Andy Serkis made his name performing the role of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, but he has since worked as Jackson’s second-unit director on The Hobbit and formed his own performance-capture studio, The Imaginarium, which plans on making a new version of Animal Farm:
I think we found a rather fresh way of looking at it,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It is definitely using performance capture, but we are using an amalgamation of filming styles to create the environmments.
“We are in proof-of-concept stage at the moment, designing characters and experimenting on our stage with the designs,” he continues. “It is quite a wide canvas as to how much and how far we can take performance capture with quadrupeds and how much we will be using facial [capture]. We are not discounting the use of keyframe animation or puppeteering parts of animals. We are in an experimental phase; it’s terribly exciting.”
On the storytelling, Serkis says: “We’re keeping it fable-istic and [aimed at] a family audience. We are not going to handle the politics in a heavy-handed fashion. It is going to be emotionally centered in a way that I don’t think has been seen before. The point of view that we take will be slightly different to how it is normally portrayed and the characters, We are examining this in a new light.”
A family-friendly version of Animal Farm?
Trotsky will come back and lead a rebellion against Stalin and they’ll all live happily thereafter.
See? Easy.