A few months before delivery, Bay Raitt lead his team in remodeling Gollum’s face (left) to closely resemble Andy Serkis. In addition, Raitt re-worked the edge flow in order to allow for the incredibly complicated skin and muscle motion. Gollum’s original facial structure (right) was based off a model built by Weta Workshop. You can see how the edge flow doesn’t quite follow the muscle structure in an animatable way. Some of the other noticeable differences from the final design are larger eyes, a more pronounced muzzle and more pug-like nose.

Developing the Pipeline
When Joe Letteri came on board as the visual effects supervisor early on during the pre-production for The Two Towers, he really pushed the idea of a pipeline that allowed us to run shots through the facility at an insane pace. His goal was to have the animators be able to “publish” their daily work (i.e., send out their latest animation to be used by the rest of the facility) at 5:00 pm every day, and then be able to see that work skinned, rendered, textured and composited in dailies the next morning. What that meant was that we had to develop a pipeline that was as automated as possible. So Eric Saindon (creatures supervisor and CG supervisor), Greg Butler (3D sequence lead), Bay Raitt (senior creature technical director), Seth Lippman (3D sequence lead), Dana Peters (senior creature technical director), Bret Hughes (software engineer) and I plus a myriad of others wrote a system that could handle this type of throughput. We had weekly meetings where everyone would get together and discuss everything from directory structures to rendering software to disk quotas. It took a bit of time to get going, but once it started working, the shots would fly through the system.

By the time we completed work on The Two Towers our pipeline was well established. We could have more than 100 shots online at one time, all of which were being worked on and viewed daily.

It was at this time that we were starting to get feedback from the press about Gollum. It was probably one of the most exciting and energizing times to work at Weta Digital. One of the things you strive for when doing visual effects is being invisible. Any effects work that stands out is bad, as the point is NOT to be obvious. If the audience can see the wires, the matte lines, a sliding foot, a misplaced light, a bad render, you haven’t done your job. This, we all understand and work our best to make the audience believe everything they see on-screen is absolutely real. “Why, of course, those 15- foot trolls are real. We hired them pretty cheap. It’s amazing. They just wanted library cards and Internet access. They don’t need clothes. A couple of fresh loin cloths and they’re set for a year.”

Andy Serkis and Gollum
With Gollum, we wanted the audience to believe he was real. We worked intensely to ensure the fact that the audience would suspend disbelief and not think, “Wow, what a cool digital character.” But, “Wow… what an amazing actor.”

I think a lot of what was making Gollum appeal to the audience is the fact that he was driven from a single emotional “base.” We had the unique experience of working with this phenomenal talent: Andy Serkis. Andy had initially been hired just to perform Gollum’s voice, and we (the animators) were going to animate to that performance. It was soon quite apparent that in order for Andy to actually play the voice, he had to embody the character emotionally and physically.

This was a huge boon for the animators and motion editors, as now even though there were more than 20 of us working on Gollum, there was one psychological base to start from. Either we would take the motion capture he performed and tweak it as necessary, adding the facial animation, or we would take the emotional connotation that Andy had projected and animate to that.

It was a completely awe inspiring experience. You could see some remarkable work coming from the animators. Senior animator Mike Stevens was one of the first to really “capture” Andy’s emotional state in a shot. Atsushi Sato, another senior animator, was so amazingly fast, he would get a difficult shot and turn it around in a matter of days, and your only comment would be, “Gah. Wow.” (Animation supervisor) Adam Valdez animated one of my favorite shots in The Two Towers: when Frodo says Smeagol’s name for the first time and he looks up shocked. “My name…my name…” says Gollum. Stunning. Each animator was pushed and it became obvious how much better all our work was getting. I honestly feel it had to do with the fact that Randy Cook (creature effects supervisor/designer), screenwriter Fran Walsh and Andy were able to clearly communicate Gollum’s emotional state through Andy’s physical and auditory performance.