I AM GEORGE WALKER BUSH, SON OF THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH, AND CURRENTLY SERVING AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOU BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT MET NEITHER IN PERSON NOR BY CORRESPONDENCE. I CAME TO KNOW OF YOU IN MY SEARCH FOR A RELIABLE AND REPUTABLE PERSON TO HANDLE A VERY CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS TRANSACTION, WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO AN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.
I AM WRITING YOU IN ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE PRIMARILY TO SEEK YOUR ASSISTANCE IN ACQUIRING OIL FUNDS THAT ARE PRESENTLY TRAPPED IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ. MY PARTNERS AND I SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE IN COMPLETING A TRANSACTION BEGUN BY MY FATHER, WHO HAS LONG BEEN ACTIVELY ENGAGED IN THE EXTRACTION OF PETROLEUM IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND BRAVELY SERVED HIS COUNTRY AS DIRECTOR OF THE UNITED STATES CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.
IN THE DECADE OF THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES, MY FATHER, THEN VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, SOUGHT TO WORK WITH THE GOOD OFFICES OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ TO REGAIN LOST OIL REVENUE SOURCES IN THE NEIGHBORING ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN. THIS UNSUCCESSFUL VENTURE WAS SOON FOLLOWED BY A FALLING OUT WITH HIS IRAQI PARTNER, WHO SOUGHT TO ACQUIRE ADDITIONAL OIL REVENUE SOURCES IN THE NEIGHBORING EMIRATE OF KUWAIT, A WHOLLY-OWNED U.S.-BRITISH SUBSIDIARY.
MY FATHER RE-SECURED THE PETROLEUM ASSETS OF KUWAIT IN 1991 AT A COST OF SIXTY-ONE BILLION U.S. DOLLARS ($61,000,000,000). OUT OF THAT COST, THIRTY-SIX BILLION DOLLARS ($36,000,000,000) WERE SUPPLIED BY HIS PARTNERS IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA AND OTHER PERSIAN GULF MONARCHIES, AND SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS ($16,000,000,000) BY GERMAN AND JAPANESE PARTNERS. BUT MY FATHER'S FORMER IRAQI BUSINESS PARTNER REMAINED IN CONTROL OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ AND ITS PETROLEUM RESERVES.
MY FAMILY IS CALLING FOR YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE IN FUNDING THE REMOVAL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ AND ACQUIRING THE PETROLEUM ASSETS OF HIS COUNTRY, AS COMPENSATION FOR THE COSTS OF REMOVING HIM FROM POWER. UNFORTUNATELY, OUR PARTNERS FROM 1991 ARE NOT WILLING TO SHOULDER THE BURDEN OF THIS NEW VENTURE, WHICH IN ITS UPCOMING PHASE MAY COST THE SUM OF 100 BILLION TO 200 BILLION DOLLARS ($100,000,000,000 - $200,000,000,000), BOTH IN THE INITIAL ACQUISITION AND IN LONG-TERM MANAGEMENT.
WITHOUT THE FUNDS FROM OUR 1991 PARTNERS, WE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ACQUIRE THE OIL REVENUE TRAPPED WITHIN IRAQ. THAT IS WHY MY FAMILY AND OUR COLLEAGUES ARE URGENTLY SEEKING YOUR GRACIOUS ASSISTANCE. OUR DISTINGUISHED COLLEAGUES IN THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION INCLUDE THE SITTING VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, RICHARD CHENEY, WHO IS AN ORIGINAL PARTNER IN THE IRAQ VENTURE AND FORMER HEAD OF THE HALLIBURTON OIL COMPANY, AND CONDOLEEZA RICE, WHOSE PROFESSIONAL DEDICATION TO THE VENTURE WAS DEMONSTRATED IN THE NAMING OF A CHEVRON OIL TANKER AFTER HER.
I WOULD BESEECH YOU TO TRANSFER A SUM EQUALING TEN TO TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT (10-25 %) OF YOUR YEARLY INCOME TO OUR ACCOUNT TO AID IN THIS IMPORTANT VENTURE. THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL FUNCTION AS OUR TRUSTED INTERMEDIARY. I PROPOSE THAT YOU MAKE THIS TRANSFER BEFORE THE FIFTEENTH (15TH) OF THE MONTH OF APRIL.
