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Dominic Monaghan: Hello, hello, hello, hello! What is going on guys?!How are you? How's everyone? Shush! Shush! Can everyone shush! One person at a time! How are you? How are you? Everyone alright at the back? Everyone OK? Cool, man! So we're all here for the Star Wars convention, right? Let's bring the hobbit over. What do we think? What do we think of the female hobbit? Beautiful feet! Ben, come here Ben! There's a few little mistakes going on here guys. What is THIS? Look at this! Ben Hawker: The glue's coming off! Dominic Monaghan: Yeah, OK. I'll give that like seven and a half out of ten. Ben Walker: There's someone on the receiving end... Dominic Monaghan:Blending's good. The Ears - fantastic! Very good work. Hair's good. Hobbit women have to be very buxom and sexual. Elf women kind of, you know, flat-chested. Oh, elf in the audience I see! Tall, kind of asexual! It's true. There is still debate as to whether elf men do actually have ... special places! We think maybe have babies through some kind of magic happening! But fantastic - you look great! Shall we embrace? A little hobbit embrace? Richard Taylor: This course isn't all about the costuming and the actors. There's a big part that's played by visual effects. I would like to introduce Bay Raitt who's going to come on stage and talk about the development of Gollum . Bay looked after the facial animation system. FX: Loud applause Bay Raitt: Hi, I'm from Weta Digital, next door to these guys. I'm here to show you a little bit of behind-the-scenes for Gollum. I'm representing a crew of a couple of huindred people so I'm really proud to be here, showing you guys what we've done. I'm the creature facial lead for Lord of the Rings. Over the last three and a half years I've been pretty much looking at Gollum's face. I know Andy Serkis and all these guys really really well. FX: loud funky bass groove starts up over speakers for no apparent reason. Dominic starts grooving. Audience laugh and music is quickly faded down Bay Raitt: I'll just have to show you. So if we roll the tape I can just start talking through it. It's basically a whole bunch of stuff that has clips, movies, images of all the crew that we've been working on, so if you'd just start up the DVD. It's on the laptop so it's going to be a little strange here. Put it to full screen play. Alt-Enter! So can we start that again? ... This happens a lot! One day we had the power turned off at Weta Digital and we had to take the machines back to my house! One of the scenes where Gollum drops his face and goes 'What did you call me?' I did that at about 4am in the morning in my den - how his face actually drops. So we're having one of those moments right now! FX: Cries from audience for Dominic to show dancing again Dominic Monaghan: I am available for Bar Mitzvah's, weddings, female parties.. female parties. Bay Raitt: They've asked me to re-announce 'Please don't videotape this'. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that we don't want leaving this room - it's just for you folks! A lot of it was just edited off of my PC and hopefully it will show up soon. Without my computer, I'm kinda... Richard Taylor: Are we waiting on computer problems, as usual? Bay Raitt: This is really common! OK, at Weta Digi we have over 8 Terrabytes of hard disk space. 'Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' took over 4 million render hours to render. We have a tape robot that backs up the entire hard drive system every night and then ships itself off to a secure location in case the building catches fire. The biggest problem we have at Weta Digital in our machine room is keeping the temperature so that the whole place doesn't burn down. We have four machine rooms running with stacks and stacks of processors just to.... Richard Taylor: (interrupting) Oh rubbish! The biggest problem at Weta Digital is whether we're going to get the right brand of coffee in! Bay Raitt: Yeah, that's probably the big one! The place runs pretty much 24/7 right now. The crew is down there, working on 'Return of the King'. It's been a privilege to be part of a great crew. How are we looking on this DVD? I keep thinking of things I can tell you. Dance? No, I think the actors are going to be the best dancers. Richard Taylor: Well why don't we bring Andy on if we're having some.... FX: Loud applause and cheers. Andy Serkis walks on stage Andy Serkis: (in Gollum/Smeagol voices) 'Shut up, precious. I can't hear myself think', 'No, no, nor can I!', 'Well shut up then!' FX: Lots of applause Andy Serkis: (as himself) Where are we up to? What's going on? Oh, the DVD player's not working so we're just going to give you a little bit of entertainment ourselves. So what do you want to know? I tell you what I could start by telling how it all kind of happened for me. Is that a good idea? OK. So I get a phone call from my agent in February 1999 and they say 'Andy they're doing this film 'Lord of the Rings' down in New Zealand. They're looking for someone to do three weeks voice-over work for this weird character called Gollum'. I kind of said 'Well look, can you not get me up for a decent ****ing role? There must be a load of good parts in that film'. And they said 'Well have you read it?'