Director, actor, and certified mo-cap expert Andy Serkis is hot off directing Venom: Let There Be Carnage and he has some hot takes that he wants to share. And by hot takes I mean strange and also vaguely unsettling predictions about the future of facial capture. Serkis, who is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Gollum in all of the Lord of the Rings movies and Caesar in the new Planet of the Apes trilogy, has an interesting perspective on these kinds of things. He’s watched the technology change and evolve from an actor and director’s perspective, which makes his points feel salient, even if they also feel a little bit like science fiction at the same time.
In an interview with Games Radar about Venom and CGI, Serkis went all-in about how much the technology has changed since he started playing Gollum way back in 2001:
In terms of performance, capture, the method of facial capture is evolving all the time and the detail, the nuances in the end, the actual root performance that you get out of an actor, and the translation of that into the final thing is getting closer and closer. One would see that through, for instance, the “[Planet of the] Apes” movies. And even going back and doing “The Hobbit” after many years, Gollum in “The Hobbit” was on another level in terms of facial capture.
Thirty Mile Zone 