I KNOW THAT A TRANSACTION OF THIS MAGNITUDE WOULD MAKE ANYONE APPREHENSIVE AND WORRIED. BUT I AM ASSURING YOU THAT ALL WILL BE WELL AT THE END OF THE DAY. A BOLD STEP TAKEN SHALL NOT BE REGRETTED, I ASSURE YOU. PLEASE DO BE INFORMED THAT THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION IS 100% LEGAL. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO CO-OPERATE IN THIS TRANSACTION, PLEASE CONTACT OUR INTERMEDIARY REPRESENTATIVES TO FURTHER DISCUSS THE MATTER.
I PRAY THAT YOU UNDERSTAND OUR PLIGHT. MY FAMILY AND OUR COLLEAGUES WILL BE FOREVER GRATEFUL. PLEASE REPLY IN STRICT CONFIDENCE TO THE CONTACT NUMBERS BELOW.
The nurses may not be as skilled in diagnosis and treatment of common maladies, but they're definitely more skilled in the fine art of pleasuring men with their mouths.
Hollywood is buzzing about the special effects team that animated Gollum in 'The Lord of the Rings' and the actor who gave him a soul.
By P.J. Huffstutter and Alex Pham, Times Staff Writers
After a recent Beverly Hills screening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences walked out of the three-hour epic buzzing about "him."
Not actor Viggo Mortensen, who plays the hunky, sword-wielding Aragorn. Not Elijah Wood, cast as the diminutive, ring-bearing hero Frodo. Instead, the chatter focused on Gollum, the wheezing, lisping wretch who plays Frodo's foil.
What a stunning performance. An Oscar contender. He's just great!
Technically, Gollum is not a "he," but an "it" -- an agglomeration of 1s and 0s that required six years of research, scores of computer programmers and countless cycles of processing power to make the animated amphibious creature as believable as human actors.
The key, though, was a human actor -- a classically trained Shakespearean stage player named Andy Serkis whose face never appears on-screen, but nonetheless infuses Gollum with enough sadness and pain to make him perhaps the most believable computer-generated character in a movie.
Animated film characters have mingled on-screen with live actors since Gene Kelly danced with Jerry the Mouse in 1945's "Anchors Aweigh." And animators long have been able to squeeze a response out of audiences -- whether it's the tearful death of Bambi's mother or the fearful rampage of the Tyrannosaurus rex in "Jurassic Park."
Yet despite the advances made by powerful computers in animation, most characters have never felt like anything but special effects novelties to humans adept at distinguishing life from lifelike.
Gollum's debut in "The Two Towers" marks the strongest marriage to date of technology and art in moviemaking. Already, Hollywood is talking about Academy Award nominations both for the team that gave Gollum life and the actor who gave him a soul.
"What's the difference between John Hurt wearing a latex mask in 'The Elephant Man' and Andy Serkis wearing a pixel mask of Gollum now?" asked Russell Schwartz, president of domestic marketing for New Line Cinema, which releases the movie Wednesday. "There's no difference. They're both human."
Making Gollum believable was the biggest technical and artistic challenge for Peter Jackson, who directed "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. In the J.R.R. Tolkien series on which the movies are based, Gollum is a central figure, a Hobbit disfigured and driven mad by the power of the One Ring.
"Peter's biggest fear, even back in the earliest days, was that audiences would not think of Gollum as a 'he,' " said Lulu Zezza, a former production supervisor on the "Lord of the Rings" series.
"Peter thought the success of these movies hinged on Gollum being real, being believable," she said. "If he missed on Gollum, if he didn't create the hugely dimensional character that he is in the books, the movies would fail."
The burden fell to Serkis, known for his leading roles in "King Lear" and "Macbeth" at London's Royal Court Theater. When he met with Jackson and co-producer and writer Fran Walsh in London in the late 1990s, the actor thought he was trying out for a voice-over job.
"My thought was, 'Why can't my agent get me up for a decent part?' " Serkis said.
The job was quickly clarified. Serkis flew to New Zealand and, for nearly 18 months, joined the rest of the cast in principal photography. That alone was unusual.
When animated characters appear in movies, they are generally added after the fact by technicians and artists. A crew member may read lines or go through the motions to give actors a point of reference. But for director Jackson, there was never a question of using someone other than the person cast in the role of Gollum.
That decision added time and money to the project, but Jackson's reasoning was that stunt people and crew members don't have the same ability as actors to speak with their bodies and convey emotion through something as simple as a stare. Serkis' performances during the original shoot became the foundation of what audiences see on screen.
