Andy Serkis predicts the future of motion capture technology will be a lot like deep fakes. The English actor and director is virtually synonymous with performance capture, having worked with it in multiple high-profile roles throughout his career. Serkis’ latest directorial feature, Sony’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, is now playing in American movie theaters.
There’s an ongoing debate over whether performance capture, which involves recording and digitally recreating the movements of an actor, is more visual effect than acting, and Serkis has virtually always been at the center of it. He first came to public attention for his portrayal of Sméagol/Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which some critics felt merited an Academy Award nomination, despite the character’s computer-generated nature. He would then continue developing the tech as King Kong in Jackson’s 2005 remake and as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboots, which garnered him (and the other ape cast members) tremendous acclaim.
As someone at the forefront of motion capture, Serkis is in the perfect place to predict where it’s headed, and he tells Total Film it will continue to approach reality. The actor believes the technology is constantly evolving to better and more completely translate the actor’s performance, to the point that it could eventually replace makeup entirely. Making someone look like, say, Abraham Lincoln could be someday involve recreating his actual face:
In terms of performance, capture, the method of facial capture is evolving all the time and the detail, the nuances in the end, the actual root performance that you get out of an actor, and the translation of that into the final thing is getting closer and closer. […] People have criticized me before for saying it’s like digital makeup, but it is becoming that. I think you will be able to play someone from history from photogrammetry and have a real Abraham Lincoln’s face that you’re playing rather than a sculpted one.
Elsewhere in the interview, Serkis jokingly admits to feeling somewhat responsible for the current era of deep fakes, in which someone in an existing video is replaced with the likeness of another. While perhaps more famous for its amateur applications in things like hoax videos, the AI-guided strategy has become notable in film and TV for its more sinister potential to allow studios to incorporate an actor without their actual involvement. For example, Disney has developed deep fake technology that it claims can be used to facilitate new performances from long-dead stars.
While deep fakes are often more about the replacement than the actual person underneath, Serkis‘ assertion that the tech could meet somewhere in the middle is not an unlikely scenario. While potentially putting Hollywood’s many makeup artists out of work, this level of performance capture would also revolutionize casting, as decisions would no longer need to be made based on resemblance. However, even with all this transformative potential, the final product would still be dependent on the physical performance of the actor – The Irishman can de-age Robert DeNiro all it wants, but the moment he moves like an older man, the illusion shatters.
