Making a Model
To create Gollum, the filmmakers went though six basic steps.

Step 1: Creating the Look
First, you decide what the character will look like. That's a collaborative process between artists, animators and the director. The Lord of the Rings team decided the shape of Gollum's face, his height, the amount and length of his hair, his outfit, and so on.

Filmmakers will tweak a character like Gollum over many months or years before getting to the final form you see in the movie. Gollum even changed slightly between the three Lord of the Rings movies, as animators learned new things and technology advanced.

Photo courtesy New Line Actor Andy Serkis, the actor who plays Gollum, with his computerized counterpart

Step 2: Putting it in the Computer
Once you have an idea what the character will look like, you have to "build" the character in the computer. In other words, you need to make a 3-D computer model. There are many ways to do this. In the case of Gollum, the special effects team at WETA Digital created a life-size sculpture and scanned it with a laser. The data from the laser scan gave them exact measurements for the computer model of Gollum.

Step 3: Building the Bones
After you get the body shape in the computer, you build a skeleton - an articulated framework for the model. You also add "muscles" so you can move all the different parts of the skeleton and the body. The skeleton of an animated character is a lot like the skeleton of a person or an animal -- if you move a bone in a certain direction, the part of the body attached to the bone moves with it. You can also think of the model as a marionette, made up of separate body pieces joined by hinges.

Photo courtesy New Line The computerized model of Gollum's face

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