A scene from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

In a coffee shop in Eagle Rock, north east Los Angeles, the barista looks up from her iPhone, startled. One of the customers is prowling around on all fours like an ape. He's holding arm extensions to mimic a gorilla's long-armed gait, and he's snorting and grunting as he goes. By the time he returns to his seat, it's not clear whether he's going to drink his mocha or start beating his chest.

''It's a really great workout,'' he says, suddenly snapping out of character. ''I'm actually thinking of marketing those arm extensions. All the guys I taught, they were shredded by the end of the movie.''

Of all the strange jobs in the film industry, Terry Notary, 46, might have the strangest: he's Hollywood's go-to ape-movement coach, the only one practising in the world. And it suits him. A former gymnast and Cirque du Soleil acrobat from Marin County, in California, he's small, strongly built and, when he sets his mouth just so, more than a little simian. He also has the energy of a kindergarten teacher, never just describing his work when he can leap from his chair and act it out. Being an ape, he says, is ''super fun''.

Terry Notary plays more than 100 primates in the film, and taught the actors and stuntmen how to move.

Notary's first ape-movement gig was on Tim Burton's version of Planet of the Apes, in 2001, in which he taught Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter (Roth was a star student, Bonham Carter less so). He then spent several years as movement coach for various superheroes such as the Silver Surfer, Superman and the X-Men, as well as the Na'vi people in the 2009 3D spectacular Avatar. But, in 2011, he returned to apes for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and now the sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And these apes are of another class entirely.

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''With the Tim Burton film, we used ape suits and make-up, it was completely different,'' he says. ''But Rise and Dawn are all mocap. It's a totally different way of working.''

By ''mocap'', Notary means motion-capture technology, a method most often associated with Andy Serkis, who plays Caesar, the ape leader, and who made his name as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. Serkis and Notary are the world's leading mocap performers: in Rise, they played all the apes between them, and in Dawn they play several too, though Notary trained five other actors as well.

''Every morning, they'd put this plastic mould on my face with 52 small reflective dots on it, in a standard pattern,'' he says. ''Then I'd have this helmet with a chinstrap, with a camera attached so it's pointing in my face at all times - you just have to learn to look right through it.

More here:
How to act like an ape