Each scene that included Gollum was shot at least twice during principal photography, when most of the film is shot. The first time was with Serkis in front of the camera with his fellow actors so they could create an emotional energy and give key data to the lighting and animation teams.
On the second round, Serkis stepped off-camera and the scene was reshot, giving the effects crew a "clean" pass of the scene and space to put in the digital creature.
As the rest of the cast returned home, Serkis stayed in New Zealand and donned a motion-capture suit, acting out for the third time every scene in front of a blank screen.
The suit looks like a wetsuit fitted with dozens of sensors tied to a computer.
When Serkis moved, an electronic skeleton parroted each motion precisely.
The monitoring also covered his face, which was dotted like a pox. Each twitch, smile or grimace was recorded digitally.
During the process Jackson made a decision that threw everything into chaos: Gollum should resemble Serkis.
The edict came as a shock. Artists at Weta Digital had spent years laboring over Gollum's look, creating so many statues of the emaciated being that they filled one room and threatened to spill into the hallway.
Scrambling to satisfy Jackson, mounds of clay were carved to marry Serkis' face with the froglike appearance of Gollum. One day, Richard Taylor, head of the practical effects house Weta Workshop, brought a sculpture to Jackson for review.
When Jackson said the ears were too pointy, Taylor reached for a bread knife and hacked down the tips. Moments later, Serkis entered the room.
"It was like seeing my father and my son in the same face," Serkis said. "It was uncanny."
The sculpted body and face were scanned into the computer to create a three-dimensional map that became the canvas artists used to link Serkis' recorded expressions to Gollum's face. Serkis' smile became Gollum's.
Then, it was time to test the system. Serkis and the animators spent days together in darkened rooms studying a monitor, pretending they were sitting in stadium seats at the local multiplex. What would movie-watchers believe? What flaws would they spot?
"In the human brain, we are very sensitive to human faces," said Henrik Wann Jensen, an assistant professor of computer science at UC San Diego, who has done extensive research in the process of creating realistic human skin. The production team relied on Jensen's theories in part to develop the look of Gollum's skin.
"If you look at animals, you can distinguish between a few of them," Jensen said. "But our brain is encoded to remember hundreds and hundreds of human faces."
In judging digital characters, one of the first things audiences look for is emotion, said Rob Coleman, animation director at visual effects giant Industrial Light & Magic.
"Do I believe in the character?" Coleman said. "Is there spark behind the eyes? Can I feel that this character is thinking?"
To get an audience to answer yes, animators have to re-create a mind-numbing amount of detail.
"When you talk with someone, you can tell whether they're engaged or distracted," Coleman said. "Just a flicker of muscle and we can tell whether someone is telling the truth."
As for movement, gestures aren't the only things that must be re-created. Animators also have to duplicate tiny tremors, twitches and tics.
To make a character believable requires "quick twitchy movements [that are] not essential to the performance. It's a twist of the mouth, a flicker of the eyes," said Steve Sullivan, research and development director at ILM. "They're not essential, but they make you realize that the character is in an environment and is reacting to the world beyond the camera."
One of the biggest tests of this subtlety is seen during Gollum's three-minute monologue, where the evil creature created by the One Ring has an impassioned debate with his gentle side -- the being known as Smeagol. It is a key point in the film, and a scene where the virtual character literally stands alone in front of the camera.
Back and forth, back and forth, the debate rages. At first, it appears that there are two creatures: The manic Gollum, whose face crinkles with malevolence, and the gentle Smeagol, whose slow movements seem weighed with sadness.
Then, the camera pans back, revealing that the two creatures are actually one. Gollum's eyes widen. His chest heaves.
Suddenly, he freezes.
For Serkis, the key to making Gollum human was capturing this sense of stillness -- to convey emotion and movement, while remaining absolutely motionless.
"On stage, you use movements to build energy and use stillness to draw the audience in," Serkis said.
"When I was on stage [against the blue screen], the same theories applied as if I was on stage in London."
Animators, though, work in a world of movement. To be still is to be flat, uninteresting or worse -- clearly fake. One of the hardest aspects of the role, Serkis said, was thinking like an animator.
"By the end, the animators were more my family than the acting community," Serkis said.
Re:When all that's noticed is the downtime...
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: -1
Yo yo, yo what about that Nina Fefferman - she worked there too, right? If you like freaky goth white chicks, she ain't bad.
