Andy Serkis Doing Motion Capture Work on Star Wars
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- June 30, 2014
By James DeRuvo (doddleNEWS)
Gollum has joined the Dark Side. But we all knew that, didn’t we? Well, I guess we can’t really say that he’s playing a villain in the new Star Wars movie, but motion capture icon Andy Serkis (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Hobbit) and his company The Imaginarium, have been contracted to do all the motion and performance capture duties for J.J. Abrams in Star Wars Episode VII. This, in addition to revealing he’s consulting and playing a role in The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
It's extraordinary. I grew up with Star Wars and was a massive fan of the original films. I never imagined in a million years that I'd be engaging with this. It's just come about so organically. JJ Abrams and I met, and we just had this incredible kind of vibe between us. He said, 'You'd fit really well in this universe,' and I said, 'I think I probably could.' – Andy Serkis
What I like about what I’m seeing from Abrams so far, is that he seems to be bringing along those film professionals who were raised on Star Wars and are genuine fans of the series. That provides with a seminal respect for the material more than any generic hired gun would. For Serkis, he told Sci-Fi Now that his company would be providing all the motion capture work being done, presumably for CGI characters (and I’m hoping we get a cantina scene that bears that out), and then, he says he’s been cast in a role for a specific character, and has participated in read-throughs, as seen in the official cast photo.
“We're working very closely,” Serkis said, “in two ways: the Imaginarium is providing all of the performance characters, and I myself am playing a character in it.” That’s cool.
Serkis founded The Imaginarium to handle the glut of motion capture and performance duties that have come his way as a result of his work in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since then, he’s added his work to The Hobbit trilogy, the two most recent Planet of the Apes as Caesar, and we’ve also heard he’s done the motion capture work for the Hulk in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, while Mark Ruffalo handles all the Bruce Banner stuff. And with the alien-rich environment, it looks like Abrams wants to tap into for Episode VII, it makes sense that Serkis and his cadre of mo-cap actors would be drafted.
But with Lucasfilm doing work on live motion capture lately, I wonder if that’s what we’re going to see for this film, or maybe Episode VIII That would be pretty interesting. We wrote about it last year, as ILM engineers were showcasing a new technique which married CGI characters and motion-capture in real time. It was in its infancy back then, but it still looked pretty cool and if they’ve matured the technology to the point of using it, it would make sense to draft Serkis to bring it to the next level.
And Serkis says he’s excited to have been cast to play a major character as well. Here’s hoping it’s not Jar Jar Binks.
Hat Tip – /Film
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