Craft Leaders: Andy Serkis, Director and Actor

It’s extremely unusual, unprecedented even, for an actor - let alone an A-list star - to discuss the cutting edge of production techniques with so much passion and erudition. But Andy Serkis is not your usual filmmaker.

“Using game engine technology to achieve high quality rendering in realtime means that, once something is shot on set, there will be no post production,” he says. “I believe that is where we are headed and with VR, AR and interactive gaming platforms emerging it’s the most exciting time to be a storyteller.”

Serkis is synonymous with performance capture, the art of playing digitally enhanced characters which he has made his own over the last seventeen years.

Famously as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Serkis has inhabited King Kong, also for director Peter Jackson, Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy and Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: A New Hope and The Last Jedi.

In doing so he has…