Andy Serkis’s Take On Acting
His interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“It [motion-capture acting] should be in the [regular] acting category because the acting part of the process is entirely the same. I’ve been bombarded by hate mail from animators saying, “How dare you talk about ‘your’ character when all these people work on it after the fact? We’re actors as well.” They are actors in the sense that they create key frames and the computer will join up the dots, carefully choreograph a moment or an expression and accent it with an emotion. But that’s not what an actor does. An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don’t have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.”
I’m a little ambivalent about Serkis’s philosophy. I think he’s an incredibly talented actor, and the creation and execution of Gollum was spectacular all around. However, part of why Gollum worked as a motion-capture character is because 1) he was within a mostly live-action movie and 2) the type of creature he is doesn’t exist in the real world. Gollum looks realistic because obviously we have nothing to compare it to. In entirely motion-capture animation with human characters, it’s a little different. It looks unnatural, which is distracting, and lacks some of the magic of traditional animation.
