SooA Kim: Looking Outwards-05

I chose Joe Letteri who is the senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital in New Zealand and the Oscar-winning co-creator of Gollum on screen The Hobbit. I admire films where actors interact with CG characters because the process incorporates using motion capture on the actor, that will be playing the computer generated character, and uses VFX techniques to bring the character into life. Since the Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2002, the CG looks of Gollum’s character has been constantly analyzed and applied with more technical progression on CG tools, as in the Hobbit, 2012, Gollum looks more realistic in terms of his skin texture and muscle movement. To achieve more realistic CG character that is no different to a real actor, Joe Letteri and Weta Digital focused in depth on how muscles and skeleton joints work in an actual human body. One of the techniques that they developed was a tissue simulation and subsurface-scattering technique to render Gollum’s skin texture to give more translucency.