. And I said 'Well I read The Hobbit when I was a kid' and they said 'Well this part is Gollum' and I went 'Oh! ****!'. I remembered who Gollum was'. Anyway three and a half years later and it wasn't quite how we thought it was going to be originally. Peter Jackson came over to London and he said in fact it wasn't just going to be three weeks voice-over work on an animated character, like dropping a voice on top of a character, it was going to be ..He wanted basically... His mission for Gollum, although it would finally manifest itself as a CG character, would be to have an actor play the role all the way through. He wanted it to have that energy and interactiveness that you would have with any three actors on set in a normal filming situation. So we talked through it and he showed me the conceptual drawings and stuff and then we shot some stuff and a few months later I got the offer, so that was great. Although he said it was going to manifest itself as a CG character, at that time he wasn't quite sure how, and that was the journey that we would all take as a group of artists, animators, actors.. to actually really draw it together over this period of time. What happened was I basically started thinking about the psychology of the role, the physicality, how to get the voice going. I suppose the first stage was the voice. Once I'd decided that Gollum carried this pain in his throat and I'd, as many of you might already have heard, kind of based it on my three cats at home who when they get furballs convulse and throw up. Bay Raitt: We also actually tried to do some automated lip-sync stuff because before you were cast we had no idea what he was going to sound like so we had Andrew Jacks(?), the voice coach, so we'll show it to you when we've the tapes working. He spoke fairly clearly and when we heard your first take my forehead hit the table because it's all throat, and I realised that nothing automated was going to work. We were going to have to go through and key-frame all of it, and it was an amazing performance. We've actually got Andy's audition on tape. Andy Serkis: No! That is insane! Bay Raitt: So for the first six months I was working on Gollum that was all I had, so I went through this one tape just over and over again, looking at every expression and having that audio just burned into my mind, going 'Oh my God! How am I going to get CG to do this?' because it was really a lot because he was really pushing it really hard. I was just trying to do justice to what I knew he was going to bring down. Are we working with the tape? Just go ahead and roll it! FX: demonstration of maquettes and early experiments with scene from first movie Andy Serkis: Pete actually wanted me to play naked. FX: Reel showing Andy's demo tape performance. Lots of applause Andy Serkis: Jesus Christ! How the **** did I get the job? Bay Raitt: So we saw that and we thought 'Oh my God! He really looks like the design!'He really has the same characteristics, not to insult... Andy Serkis: Thanks buddy! Bay Raitt: So I started going through that frame by frame and basically building the facial system. If we just keep playing because with Andy up here on stage and... Andy Serkis: Before we do that can I just say that when Bay and I started working together we'd have these long in-depth conversations and he'd draw all these lines over my face to work out where the facial muscles were and everything - you'll probably talk about that in a bit. But we'd be having these great conversations about Gollum and then I'd realise that he wasn't listening to a blind word I was talking about, he was just looking at how my lips were moving and my nostrils were flaring and I thought I was being really interesting. Bay Raitt: Yeah, I picked up a really annoying habit of being able to chat people up while being able to absorb their faces. The good thing about making faces for a living is that pretty much everyone is beautiful but sometimes I get caught up in things. The next clip after that is your first day at work... Andy Serkis: So I basically, once I'd got offered the job, worked on the physicality and kind of went through the books and looked at Tolkien's descriptions on how the character moved. This was my first day up in Ruapehu on the side of a volcanoe with a shaved head, trying to find my feet as Gollum. Tolkien wrote... he moves like a