team also acted as consultants. It's Complicated, Paul Rudd Meets a Tiny Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in First Clip from 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife', For the First Time Ever, Watch 'Saw's Grisly Games in 4K Ultra HD, 'The Sneider Cut' Ep. “They would save their performance for when I wasn’t in the take, because that wasn’t supposed to be the real take. The colour varies depending on its intended thickness. WIRED, Throughout the meeting, an intern walks around in the middle of the Volume, dressed in a Lycra suit spotted with markers. “You’re controlling it in that way. Amit Katwala. COVID-19 Best Products (Gollum’s voice was entirely Serkis’s – there was no computer enhancement.) We get the entire performance in one hit: emotionally connecting with the other actors, not having to repeat everything, every single decision made with the director… It’s come to the point where it really isn’t any different from live-action acting.”. “In Lord of the Rings, motion capture was so new we couldn’t attempt to capture his face,” says Letteri. Covering the hottest movie and TV topics that fans want. Most of the acting is in the eyes.” In the two weeks prior to shooting Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Serkis and his fellow ape-playing actors spent most of their time inside a largely empty studio in Vancouver. Serkis arrived in New Zealand on April 5, 2000. He studied how they groomed each other and how they vocalized their emotions. Andy Serkis on His Most Groundbreaking Motion-Capture Performances ... because Serkis’s motion-capture performances of characters such ... and War for the Planet of the Apes Serkis … Two months later, Serkis met Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, Jackson’s wife and co-scriptwriter. With performance capture technology as the only viable option, the filmmakers turned to WETA Digital in New Zealand to see it through. Weta also created a system that could capture his facial expressions, consisting of 150 three-dimensional markers placed all over the actor’s face. For the entire shoot, we were fully integrated into the live-action shooting… with head-mounted camera and so on. Reeves couldn’t work out why Serkis’s performance had been so affecting. If the film ultimately works, it will be because the technology captures his expressions and body movements so perfectly. Tom Ward. But he inevitably ended up fielding questions about Gollum, the role he is still best known for. It wasn’t how he had planned his career. With Mark Bomback, Dylan Clark, Toby Kebbell, Matt Reeves. In the film, Andy Serkis plays Caesar, a chimpanzee with enhanced intelligence who is adopted as a baby by a scientist and, in later life, leads a rebellion against humans. All the other actors had their costumes on and felt fantastic – he had a motion-capture suit on, which isn’t the most flattering.”, Serkis worked with the actor inside the Volume, exploring the many sides to his character. Andy Serkis Thinks the Oscars Is Getting Closer to Finally Nominating Motion-Capture Acting But the actor is a bit disappointed the Academy didn't start with the acting in "War For the Planet … “Nobody else in the world can do that.”, By He conceived Gollum as an addict whose inner struggle translated into an out-of-control, convulsive physicality. Matt Reeves, the director of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, was blown away when, in 2011, he saw the film’s predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. “I thought it was crazy. During the shooting of a scene with James Franco in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a sound recordist asked Serkis to keep his “monkey noises” down because he was trying to record Franco’s dialogue. Serkis had no idea what motion capture was. “The original 1933 version of Kong was a monster,” Serkis says. “I wanted to understand what he did to make Caesar such an emotional character,” he says. A bank of computers occupies one side of the stage. In his audition, he climbed up on a chair, his face contorted, and delivered his lines in a thin voice interspersed with a gurgling cough (the inspiration for Gollum’s cough was Serkis watching his cat, Ditz, coughing up a fur ball). Here's how. “When you calibrate your avatar, you are kind of both marionette and puppeteer at the same time,” says Serkis. “We did seven-hour days on stage here while I was in my trailer waiting to go on as Caesar. He added that Weta Digital would also attempt to capture some of Serkis’s acting with a technology called motion capture. “It was an epiphany. For each scene, Jackson shot three passes, one with Serkis as a reference for the visual effects team, another where Serkis would step out of the frame and recite the dialogue and call the timing of Gollum’s movements, and a final scene without actors to provide a background plate for the animation. For 20 minutes, there wasn’t a word said. