![]() He is the story’s lone multidimensional character, and the battle for his soul, a soul that has long since been lost to the Ring of Power, buttresses the stakes of Frodo’s own struggle. Gollum is the opposite - vividly alive, and essential to the success of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation. Previous attempts at using motion capture gave the world Jar Jar Binks and Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists, performances so off-putting and soulless that one could not help but long for the heyday of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. We’ve all seen these movies so many times over the last 20 years that it can be hard to really grasp the achievement of the end results. Serkis on a soundstage, recapturing his Gollum performance for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Photo: Alamy Stock Photo Serkis additionally dropped by Weta’s offices to help the animators, modeling gestures or facial expressions they were struggling to realize. At times, the animators revised Serkis’ performance, altering the physicality or even the facial expressions, to better suit Jackson’s needs. Gollum’s face is made up of 875 shapes that animators manipulated using 64 controls in order to create his many expressions. The hands, feet, and, most importantly, facial expressions of Gollum were all animated later, using Serkis’ performance as reference footage. The only motion-capture data is for his torso, legs and arms.” As Bay Raitt, one of the 18 animators who created Gollum, explained to Animation World Network, “There is no facial motion-capture data, at all, on Gollum. Far less of Gollum is an exact rendering of Serkis’ movements than most people today remember. He then recreated his physical movements and performance, so that they could serve as the basis for the eventual animated creature.īy today’s standards, the “puppet” was rudimentary. Surrounded by 25 cameras in an entirely blue studio so pristinely maintained that crew members were barred from bringing water bottles into the room for fear that their reflections would muck up the shot, Serkis wore a special costume that enabled his movements to manipulate a digital Gollum puppet, and a special visor that showed him what his movements would look like in the already-shot footage. Later - many months later - Serkis recreated his blocking in a motion-capture studio. Jackson shot each Gollum sequence twice: once with Serkis doing the movements of the character, and once without him. That the end result is so believable, so deeply felt and human, is miraculous given the complicated, piecemeal nature of its construction. In order to make Gollum, Serkis and the animators at Weta Digital broke down “the acting side of it” into its component parts, then stitched them back together like Frankenstein’s monster. Since motion-capture technology was still in its early phases, nothing Serkis did during principal photography for The Two Towers would wind up in the final product. In a way, while on set, Serkis sketched out an outline that he, Jackson, and the animators at Weta could embellish later. Serkis would need to do all of those things separately, and he wouldn’t do them alone. But most actors do all of those things simultaneously by themselves. ![]() On one level, Serkis is only describing what all actors do: using their physicality and voice to embody, and communicate the psychology and emotional drives of, a character. But I guess what I’m doing is really providing the acting side of it, the emotional drive behind the character, the physicality, and I suppose, most importantly, the voice.” “Now, the character of Gollum does tend to belong to a lot of different departments, obviously, as a computer-generated character. “I’m playing the character of Gollum,” Serkis says in the doc. He looks like a discount Moon Knight, or perhaps an angry larva. He’s dressed in all white, complete with a hood. Serkis jumps all over the stage, pulled and pushed by Wood and Astin. Gollum has been tracking Frodo and Sam and is now attacking them in hopes of finally getting his distended hands on his precious, precious ring. We spy on Jackson as he shoots Gollum’s entrance into the film. Initially, all we see of Serkis in the documentary is a manic blur wrestling Elijah Wood’s Frodo and Sean Astin’s Sam. Serkis first tried to explain his job in the making-of documentary that came bundled with The Two Towers’ DVD release. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.
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