Warner Bros. has released footage from the set of The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. In it, we follow the director/star as he transforms back into the titular character.
The video begins as Serkis makes his way onto the set in a motion-capture suit.
Ostensibly, it’s the first day of shooting. Serkis checks in saying, “What are we going to start with?”
“At the beginning,” hears back.
The he asks, thumbing through what looks like a script, “Who’s up?”
The reply: “You are.”
Serkis then moves to the middle of the room, crouches down atop a box and says in a familiar rattling voice, “And…Action!”
You can watch it below.
In 2024, Serkis told Deadline he was excited to revisit the character, given all the advances in motion capture since the last film.
“At that time, the motion capture technology back then was pretty much restricted to interior sets and it was just motion capture. Throughout the course of the evolution of the technology through the [Planet of the] Apes movies, it changed,” Serkis said. “For instance, we were able to untether it from a volume and allow real performance capture, because in those three films, the first three films, the facial was all animated, copying my facial expressions. But it wasn’t driven by a performance capture, the delicacy and the nuance that was then able to be caught using head-mounted cameras. During the Apes movies is when the real experimentation began with going outdoors and shooting on location. And those are the big movies. And obviously Jim Cameron was working on his Avatar movies alongside Weta. They were pushing the nuances of facial performance with facial capture as well.”
The film’s story, much of it developed from Tolkien’s appendices, is set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. The Hunt for Gollum follows Aragorn’s perilous quest to capture Gollum before the creature can reveal the One Ring’s location to Sauron.
While Serkis hasn’t revealed much more about the plot, he did recently tell the BBC, “The hunt takes place in two different dimensions really and that’s about as far as I can say at the moment.”
