Andy Serkis talks motion capture: “It’s all about performance”

PanARMENIAN.Net - Andy Serkis has explained that he considers motion capture performance to be driven by emotion, Digital Spy said.

Serkis portrays Caesar, the dominant ape in the forthcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, through the medium of motion capture. A dozen actors played apes through this method, with the 2,000 other apes being entirely computer generated.

The actor told The Telegraph: "This is a much more ambitious production than the last one. Technologically we have moved on with more robust, live action performance capture suits and the face-mounted cameras have a much higher resolution."

Responding to the question of whether actors who specialise in performance capture should be eligible for awards recognition, Serkis claimed that the use of CGI cannot override the emotion needed by the actors.

"It's all to do with performance," he said. "Caesar and all the other computer-generated characters I have ever played are driven by one thing, and that is acting. Audiences want to be moved by acting, not by a visual effect.

"The reason the audience feels what it does towards these characters is purely, I believe, because of performance."

He also disputed the idea that he has criticised digital artists by downplaying their role in the process of bringing the characters to life.

"I've been badly misquoted as saying horrendous things like 'Andy Serkis does everything and the animators do nothing', which I would never say in a million years," he said. "I have an extraordinary relationship with animators and visual effects artists going back for 14 years.

"Acting is acting and visual effects are visual effects and it's a marriage, but the authorship of performance - everything you watch on screen that you feel and think about a character - comes from the actor."

Serkis recently revealed that he will appear in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is released in the UK on July 17.