I wish he'd talk less about his faggoty Vermont trains and more about his girlfriend whom he can't satisfy with his little stub.
When my faction prevails in Washington, Amtrak is going to shut Vermont's trains the fuck down and this guy will have to go back to installing Debian for the 82389th time even though it doesn't work with his quality Windows-only hardware.
Frankly, with all the terrorist threats against our railroads, these rail "enthusiasts" need to be under strong surveillance anyway.
I recommend that the Department of Homeland Security place an X10 camera in this ho's shower.
The X10 camera, as we learn from Slashdot's banner ads, is an indispensible tool of security against communist Canadian terrorists.
New England, eh? I've noticed that your clam chowder bears a strong resemblance to my semen. Why is that? Did the Puritan men who founded your area invent it as an outlet for their homosexual urges?
If you want to sell Windows in Europe you have to get rid of that IE
I can't wait the day when Europeans set up a new computer for the Internet by using the command-line ftp client to connect to Netscape or Microsoft and spend an hour or more downloading the browser installer. Better yet, maybe Microsoft won't be allowed to "bundle" the FTP client either, so Europeans will have to go out and BUY a browser for God knows how much.
My brother & sister's son has been using this setup for over a year now.
Your brother and sister's son? So would you say that DirectPC is the ISP of choice for inbred people? Also, how come your sister chose your brother over you? Or did you get another sister?
Slashdot Mirror
IMMEDIATE ATTENTION NEEDED
: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
FROM: GEORGE WALKER BUSH
DEAR SIR / MADAM,
I AM GEORGE WALKER BUSH, SON OF THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH, AND CURRENTLY SERVING AS PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOU BECAUSE WE HAVE
NOT MET NEITHER IN PERSON NOR BY CORRESPONDENCE. I CAME TO KNOW OF YOU IN MY
SEARCH FOR A RELIABLE AND REPUTABLE PERSON TO HANDLE A VERY CONFIDENTIAL
BUSINESS TRANSACTION, WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO
AN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.
I AM WRITING YOU IN ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE PRIMARILY TO SEEK YOUR ASSISTANCE IN
ACQUIRING OIL FUNDS THAT ARE PRESENTLY TRAPPED IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ. MY
PARTNERS AND I SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE IN COMPLETING A TRANSACTION BEGUN BY
MY FATHER, WHO HAS LONG BEEN ACTIVELY ENGAGED IN THE EXTRACTION OF PETROLEUM
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND BRAVELY SERVED HIS COUNTRY AS DIRECTOR
OF THE UNITED STATES CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.
IN THE DECADE OF THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES, MY FATHER, THEN VICE-PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, SOUGHT TO WORK WITH THE GOOD OFFICES OF THE
PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ TO REGAIN LOST OIL REVENUE SOURCES IN THE
NEIGHBORING ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN. THIS UNSUCCESSFUL VENTURE WAS SOON
FOLLOWED BY A FALLING OUT WITH HIS IRAQI PARTNER, WHO SOUGHT TO ACQUIRE
ADDITIONAL OIL REVENUE SOURCES IN THE NEIGHBORING EMIRATE OF KUWAIT, A
WHOLLY-OWNED U.S.-BRITISH SUBSIDIARY.
MY FATHER RE-SECURED THE PETROLEUM ASSETS OF KUWAIT IN 1991 AT A COST OF
SIXTY-ONE BILLION U.S. DOLLARS ($61,000,000,000). OUT OF THAT COST,
THIRTY-SIX BILLION DOLLARS ($36,000,000,000) WERE SUPPLIED BY HIS PARTNERS
IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA AND OTHER PERSIAN GULF MONARCHIES, AND
SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS ($16,000,000,000) BY GERMAN AND JAPANESE PARTNERS.
BUT MY FATHER'S FORMER IRAQI BUSINESS PARTNER REMAINED IN CONTROL OF THE
REPUBLIC OF IRAQ AND ITS PETROLEUM RESERVES.
MY FAMILY IS CALLING FOR YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE IN FUNDING THE REMOVAL OF
THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ AND ACQUIRING THE PETROLEUM ASSETS OF
HIS COUNTRY, AS COMPENSATION FOR THE COSTS OF REMOVING HIM FROM POWER.
