Andy Serkis plans UK motion-capture studio

The actor, whose performances as Gollum and King Kong were created through motion capture, is to head his own studio specialising in the technique

Performance capture pioneer … Gollum made an international star of Andy Serkis. Photograph: Rex Features and Graham Jepson/WireImage.com

The actor Andy Serkis, who so memorably played Gollum and King Kong using performance capture, has announced the UK's first studio specialising in the technique.

As he told a recent British Screen Advisory Council discussion on working with digital film technology, Serkis caught the bug of "cyber-thespianism" working with Peter Jackson at his Weta studios in New Zealand, first on The Lord of the Rings trilogy and then on King Kong. He has since directed performance capture for two video games, one in America and one in New Zealand. That made him wonder why the same facility wasn't available in Britain, when so much of the original technology was developed out of Oxford and Cambridge.

Performance capture, also known as motion capture or mo-cap, is a technique of recording an actor's movements and expressions, and translating that into a computer-generated image. Actors wear blue Lycra suits covered in dots that are tracked by cameras and coverted into digital images. James Cameron used the technology to create his Na'vi in Avatar.

Serkis was the first actor to become famous for his performance capture work. He calls himself "a confirmed performance-capture-oholic". He recently played a mo-cap Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's Tintin, and will revisit his Gollum role in The Hobbit. He describes it as an "exciting and liberating" tool for actors, because it enables them to play any creature and allows them to make the character decisions rather than a committee of animators.

Serkis calls his studio concept the Imaginarium. He is in discussions with various partners, and would head the studio himself. He wants it to be used not only for film and video games, but also for live performances to create mo-cap creatures in ballets, rock concerts or even nightclubs. He also hopes it will become an academy where British writers, digital technicians and concept artists can meet, swap ideas and create new forms of entertainment.

"People come out of film schools not equipped with the skills for doing anything other than shooting kitchen sink dramas," he says. "We need to change our mindset, cross-fertilise our talent and encourage writers, directors and producers to think on a much larger scale."