I mean seriously, he blew me away with his performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and I was P!$$ED that he didn't even get nominated for a Saturn award, let alone an Oscar. He's one of my favorite actors and deserves recognition from his work.
shareCame here to say the exact same thing. He was nothing short of amazing as Gollum, and he was incredible in Rise of the Planet of the Apes as well. He should at least have been nominated.
shareThey dont give Oscars to actors for this kind of performance because it is not just them. He is a great actor, but several animators pour tons of time into editing and tweaking his performance (often much longer than he spent in the suit). This is not like a make up artist, they are actually altering the performance to better fit the character model. Many times things have to be thrown out and hand keyed, using Andys movements as just a reference and not captured motion.
Its unfortunate that Mr. Serkis doesnt give credit to the team of animators that help bring his characters to life. Instead he makes comments about how its just "digital paint" on top of his performance, or in his recent Colbert Report interview exclaiming "yes its all me". I think he does a disservice to the team of animators working with him, his lack of knowledge of the process seems to make him almost unknowingly dupe the public into thinking its all just him in a suit.
That being said he is a fantastic actor and deserves recognition for what he does. I just dont agree with how he portrays performance capture as all him.
In truth it pretty much is just him ^ It's his performance through and through. Though understand what you're saying.
He's one of the great actors out right now.
and a COKE.... I'm sorted
I get your point but if it was all like that then OPtimus Prime should get nominated because of the cool CGI. Animators have their own award (VFX, animated movie?). The man doing the motion capture is nearly always unkown however Serkis is very well known. His performance as Gollum is probably one of the best things about LOTR. He gave life to a CGI model.
"That was a courtesy flush. I'm not actually done yet"
This is the problem I have with Andy Serkis. The majority of people are completely ignorant about the whole mo-cap process, and people like Andy exploit that and take all the credit. He likes to make people think that the animators just press a magic button and the data is transferred from him to the digital character with no effort.
In reality, it is never that simple, not even close. Any recording will always have errors in, which the animators have to fix manually. This clean up stage is a long, tedious process which can take hours for a clip of just a few seconds.
Once clean up is done, the data has to applied to a virtual actor, which is in turn applied to the digital character, (which first has to be rigged and skinned). Again, during these processes more errors will always come up which need to be fixed, and the animators will be constantly making tweaks and adjustments.
Once the animation is actually applied to the digital character, there is still tonnes of work to be done. One of the issues with mo-cap is that animation doesn't scale... so if you apply animation to a character that has different proportions to the mo-cap actor, it won't look right. This has to be fixed by hand.
People think that the data recorded is pretty much the final product in terms of the actual animation, but in reality it's just the first building block.
The one thing less artificially rendered or digitally enhanced in Serkis' performance is his eyes.
A very powerful end to "Dawn.." knowing one is in fact starring into Serkis' eyes (and not a real or digitally made ape face; further nagging at one of the overarching points of the film that we are similar animals)
I was just about to come and start this topic after watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. His performance was riveting!
"They say hunger is the best spice" - Spike
Actually no, what he has said is that the acting and the visual effects should not be blended into one mo-cap award because the two art forms are distinct.
Per Wired 11.11.14:
“It’s a long-standing debate, really, but I’ve always held that there shouldn’t be a separate [Oscar] category,” Serkis told WIRED just before Dawn’s release this summer. “This is acting, and the acting part of it is what is authoring the performance on set. Then, of course, there’s visual effects—the rendering and the artistry and the animation that goes on top to take our performances and put them [on screen]. That’s a visual effects category. So I don’t think blending them makes any sense whatsoever.”