Why ‘Better Man’ Became A ‘Passion Piece’ For Director Michael Gracey And VFX Supervisor Luke Millar
A week before the December 25 opening of Better Man, Paramount Pictures’s unusual rock music biopic loosely based on the life and times of U.K. rock star Robbie Williams, the Visual Effects Society (VES) hosted a special screening followed by a 38-minute discussion of how Wētā FX transformed the bad-boy British rock star into an anthropomorphic chimpanzee.
VES technology committee member Barbara Ford Grant emceed the event. Her guests included the film’s director-writer-producer Michael Gracey, who began his career in Australia as a digital effects artist at Animal Logic before embarking on a career in music videos. Joining Gracey on stage was the production’s visual effects supervisor, Luke Millar, whose career has notably included the simian armies of director Matt Reeves’ two Planet of the Apes films.
Following the screening, the moderator summarized the filmmakers’ task as having involved 600 crew, who tackled approximately 2,000 vfx shots, amassing 9.5 petabytes of data, to transform Robbie Williams into an ape, from ages 7 to 30.
Director Michael Gracey explained the film’s metaphor — portraying a pop star as an ape — sprang from his perceptions of the heightened reality of a movie musical, blended with an empathy with animals, and observation of Williams’ self-deprecating humor: “Rob referred to himself as a performing monkey.”
Without belaboring the intricacies of Wētā FX’s sophisticated on-set performance capture processes — honed over years from The Lord of the Rings creature Gollum, to the Planet of the Apes films, and beyond — Millar and Gracey explained the fundamentals of how they translated Williams’ swagger to a man-sized, bipedal ape.
Millar commented that Wētā FX had to adapt relatable human behavior to a simian character. To do so, Jonno Davies, a performer of similar build and stature to Williams, initiated the majority of the ape-man-Robbie’s scenes; Robbie Williams then matched his performance to Davies’ body language. Wētā FX then laid ‘Robbie-isms’ onto the simian character model, aiming to capture the essence of William’s wry smile and the pop star savvy. Gracey noted, animators would then add ape behavior beyond the physical capabilities of a human face, such as in the hyper-extension of the ape’s jaw for screams.
For Robbie’s singing scenes, music supervisor Jordan Carroll gave notes on mouth shapes to guide Wētā’s approach to mouth-shapes. The intimacy of some scenes required Davies to occasionally abandon his head-mounted facial camera, if ever it impeded the performance, leaving Wētā FX animators the task of animating from scratch without the benefit of on-set facial capture.
The filmmakers went into detail to explain one of the film’s most expansive musical numbers, an apparent ‘oner’ of unbroken dance choreography, which the production captured on location in London’s busiest commercial shopping boulevard, in Regents Street. Gracey related the process of extensive rehearsal, followed by four nights of shooting the scene in four sections designed to seamlessly blend with digital takeovers. The first attempt was a bust, when legal complications, and the death of Queen Elizabeth II, scuppered plans. Five months later, the filmmakers returned, and the sequence became a showstopper.
To stage Robbie Williams’ 2003 UK concert at Knebworth Festival, which attracted 125,000 fans to its opening, the filmmakers made use of 2,000 extras at a music venue in Belgrade, Serbia. Visual effects used ‘tech-vis’ to plan crowd replication, using repeated takes of the heaving masses enhanced where needed, but Millar noted that vfx focused on best efforts to follow Williams’ improvisational lead, making use of the frenetic energy of the scene. “The audience rocked out,” Gracey recalled.
Other concerts, including where Robbie sings ‘My Way’ at London’s Royal Albert Hall, were captured in a partial stadium set in Melbourne, which Wētā transformed. Cinematographer Erik Wilson’s use of dramatic lighting, and uncoated vintage lenses, with stage lamps flaring the lens, caused optical aberrations, which Millar noted were beautiful but challenging for Wētā FX compositors.
Gracey and Millar’s conversation recalled the technical versus creative challenges, and their creative energy. “This was a game-changer for me,” said Gracey, who noted how he and Millar adopted a policy not to obsess over single shots, but rather to reserve their vfx critiques for shots as they flowed in sequence. For Millar, this meant, “way less iterations on vfx shots, and kept the work flowing,” and gave cohesion to the work. “It became a passion piece for all the artists working on this film,” he said.
Gracey commented, “I’ll never work another way.”
Watch the entire video interview with Gracey and Millar HERE.