UNFORTUNATELY, OUR PARTNERS FROM 1991 ARE NOT WILLING TO SHOULDER THE BURDEN
OF THIS NEW VENTURE, WHICH IN ITS UPCOMING PHASE MAY COST THE SUM OF 100
BILLION TO 200 BILLION DOLLARS ($100,000,000,000 - $200,000,000,000), BOTH
IN THE INITIAL ACQUISITION AND IN LONG-TERM MANAGEMENT.
WITHOUT THE FUNDS FROM OUR 1991 PARTNERS, WE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ACQUIRE
THE OIL REVENUE TRAPPED WITHIN IRAQ. THAT IS WHY MY FAMILY AND OUR
COLLEAGUES ARE URGENTLY SEEKING YOUR GRACIOUS ASSISTANCE. OUR DISTINGUISHED
COLLEAGUES IN THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION INCLUDE THE SITTING VICE-PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, RICHARD CHENEY, WHO IS AN ORIGINAL PARTNER
IN THE IRAQ VENTURE AND FORMER HEAD OF THE HALLIBURTON OIL COMPANY, AND
CONDOLEEZA RICE, WHOSE PROFESSIONAL DEDICATION TO THE VENTURE WAS
DEMONSTRATED IN THE NAMING OF A CHEVRON OIL TANKER AFTER HER.
I WOULD BESEECH YOU TO TRANSFER A SUM EQUALING TEN TO TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT
(10-25 %) OF YOUR YEARLY INCOME TO OUR ACCOUNT TO AID IN THIS IMPORTANT
VENTURE. THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL
FUNCTION AS OUR TRUSTED INTERMEDIARY. I PROPOSE THAT YOU MAKE THIS TRANSFER
BEFORE THE FIFTEENTH (15TH) OF THE MONTH OF APRIL.
I KNOW THAT A TRANSACTION OF THIS MAGNITUDE WOULD MAKE ANYONE APPREHENSIVE
AND WORRIED. BUT I AM ASSURING YOU THAT ALL WILL BE WELL AT THE END OF THE
DAY. A BOLD STEP TAKEN SHALL NOT BE REGRETTED, I ASSURE YOU. PLEASE DO BE
INFORMED THAT THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION IS 100% LEGAL. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO
CO-OPERATE IN THIS TRANSACTION, PLEASE CONTACT OUR INTERMEDIARY
REPRESENTATIVES TO FURTHER DISCUSS THE MATTER.
I PRAY THAT YOU UNDERSTAND OUR PLIGHT. MY FAMILY AND OUR COLLEAGUES WILL BE
FOREVER GRATEFUL. PLEASE REPLY IN STRICT CONFIDENCE TO THE CONTACT NUMBERS
BELOW.
SINCERELY WITH WARM REGARDS,
GEORGE WALKER BUSH
Pre-teen wasteland!
Pre-teen wasteland!
Pre-teen wasteland, oh yeah!
Pre-teen wasteland!
They're all VIRGINS!
The nurses may not be as skilled in diagnosis and treatment of common maladies, but they're definitely more skilled in the fine art of pleasuring men with their mouths.
I hope Bin Laden sinks those infidel ships as soon as you dig them up. We kicked your ass in the 1980 ALCS and we'll do it again.
Putting a Human Face on 'It'
Hollywood is buzzing about the special effects team that animated Gollum in 'The Lord of the Rings' and the actor who gave him a soul.
By P.J. Huffstutter and Alex Pham, Times Staff Writers
After a recent Beverly Hills screening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences walked out of the three-hour epic buzzing about "him."
Not actor Viggo Mortensen, who plays the hunky, sword-wielding Aragorn. Not Elijah Wood, cast as the diminutive, ring-bearing hero Frodo. Instead, the chatter focused on Gollum, the wheezing, lisping wretch who plays Frodo's foil.
What a stunning performance. An Oscar contender. He's just great!
Technically, Gollum is not a "he," but an "it" -- an agglomeration of 1s and 0s that required six years of research, scores of computer programmers and countless cycles of processing power to make the animated amphibious creature as believable as human actors.
The key, though, was a human actor -- a classically trained Shakespearean stage player named Andy Serkis whose face never appears on-screen, but nonetheless infuses Gollum with enough sadness and pain to make him perhaps the most believable computer-generated character in a movie.
Animated film characters have mingled on-screen with live actors since Gene Kelly danced with Jerry the Mouse in 1945's "Anchors Aweigh." And animators long have been able to squeeze a response out of audiences -- whether it's the tearful death of Bambi's mother or the fearful rampage of the Tyrannosaurus rex in "Jurassic Park."
