When Andy Serkis first appeared as Gollum in The Two Towers, the whole world was stunned at how greatly he nailed the role, and more importantly perhaps, how good the corrupted little smeagol looked. That started the slowly-growing trend of mo-cap, while it had existed since the early nineties, it was only now that film-makers saw to what ends it could be utilized to. After the success of the Lord of the Rings, motion capture has been utilized in video-games and movies alike.
Before mo-cap, CGI would have painstaicingly hand-made, one polygon at the time, and while movies like Terminator 2 and Tron made huge leaps in the craft, it was Jurassic Park that made living, breathing CG-creatures a reality, emplying a sort of mo-cap device called a dinosaur input device:
The device would bring together stop-motion and computer graphics, with the animator animating the dinosaur on the screen by moving the device in the desired motions. This ensured the working-style was familiar to the animator, and prevented un-natural movement of the animation, something that plagues CG-fests to this day. But things have only moved forward since the earliest days of coputer animation in star wars.
But is motion capture the way to go? Smaug was nearly perfect in the Hobbit, Avatar broke every box-office record in thee world, and The adventures of Tintin: the secret of the Unicorn was a movie that happened that one time. (also King Kong used mo-cap, remember how it was over 3 and a half hours long? good times) Ever since Gollum, things have only gotten even better, directors only needed the technology to be perfected by someone. Now that more and more characters have gotten mo-capped, movies have gotten more immersive and actors have been able to give better performances now that they have something to interact with, rather than standing in an empty room, talkong into a microphone about things they couldnt see or touch. So maybe motion capture is the way to go, even with the problems it causes, like the animation being inconsistent when switching between captured and hand-animated footage.
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