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times… One guy would jump off, do a display, another would come down by Caesar, and someone would get jealous, go over and start groaning. After a few months visiting London Zoo, he told Jackson that he was going to Rwanda to observe mountain gorillas in the wild. By Earlier this year, Serkis attended an event at Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus, London, with his Imaginarium cofounder Jonathan Cavendish, the producer responsible for the Bridget Jones films, and Samantha Shannon, the 22-year-old author of the The Bone Season, which has sold more than 270,000 copies and to which The Imaginarium has acquired the film rights. “We had to go back to New Zealand to shoot it,” Serkis says. “There were no props, just Andy. The filmmakers touted the advances of the technology in the years since it was first introduced, as well its ability to help them avoid any moral compromises on the film. He wrote about how we can train our brains in 05.14, By When Andy Serkis saddles up as horse-riding ape leader Caesar in War for the Planet of the Apes (in theaters Friday), it marks the end of a six-year, three-film journey.. “I’d never felt that level of emotional connection with a computer-generated character before.” Reeves had no experience of performance capture, the technology used in Rise of the Planet of the Apes to translate the performance of human actors into photo-realistic apes. “We only added the visual effects after, so there’s a version of this movie that we’ve been watching for a long time that has no apes in it,” Reeves says. “I know that’s not the case.”, João Medeiros is science editor at WIRED. They would act out scenes, with Serkis directing the actor in close proximity, and they would then watch a playback on the screen, refining it in iterations. “It’s not really a camera,” he laughs. Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens in theaters on August 5th. “Not later when this kind of acting is de rigueur, but now, when he has elevated this fresh mode of acting into an art form.” In essence, performance capture is no different to wearing a costume and make-up, except they’re made from pixels, not physical materials. Bottom left: Fur simulation. Serkis' digital effects company The Imaginarium worked on the game and Serkis performed motion capture. A motion-capture technician handed Serkis a pair of virtual goggles that would show him his avatar in real time. He recalls having an outburst on a take once because Wood and Austin weren’t taking their shots with him seriously enough. Jackson didn’t want Elijah Wood and Sean Austin, who were playing Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee respectively, to interact on set with a tennis ball on a stick, especially since Gollum was supposed to drive many of their scenes. “In the very early days I don’t think anybody knew exactly why I was there,” says Serkis. Charmian Love, Okja director Bong Joon-ho: 'Capitalism turns love into something ugly', Godzilla and Kong keep growing. He would become the inspiration for Kong’s gnarled face. He used weighted bags on his arms, waist and legs to get the scale of movement right. We sit down with "War for the Planet of the Apes"' Andy Serkis to talk about how technology has evolved to bring us his amazing motion-capture performances. Capita, By Humans are thought to be extinct, victims of a pandemic caused by a viral drug. Serkis, 50, who a few days earlier was cast for JJ Abrams’s upcoming Star Wars film, was introduced by Cavendish as the “great character creator of our generation”. Inside, there’s a large empty arena – The Imaginarium’s Volume – which is surrounded by 48 LED cameras attached to a metal framework. Nevertheless, he auditioned for it a few days later. With his wife, Cornelia, he has a teenage son and a baby. I realised that there was no visual-effects secret for that performance. He was fitted with a specially designed black suit, dotted with tiny Styrofoam balls covered in reflective tape. Suddenly, I wasn’t constrained to a human form.”, Serkis would sometimes act out his close-ups on the motion-capture stage up to a year after shooting on location. “It was like a magic mirror, seeing this creature standing there,” says Serkis. 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We’d always shoot a blank plate, so I’d play the scene with other actors: with Sean Astin and Elijah Wood… Then I would go back months later and – by myself in a motion capture studio – work in isolation with the plates we had shot. It would be silent and then everyone would just break out into applause.”, Peter Jackson’s initial thought was to make the creature an animated character, but the more he saw Serkis’s performance, the more he was forced to reconsider. “We wanted to make it a film that didn’t lose any of its political punch but was very much a family film that would cause a debate between an eight-year-old and an 80-year-old.” Technicians are developing a way to create pigs and sheep using actors in performance-capture suits. “Francis Ford Coppola told me once that when they rehearsed The Godfather they sat around the table in character to explore the dynamics between them,” says Reeves. Primatologists, professors and filmmakers gathered at CalTech in Pasadena this past Thursday to discuss 20th Century Fox’s new film Rise of the Planet of the Apes. 'War of the Planet of the Apes' star Andy Serkis teaches Sara Haines a pretty slick dance move More The actor shows off his dancing skills and discusses how motion capture is … Their discussion centered around Fox’s re-imagining of their venerable Planet of the Apes franchise, the role of motion capture technology in the film, and its implications on the status of the great apes in our world today. “The final version of Gollum ended up being fully inspired by Andy’s performance.”, Serkis leads an interior motion-capture shoot. You can opt out at any time or find out more by reading our cookie policy. “There’s one scene where Caesar is being abandoned at the sanctuary and he’s pressing his face to the glass as his adopted father leaves him behind. Serkis had never read The Lord of the Rings and it wasn’t the sort of role that enticed him; he was more attuned to realistic dramas. “[In Vancouver] it was freezing cold,” says Serkis. On Wednesday, I spent an hour in the company of mo-cap alpha male Andy Serkis for a footage screening of material from the