During my visit to Comic-Con International in July I had the pleasure of watching Andy Serkis speak about his role in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. If you don't know, he's a big champion of motion capture technology in film (he played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the big ape in Jackson's King Kong and now a smaller ape in Rise of the Planet of the Apes). He glowed as he described to his audience of six thousand the art of 'performance capture,' in which detailed elements of the actor's physical performance are recorded and applied to an animated character. He went on at length about the beautiful liberation of being able to transform into any character in imagination, unrestrained by his natural form. Through motion capture technology he can be fifty feet tall or five, with any face the story calls for. To some actors, Serkis said, the idea of being faceless is unsettling - afterall, every famous actor's face is their trademark. But Serkis prefers lending his expressions to any face the film calls for, and explained how exciting the prospect was for him.
