Gollum MoCaps Heavenly Sword

Andy Serkis, known to hobbit lovers most everywhere now as the guy who brought Gollum to life, talks to CHUD about motion capturing between movies and games:

Serkis: I’m actually quite excited about the prospect of digital performance. I’ve been working all year on Heavenly Sword, a video game for the Playstation 3. We went back to Weta in New Zealand and I directed all the motion capture for that game, and performing in it as well. I got involved at an early stage in the story design element, then I went through and cast and was in charge of directing performance. I think it’s a fantastic portal at the moment. More and more films are going to use motion capture and I think it’s going to finally be recognized as performance. I really do imagine that in ten years’ time actors will come out of drama school and they’ll do theater and they’ll do TV and film and they’ll do video games as a matter of course. I think it’s beginning, I think it’s in its infancy.

So you see video games having a real future as a performance art.

Serkis: Totally. Again, it comes back to storytelling and script writing and script development. Obviously the technology has reached a point where the fusion between cinema and video games are there. The techniques we used for Heavenly Sword are no different from that for King Kong. It was exactly the same thing; it’s just the resolution of the digital characters. But in terms of the process, in terms of achieving performance, it was exactly the same. All it comes down to is engaging the game player or your audience member in a compelling set of characters in a compelling situation.

-- CHUD.com - Cinematic Happenings Under Development


tagged: game, gaming