When it was announced that Andy Serkis would take the helm of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, it's fair to say that the vast majority of fans expected the actor and filmmaker to bring his motion-capture expertise to the sequel. It just so happens that's not the case, as both Venom and Carnage are brought to life in the film primarily with CG.
"I’ve spent a considerable amount of my life playing a character with two sides to his personality," Serkis explains. "I knew that this film would be about how to free up Tom to imagine Venom’s presence. We knew it would not be helpful for him to act opposite a man in a suit, because Venom is a symbiote, coming out of him. We wanted to give Tom the freedom in his process to give the performance he wanted."
Despite that, Serkis still used his mo-cap experience "as a tool to find the physicality of the characters."
Tom Hardy's performance was ultimately key in how Venom was brought to life, but what about Carnage? He's a very different beast, and the director did use mo-cap early on in the process.
"Unlike Venom, Carnage didn’t necessarily have to be bipedal; he can move his tendrils in different ways," says Serkis. "I worked with a lot of dancers at the Imaginarium studio to find interesting ways of moving that character – as if we were taking Venom’s energy and displacing it and moving in really interesting, more psychologically driven, twisted ways. It was great to have that opportunity to work with performance capture to form a basis, to find a physical vocabulary for the way Carnage would be."
Hardy and Woody Harrelson may not have been decked out in mo-cap costumes for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, but it sounds like Serkis had no problem tapping into how best to portray these characters on screen. Visually, what we've seen thus far looks great, and it could be that motion capture simply doesn't suit these symbiotes as well as some other CG characters.
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