Yet despite the advances made by powerful computers in animation, most characters have never felt like anything but special effects novelties to humans adept at distinguishing life from lifelike.
Gollum's debut in "The Two Towers" marks the strongest marriage to date of technology and art in moviemaking. Already, Hollywood is talking about Academy Award nominations both for the team that gave Gollum life and the actor who gave him a soul.
"What's the difference between John Hurt wearing a latex mask in 'The Elephant Man' and Andy Serkis wearing a pixel mask of Gollum now?" asked Russell Schwartz, president of domestic marketing for New Line Cinema, which releases the movie Wednesday. "There's no difference. They're both human."
Making Gollum believable was the biggest technical and artistic challenge for Peter Jackson, who directed "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. In the J.R.R. Tolkien series on which the movies are based, Gollum is a central figure, a Hobbit disfigured and driven mad by the power of the One Ring.
"Peter's biggest fear, even back in the earliest days, was that audiences would not think of Gollum as a 'he,' " said Lulu Zezza, a former production supervisor on the "Lord of the Rings" series.
"Peter thought the success of these movies hinged on Gollum being real, being believable," she said. "If he missed on Gollum, if he didn't create the hugely dimensional character that he is in the books, the movies would fail."
The burden fell to Serkis, known for his leading roles in "King Lear" and "Macbeth" at London's Royal Court Theater. When he met with Jackson and co-producer and writer Fran Walsh in London in the late 1990s, the actor thought he was trying out for a voice-over job.
"My thought was, 'Why can't my agent get me up for a decent part?' " Serkis said.
The job was quickly clarified. Serkis flew to New Zealand and, for nearly 18 months, joined the rest of the cast in principal photography. That alone was unusual.
When animated characters appear in movies, they are generally added after the fact by technicians and artists. A crew member may read lines or go through the motions to give actors a point of reference. But for director Jackson, there was never a question of using someone other than the person cast in the role of Gollum.
That decision added time and money to the project, but Jackson's reasoning was that stunt people and crew members don't have the same ability as actors to speak with their bodies and convey emotion through something as simple as a stare. Serkis' performances during the original shoot became the foundation of what audiences see on screen.
Each scene that included Gollum was shot at least twice during principal photography, when most of the film is shot. The first time was with Serkis in front of the camera with his fellow actors so they could create an emotional energy and give key data to the lighting and animation teams.
On the second round, Serkis stepped off-camera and the scene was reshot, giving the effects crew a "clean" pass of the scene and space to put in the digital creature.
As the rest of the cast returned home, Serkis stayed in New Zealand and donned a motion-capture suit, acting out for the third time every scene in front of a blank screen.
The suit looks like a wetsuit fitted with dozens of sensors tied to a computer.
When Serkis moved, an electronic skeleton parroted each motion precisely.
The monitoring also covered his face, which was dotted like a pox. Each twitch, smile or grimace was recorded digitally.
During the process Jackson made a decision that threw everything into chaos: Gollum should resemble Serkis.
The edict came as a shock. Artists at Weta Digital had spent years laboring over Gollum's look, creating so many statues of the emaciated being that they filled one room and threatened to spill into the hallway.
Scrambling to satisfy Jackson, mounds of clay were carved to marry Serkis' face with the froglike appearance of Gollum. One day, Richard Taylor, head of the practical effects house Weta Workshop, brought a sculpture to Jackson for review.
When Jackson said the ears were too pointy, Taylor reached for a bread knife and hacked down the tips. Moments later, Serkis entered the room.
"It was like seeing my father and my son in the same face," Serkis said. "It was uncanny."
The sculpted body and face were scanned into the computer to create a three-dimensional map that became the canvas artists used to link Serkis' recorded expressions to Gollum's face. Serkis' smile became Gollum's.
Then, it was time to test the system. Serkis and the animators spent days together in darkened rooms studying a monitor, pretending they were sitting in stadium seats at the local multiplex. What would movie-watchers believe? What flaws would they spot?
"In the human brain, we are very sensitive to human faces," said Henrik Wann Jensen, an assistant professor of computer science at UC San Diego, who has done extensive research in the process of creating realistic human skin. The production team relied on Jensen's theories in part to develop the look of Gollum's skin.
"If you look at animals, you can distinguish between a few of them," Jensen said. "But our brain is encoded to remember hundreds and hundreds of human faces."