grasshopper, a snake, all these animalistic descriptions of him and I really worked that into the physical vocabulary and made this decision that he should move around on all fours because of the nature of his.. I decided on the fact that he was kind of an addict and I wanted that pain to become important. That was a real bum decision because it meant I'd have to crawl around for four years. Bay Raitt: It was great. We've actually got footage... at Weta we do this thing where everybody that works submits their stuff to this internal web page so we can see what the entire facility is doing and it updates sort of every 10 seconds when we're in full crunch mode, and we've got hundreds and hundreds of takes of this guy pretty much looking like that. You doing Gollum. That's pretty much Gollum to us. Richard Taylor: I think it's worth noting, as you all can see now that Andy's walked on stage. The moment he walked on stage at our facility we knew that Gollum needed to go through a redesign to capture what is intrinsically Smeagol/Gollum in Andy. I pay that as the greatest compliment, Andy. Andy: (doing Smeagol voice) Thank you, precious! Richard Taylor: That's indeed what began the redesign with Pete and Andy and Bay and the guys in the workshop. Bay Raitt: Just something to explain as a back story. If we redesigned Gollum we had to rebuild the entire facial system before any animators could start, before we could finalise shots. basically we had to start from scratch. It was about Christmas time that Pete actually decided that yes, we were going to go ahead and redesign it. He sort of looked at me and was like 'Can you do this?' and I basically said 'Well I can hire a couple of guys' and I went ahead and hired Sven Jensen, John Feather and one of our modellers, Brad deCaussin, to help me make this facial system happen in this obscenely quick amount of time. I ripped these guys, and when they met Andy they just flipped out because I'd been drilling them about it. I'd had like a year and a half, nearly two years, of studying the face and ... Andy Serkis: And when I saw the final model, the final sculpt that Bay had been working on I was so unbelievably blown away, because it really, honestly.... the Smeagol side of the personality looked just like my two and a half year old son. And the Gollum part looked like my dad!It was kind of this bizarre gene that you pulled somewhere along the line. It was actually at that time that Peter decided he'd use motion capture on a much greater scale so in fact we'd shoot all the scenes on the set and then the majority of the scenes, where it was physically possible, I would then motion capture and replace myself back into the scene. Are most people kind of aware how motion capture works? If not, put your hands up. Ah, everybody knows. Great! It basically fell into three different areas. We either used exactly what was shot on set and that was rotoscoped, which is basically painting the excess fat - which is me - out and then over my movements, or the scene would be motion captured - this would be more in the scenes where Gollum wasn't intermingling with Frodo and Sam. Bay Raitt: The cool thing is it's actually a hybrid of a whole bunch of different approaches. There's a couple of different ways that you can make a 3D character move around. One of them is to go through it frame by frame - keyframe it like a traditional cell animator would, and use the computer to help speed that up. One is to use this motion capture system which basically captures everything that Andy does, but it has a hard time catching things like the face like the tongue, the fingers and the toes. Then there's the ability to go through it frame by frame sort of matching or tracing the 3D model onto what Andy's doing. And for all the shots in the movie it's like taking all those approaches and drawing them into a blender and hitting 'Purée'. You've got teams of people, so there's like an Andy Serkis removal team that removes Andy Serkis from the film. There's people that go through and match everything that he does so that the animators that are animating Gollum against Frodo and Sam, all three of these guys are actually playing in the scene together. It's pretty impressive. Laura Abely: Bay, you know you guys had all that technical stuff that you had to deal with, but you also had to deal with the human element because you had to interact with some other people as well. Can you talk about that a little? Andy Serkis: Yeah, I guess so. Why not! basically as I say, from the word 'Go' Peter wanted Gollum to interact with Frodo and Sam. He wanted three actors together. So you've got to have three good actors. So it's probably about time that we introduced the other two.... Continue on to page 3 of transcript Go back to page 1 of transcript

Email: ian@iansmith.co.uk