Andy Serkis has been honing his directing skills heading the second unit on the upcoming The Hobbit movies. Now he’s planning to take the main director’s chair, as THR reports he’s set to helm a performance capture adaptation of the George Orwell classic Animal Farm.
The film is being produced by The Imaginarium, the performance capture studio that Andy Serkis and producer Jonathan Cavendish formed in 2011. Here’s what Andy Serkis had to say about the project, “I think we found a rather fresh way of looking at it. It is definitely using performance capture but we are using an amalgamation of filming styles to create the environments. We are in proof of concept stage at the moment, designing characters and experimenting on our stage with the designs. It is quite a wide canvas at the moment 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 key frame animation or puppeteering parts of animals. We are in an experimental phase; it’s terribly exciting.
“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.”
Serkis is also expected to act in the movie. However don’t expect Animal Farm until 2015 at the earliest, as Serkis has promotion of The Hobbit and his role as Caesart in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to slot in before he heads to the Orwell classic.