How did an actor become Gollum?
Andy Serkis based Gollum's famous throat noise on his cat coughing up hairballs, and a computer carried the rest of his performance onto the screen.
▶ Start the storyA computer recorded how he moved, and artists built Gollum around the rest of his performance. Motion capture is the process of recording high-resolution movement of people into a computer system. In films it means recording an actor's actions and using them to animate a digital character, and when it also captures the face, fingers, subtle expressions or voice, it is often called . Often the aim is to record only the actor's movement, not their appearance, and the data is mapped onto a 3D model so that the model does the same things as the actor.
The actor wears markers near each joint, often on a full-body spandex suit, and cameras track them. The technique began as an analysis tool in research in the 1970s and 1980s. Star Wars: Episode I in 1999 was the first feature-length film with a main character made this way, Jar Jar Binks. Then came Gollum, played by Andy Serkis. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was the first feature film to use a real-time motion capture system, streaming Serkis's actions into Gollum's computer-generated skin as he performed.
Step 1: The actor performs
In a suit with markers near each joint
Step 2: Cameras track the markers
Movement is recorded many times a second
Step 3: Map the data onto a 3D model
The digital model repeats the actor's actions
Step 4: Animators refine it
animation and shape the final performance
But Gollum was never only a capture. The character was built around Serkis's facial features, voice and acting choices, and Serkis based the iconic throat noise on the sound of his cat coughing up hairballs. Animators at Weta Digital mixed the motion capture data with traditional animation and with a laborious process of digitally Serkis's image and replacing it with Gollum's, a technique coined .
The result started a debate: is CGI-assisted acting acting? Producer Barrie Osborne campaigned for Serkis to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, because his voice, body language and facial expressions were used.
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Recap
Motion capture records how an actor moves and maps it onto a digital model, which artists then refine with animation.
💡 A trick to remember it · An actor in a dotted suit is the puppeteer, and the computer character is the puppet that follows every move.
Surprising fact · Gollum's throat noise was based on Andy Serkis's cat coughing up hairballs.
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