To millions of fans across the globe, actor Andy Serkis is a man they probably wouldn't recognize if he came up and talked to them. And yet the 43 year-old, London-based actor is one of the most influential actors of the past decade for his groundbreaking work in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong. Working with director Peter Jackson on all four of those film projects, Serkis used WETA Digital's cutting-edge technology to bring his actions and voice to completely digital characters. Although digital, these characters managed to resonate emotion and depth not seen before on the big screen.

Now Serkis has turned his attention to interactive entertainment, working with developer Ninja Theory and Sony Computer Entertainment to bring a virtual cast of characters to life. Blending traditional real-life acting with state-of-the-art motion-capture technology, Serkis oversaw the game's cinematic direction.

Nina Kristensen, co-founder of Ninja Theory, said that Serkis' journey to games happened completely by accident. The brother of Tameem Antoniades, creative director at Ninja Theory, happened to be doing Serkis' mortgage.

"We had fantasized about working with Andy," said Kristensen. "He's the most accomplished CGI actor in the world today. Midway through the mortgage we showed Andy what we were working on via a laptop computer and he liked what he saw. Andy is not only playing King Bohan, the game's villain, he was also our dramatic director. He has so much expertise, he was able to help the other actors and build up their characters in a motion-capture situation."

Heavenly Sword™ provided several firsts for Serkis, including his first foray into capturing facial and body animation together. In King Kong, body and facial CG was done separately. For Heavenly Sword™, Serkis and the other actors did body and facial mo-cap simultaneously while Ninja Theory recorded their dialogue. It was just like performing in theater, save for the tight spandex suits and mo-cap balls.

"We're striving to create the best facial performance ever seen in a game," said Serkis in a video interview with Sony Computer Entertainment. "This is capturing performance."

How these performances were captured was another first for the game. When he wasn't interacting with the actors as King Bohan, Serkis was directing as many as five actors interacting with each other in full mo-cap gear in the studio. Kristensen said the team didn't have to go back and tidy up facework or overdub anything or match stuff together. They simply took the best take each time and translated it into the game.

"I do see it as a first step in a long journey of a new dramatic art form," continued Serkis. "Up until PLAYSTATION®3, we've not been able to represent characters realistically. If this desire to create a new direction in gaming is to be successful it all has to be based around the emotional engagement of actors and performers and the characters they're playing."

Because he came aboard the project early on, Serkis was involved in the early stages of the character development, casting and rehearsal. Kristensen said he personally chose each of the actors for the game's cast of characters, which includes Steven Berkoff, Richard Ridings, Anna Torv, Lydia Baksh, and Race Davies.

"When you're directing and creating a world in the digital realm there are no restrictions," said Serkis. "The wonderful thing about motion-capture is how liberating it is for actors because you're allowed to go anywhere. Digital characters don't exist without the soul of the actor bringing it to life."

Kristensen said that before performing the mo-cap at Peter Jackson's WETA in New Zealand, the actors sat in a circle and performed the entire game for each other, just like theater. She said he also really got into the evil King Bohan character, going as far as to research dictators for the role.

"Andy has such a wonderful, powerful voice, and he's very funny," said Kristensen. "He really brought the character to life."

Ninja Theory worked closely with WETA to couple these strong performances with advanced facial-capture techniques.

"We worked with them to translate the facial performances of the actors to PS3™," said Kristensen. "We've broken new ground there, too. The whole set-up we had was something they had never done before. They had the technology but we worked with them to build it up so we could capture these performances. We had some ideas of how we wanted to do it and they added some ideas, as well. We collaborated and went from there."

Kristensen said Serkis was instrumental in this collaboration, and as an actor who's suited up before, he knew that working with other actors on stage is much easier than trying to act alone. In Heavenly Sword™, unlike his most memorable recent film collaborations, the playing field was even because all of the game's characters are digital.

Having experienced the advances in motion-capture first-hand over the years, the actor-- as a director in Heavenly Sword™, was able to offer guidance to his cast.

"He has so much expertise, he was able to help the other actors and build up their characters in a motion-capture situation," said Kristensen.

For the game development team at Ninja Theory, working with Serkis brought the experience full circle.

"We're always looking at all of the big beautiful movies that are epic in scale like Lord of the Rings as inspiration for Heavenly Sword," said Kristensen. "The whole game is about beauty and life in a really brutal environment and we want you to feel special and powerful all of the time and we tried to use the cinematics to emphasize that."

With the leaps that WETA and PlayStation® made with Heavenly Sword™, future movies and games will bring digital characters to life in new ways. The gap between games and films continues to narrow. This new technology has also resulted in Serkis logging time playing Heavenly Sword™ on his PLAYSTATION®3.

As for what's next for the actor, he'll appear as himself, sans any motion-capture suits, in the films: Freezing Time, the story of Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and Inkheart, an adaptation of a fantasy novel by Cornelia Funke.