In judging digital characters, one of the first things audiences look for is emotion, said Rob Coleman, animation director at visual effects giant Industrial Light & Magic.
"Do I believe in the character?" Coleman said. "Is there spark behind the eyes? Can I feel that this character is thinking?"
To get an audience to answer yes, animators have to re-create a mind-numbing amount of detail.
"When you talk with someone, you can tell whether they're engaged or distracted," Coleman said. "Just a flicker of muscle and we can tell whether someone is telling the truth."
As for movement, gestures aren't the only things that must be re-created. Animators also have to duplicate tiny tremors, twitches and tics.
To make a character believable requires "quick twitchy movements [that are] not essential to the performance. It's a twist of the mouth, a flicker of the eyes," said Steve Sullivan, research and development director at ILM. "They're not essential, but they make you realize that the character is in an environment and is reacting to the world beyond the camera."
One of the biggest tests of this subtlety is seen during Gollum's three-minute monologue, where the evil creature created by the One Ring has an impassioned debate with his gentle side -- the being known as Smeagol. It is a key point in the film, and a scene where the virtual character literally stands alone in front of the camera.
Back and forth, back and forth, the debate rages. At first, it appears that there are two creatures: The manic Gollum, whose face crinkles with malevolence, and the gentle Smeagol, whose slow movements seem weighed with sadness.
Then, the camera pans back, revealing that the two creatures are actually one. Gollum's eyes widen. His chest heaves.
Suddenly, he freezes.
For Serkis, the key to making Gollum human was capturing this sense of stillness -- to convey emotion and movement, while remaining absolutely motionless.
"On stage, you use movements to build energy and use stillness to draw the audience in," Serkis said.
"When I was on stage [against the blue screen], the same theories applied as if I was on stage in London."
Animators, though, work in a world of movement. To be still is to be flat, uninteresting or worse -- clearly fake. One of the hardest aspects of the role, Serkis said, was thinking like an animator.
"By the end, the animators were more my family than the acting community," Serkis said.
Yo yo, yo what about that Nina Fefferman - she worked there too, right? If you like freaky goth white chicks, she ain't bad.
I wonder how americans think about the worlds top amount of dead children due to traffic overspeed in germany.
Americans tend to be more concerned about the more active roles Germany takes in killing its citizens.
He probably spent all his time sucking Paul Krugman's dick.
I wish he'd talk less about his faggoty Vermont trains and more about his girlfriend whom he can't satisfy with his little stub.
When my faction prevails in Washington, Amtrak is going to shut Vermont's trains the fuck down and this guy will have to go back to installing Debian for the 82389th time even though it doesn't work with his quality Windows-only hardware.
Frankly, with all the terrorist threats against our railroads, these rail "enthusiasts" need to be under strong surveillance anyway.
I recommend that the Department of Homeland Security place an X10 camera in this ho's shower.
The X10 camera, as we learn from Slashdot's banner ads, is an indispensible tool of security against communist Canadian terrorists.
If homosexuals couldn't go to work, that would be the end of Slashdot.
Will it run on Windows 98?
And as far as I know I have never seen an Indian throw away stuff just becoz it is old.
I guess they need to save their energy for throwing living women into fires just because their husbands are dead.
New England, eh? I've noticed that your clam chowder bears a strong resemblance to my semen. Why is that? Did the Puritan men who founded your area invent it as an outlet for their homosexual urges?
Does Linux still suck?
Breaking news: Slashdot now hosts soft porn!
If you want to sell Windows in Europe you have to get rid of that IE
I can't wait the day when Europeans set up a new computer for the Internet by using the command-line ftp client to connect to Netscape or Microsoft and spend an hour or more downloading the browser installer. Better yet, maybe Microsoft won't be allowed to "bundle" the FTP client either, so Europeans will have to go out and BUY a browser for God knows how much.
That'll teach them.
And, in my case, has sex with me more often than my wife does!
God I love being the boss.
Black hoes spend most of their time at my house.
Hey, anybody know where I can download the Serial # for the new Bon Jovi album?
Who's this Jennifer and why are my testicles not in her mouth?
Congratulations on explaining the joke. You fucking moron.
ma dick
You're telling a guy who needs "two more CS classes to finnish a BS" to learn about communication? I think he's doing just fine.
Let us remember the greatest Slashdot post of 9/11/2001!