second film in the rebooted saga, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes… One of The Imaginarium’s big projects is Animal Farm, which Serkis is planning to start directing later this year. “He’s shown the way for actors and made them less fearful of the technology. “Everybody trying to impress [Marlon] Brando the way they had to impress Don Corleone. For a summer film, it looks extremely intense, with scenes of animal entrapment and torture in science labs, and a deep connection – ultimately betrayed – between Caesar and his human family. There was no way we could put actors in… simian suits and pull it off. “I recently had an actor here with me,” he says. TRIAL OFFER Awards. The apes and horses will be completed in CG. 2008 Nominee ... For his exemplary motion-capture performance. Jackson explained that even though Gollum was going to be a computer-animated character, he needed an actor to play Gollum on set to avoid the disconnection between the actors and an animated character that would be added later. The initial period of shooting was difficult for Serkis. Serkis wasn’t a voice actor: even if that was all he was expected to do, he still had to get into character. The apes – particularly the hyper-intelligent Caesar, who leads a simian revolt against humanity – are all rendered by performance capture. Serkis started acting in the late 1980's with small roles on the television series Morris Minor and His Marvellous Motors (1989), and The New Statesman (1989) before being cast as Owen in Streetwise from 1989–1992. “When we where doing Avatar, Serkis came in the early days just to talk to everybody about the process,” says Letteri. Part of the casting was conducted at The Imaginarium, a London-based studio and production company Serkis cofounded in 2012. Besides the roles of Gollum and Caesar, he has played King Kong, as well as Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin. Perched on a stool, he answered questions earnestly, with an affable smile, his voice serene and his humour gentle. War for the Planet of the Apes star Andy Serkis might have become the master of motion-capture, but old-fashioned acting chops are still crucial to … “With performance capture, actors can just play out the scene as they would in theatre. PLANET OF THE APES stars James Franco. Golden Globes, USA. Welcome to WIRED UK. It was ironic because inevitably they would use that take by painting me out and overlaying Gollum on top.”, The following month Serkis met the motion-capture team for the first time. “At some point, Jackson told us that we had to redesign Gollum’s facial structure to resemble Andy’s,” Letteri says. The actor explained his level of comfort with the technology, saying: “A motion capture costume is actually a very liberating costume. We were finding our relationships.” During that period, they rehearsed every day. His first day on set wasn’t until April 13, so he spent the intervening time readying himself for the role: he shaved his head and spent hours in isolation, trying to find Gollum’s character. You can see his legacy in a movie like Avatar, even though he didn’t perform in it. When he returned to the UK, he was approached by Tameem Antoniades, the head of a Cambridge-based videogame company called Ninja Theory. He wanted Serkis to direct and act in the cinematic sequences using performance capture. Andy Serkis on ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ ’ anti-gun message, training Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk in ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron,’ and how motion capture will soon invade your TV set. Both 'Apes' sequels are currently available on Movies Anywhere. But it turns out that they’re not, and this discovery causes Caesar to navigate the line between diplomacy and war. Bottom right: The final high-resolution version of Caesar with Serkis’s vivid expressions on it. “The crazy thing about that story is that the most relatable character is not a human, but an ape,” says Reeves. It was released on PlayStation 4 … War for the Planet of the Apes star Andy Serkis might have become the master of motion-capture, but old-fashioned acting chops are still crucial to his success, By Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards. The part was offered to him in 1999. “What is needed is recognition for him now,” wrote Franco in a Deadline Hollywood article supporting an Oscar nomination for Serkis’s performance as Caesar. The character was Gollum. No actor has performed as many leading roles in a performance-capture suit as Serkis. He doesn’t look like an ape at all. Tomris Laffly reviews "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," and is mostly impressed by its mix of action-packed summer fun and social commentary. He showed Serkis pictures of an albino gorilla called Snowflake that lived in a Barcelona Zoo. Will Bedingfield, He talked about the intricacies of performance capture, calling it “digital make-up”, and invited the audience to suggest actors for The Bone Season movie. His avatar responded. As Andy Serkis’ character Caesar becomes more advanced in the “Planet of the Apes” films, so do Serkis’ motion-capture performances. “He said, don’t do that, it’s a dangerous, really bad idea,” Serkis laughs. I personally think it would have been a bit of an irony to be telling the story of our most exploited and closest cousins, and use live apes to tell that story. “I had to explain that this is how Caesar speaks,” says Serkis. The film was shot mostly on location, which involved taking expensive, cumbersome equipment to the middle of a forest near Alouette Lake in Vancouver.
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