When Will a Motion-Capture Actor Win an Oscar?

Andy Serkis remembers clearly his introduction to motion-capture technology. The actor arrived in New Zealand to take on the role of J.R.R. Tolkien's gnarly Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and faced an extreme proposition.

"My very first scene was 5,000 feet on top of a real volcano," he recalls. "I was standing in a leotard in front of a crew of 250 Kiwis wondering what the hell I was doing. I'd done a lot of preparatory work, but there was nothing that could prepare for that."

Serkis, garbed in a sensor-embedded Lycra body suit, quickly mastered the then-novel art and science of performance-capture acting. Despite his widely acclaimed star turn as the disgusting creature in the Lord of the Rings movies – which earned him the "king of mo-cap" title from Wired – Serkis failed to get a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

Will he again fall victim to mo-cap discrimination? Movie fans will find out Tuesday when Oscar nominations are announced. This time around, the London-based actor has garnered loads of critical acclaim for his stellar 2011 portrayal of alpha chimpanzee Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. In the sci-fi prequel, Serkis uncannily mimicked primate facial expressions and body language to communicate Caesar's subtly nuanced journey from a sweet-tempered high-IQ baby chimp to an outraged leader of an animal insurrection. (Update: Serkis was snubbed once again.)

It was a tour de force performance. But despite recent technological advances that enable such star turns, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' historic reluctance to honor motion-capture performances does not leave Serkis in the most hopeful of moods.

"Reviewers have a strange way of describing my performances.""The acting community has worries about performance capture because they believe it's some form of replacement for performance when in fact, it's the opposite," Serkis, in Los Angeles on break from reprising Gollum in the upcoming Hobbit movies, tells Wired.com in a phone interview. "Performance capture is a tool that allows actors to transform themselves into many different characters. You're not confined by physicality. You can play anything."

Serkis sounds faintly annoyed as he recaps movie critics' characterizations of his mo-cap work, which also includes the title role in Peter Jackson's live-action King Kong reboot and Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s animated film The Adventures of Tintin.

"Reviewers have a strange way of describing my performances," Serkis says. "They'll say things like, 'Serkis lent his voice to' or 'inspired the emotions' or 'lent his movements to' or 'emotionally retained the backbone of,' as opposed to 'performed the role.' I suppose the question is, at what point does the camera snap and capture the emotional content of a scene?"

Technological Leaps Lead to Growing Acceptance

For Rise of the Planet of the Apes, director Rupert Wyatt filmed Serkis in real-world settings with co-star James Franco and other members of the cast. "There's no disconnect between the performance-capture actor and the live-action actor," says Serkis. "One is in a costume and the other is in a motion-capture suit. Every single beat, every interaction between the characters, happens at the same time."

Contrast that with the hermetically sealed process that marked Serkis' early performance-capture projects. "In the case in Lord of the Rings," Serkis says, "I'd film scenes with the actors and then, for Gollum close-ups, I'd have to go back to the post-production bay and redo it in isolation."

Perhaps as a result of the great technological strides made in recent years – and the increasing role that animation is taking in Hollywood – actors, including those who pick Oscar nominees as members of the Academy, are gradually warming up to performance-capture techniques, according to the Screen Actors Guild.

"A lot of that anxiety (about performance capture) is dissipating as more actors do the work themselves," says Woody Schultz, chairman of SAG's performance-capture committee.

This year, actors who've strapped themselves into motion-capture suits will show up as characters in John Carter of Mars, The Avengers and World War Z, while upcoming projects including Fantastic Voyage and James Cameron's Avatar sequels are expected to employ actors rigged with reflective markers and head-mounted cameras, according to Schultz.

A veteran of half a dozen motion-capture projects including Tintin, Avatar and Robert Zemeckis' pioneering 2001 The Polar Express, Schultz points out that high-end videogames have also become a major employer of performance-capture artists.

"L.A. Noire cast more than 200 actors," he says. "That's a lot of actors who'd never been exposed to performance capture and now have that experience. Compared to 10 years ago, many more actors now understand firsthand that the approach to performance capture is no different than any other acting job."

Still, the final product seen on the screen is not a pure acting performance in the traditional sense of the word. While actors may function as the primary author of their performance-captured characters, the process relies on contributions from animators that arguably exceed the contributions of traditional costume designers and makeup experts, says Eric Furie, manager of digital systems and creative computing at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.

"What we see right now is essentially a collaborative performance," Furie says, with the actors' work being heavily supported by other artists. "You can attribute the emotion of the performance to the actor but it still needs to be helped by an animator."

"With performance capture, you’ve got the live-action film industry colliding with animation, which is colliding with game technology."That symbiotic dynamic between actors and animators is expected to give way in the near future. Industry sources envision a production model in which actors would ditch unwieldy headcams and sensor-embedded mo-cap suits in favor of outfits woven from fiber-optic material, not unlike the shape-shifting Scramble Suit imagined by Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly.

"With performance capture, you've got the live-action film industry colliding with animation, which is colliding with game technology," Furie says. "That's still being sorted out but you're going to get to a point within a few years, no question, where you're not going to need an animator in the middle."

For Serkis, future technical advances will only underscore his notion that performance capture simply serves the actor's ancient imperative: to be somebody else.

"When I did a film about Ian Drury, the way I played him is no different than the way I approached Caesar or Captain Haddock," he says. "That's the key to performance capture – it records an actor who's playing a role that could not be achieved using prosthetic makeup. It's about an actor acting a role, except with a different costume."