GOLLUM: Bless us and splash us, precious! That's a meaty mouthful.
JOE LETTERI: Gollum was really the first CG character that we were hoping to put on screen
that had to believably act in a human fashion with other actors.
BILBO: I don't want any trouble, do you understand? Just show me the way to get out of here and I'll be on my way.
GOLLUM: We knows. We knows safe paths for hobbitses. Safe paths in the dark. Shut up.
BILBO: I didn't say anything.
GOLLUM: We wasn't talking to you.
JOE LETTERI: One of the very first breakthroughs for Gollum
was casting Andy Serkis to play the voice of Gollum.
GOLLUM: You don't have any friends. Nobody likes you.
JOE LETTERI: Andy's physical presence on set became an important part of how Gollum was developed
and so what we wanted to do was to take all that physicality and find a way to capture that
and bring it to the digital character of Gollum, hence the idea of performance capture.
GOLLUM: Go away. Go away. I hate you. I hate you.
GOLLUM: Where would you be without me? I saved us. It was me. We survived because of me.
JOE LETTERI: Ten years later when we had to bring Gollum back for The Hobbit,
we had had, in the meantime, experience working with lots of other characters,
so we were able to develop, now, proper muscle systems,
proper skeletal systems, proper facial expressions.
A lot of research into the look of how light is transported in the eyes and the skin and hair.
To really get that detail working properly, we realised that what we really had to do
was study the way muscles really work in the human body, how they attach to all the joints,
how bundles of muscle fibres are constantly firing off in opposition to each other and in support of each other
when a person is moving and therefore we wanted to see that when a character was moving.
And so we've developed a new system that we call Tissue which allows us to really simulate
all the muscles and movement that's happening from the skeleton outward to the skin.
And with a character like Gollum, where he has basically very little clothing on, you can see all of that movement.
So, if you really look, you can perceive the ribs and the muscles all moving under the skin as he performs.
Gollum as a CG character needed to have this believability, this fleshiness that you see
when you look at humans either in person or on screen.
So, I encountered a technique called subsurface scattering that I thought was really the basis
of what we needed to solve to get believable looking characters.
For The Hobbit, we were able to bring out a new generation of the subsurface scattering technique
that if you look closely in the film, you can really now see the pores, the wrinkles, the fine skin creasing,
everything that happens in the skin at a detailed level when you're watching Gollum perform.
And where you really notice all these things come together in a character like Gollum especially
is in the eyes because the eyes are just these great spheres that absorb all the light that come into them.
I was really happy with what we saw of Gollum in The Hobbit.
I mean I thought he's a great character. It was always compelling.
It was always interesting and Gollum as a character I still find very engaging.
I just enjoy watching him.
GOLLUM: What has he got in his nasty little pocketses? He stole it.