The most famous motion-capture artist in the world, Andy Serkis (Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series), has opened up his own studio-academy in the art of mo-cap photography for films and video games. Dubbed the Imaginarium, the UK-based studio was conceived during Serkis’ work on some video game projects abroad, and he hopes for it to be a “creative fulcrum” for both industries as a whole.
“I was directing performance capture for two video games and we had to go one to the U.S. to shoot and the second one to New Zealand,” said Serkis to the British Screen Advisory Council (above). “When I got back I thought, why do we not have this here (in the U.K.)? A lot of the motion sensors were built out of technology that came out of Oxford and Cambridge. We have masses of CG talent in this country. Why are we losing this kind of talent abroad when we could be doing the exact same thing here?”
“Games — there’s no heart in them. They’re not about anything that is lasting. We put so much into the writing of film scripts and plays, but not into games. And games are where the audience is going to be,” the master of mo-cap said to Babble last year. “In the next generation of kids, you’re going to see a lot of storytelling in games. And I think it’s important to invest in that. I absolutely think that gaming is a massive storytelling arena in the making and now the technology has arrived to do that. It’s a fascinating time.”
I’ve always been a huge Andy Serkis fan. This is awesome to hear.