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The VFX of ‘Better Man’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Chimp

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In an era when sequels dominate the global box office, there are still studios and filmmakers willing to push the boundaries of storytelling beyond established franchises. Such is the case with Paramount Pictures and director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman), who set out to deliver Better Man, a biopic on British pop star Robbie Williams that features a CG version of the artist as a primate.

To avoid the movie coming across as just a gimmick, actor Jonno Davies was recruited to do the motion-capture performance and the CG protagonist was crafted by Wētā FX, an expert in this field that has done work on The Planet of the Apes, The Umbrella Academy and King Kong.

“With The Planet of the Apes, these characters are slowly evolving from chimps to become more humanlike, but they’re not human yet,” says Luke Millar, VFX supervisor at Wētā FX. “Whereas this one is right up the other end of the spectrum. Everything Robbie does in the film is essentially what a human does: He just has an ape representation.”

Better Man [Paramount Pictures]
Planet of the Ape: The team at Wētā FX created around 1,968 VFX shots for ‘Better Man,’ which depicts British pop star Robbie Williams as a gifted, working-class chimpanzee in a world of humans.

Three Stages of a Primate

In this lovingly crafted biopic, Williams appears as a child, teenager and adult. “We did have some younger actors helping us motion capture the young Robbie, but also we had Jonno throwing in some performances here and some references,” says Dave Clayton, animation supervisor at Wētā FX. “That was more of keyframe job. As a boy, he’s a showoff and cheeky but still has that insecurity which plagues him throughout his whole life. He later grows into a teen with much more false bravado. He’s trying to prove himself, mainly to his dad. When he matures, he suffers the pitfalls of fame, addiction, mental health issues, and is struggling up against that and his skyrocketing fame. We worked with this amazing footage from Jonno.

“That’s not to say we didn’t augment it. There are clips of Robbie everywhere throughout his life. We sourced little smiles, cheeky looks, little actions that he would do, and embellished our Robbie Ape with these real-life historical moments which elevated the character.”

Better Man "My Way" [c/o Wētā FX]
Lighting pass showing the details of Ape Robbie’s hair and outfit. The final shot appears at top. [images c/o Wētā FX]

Costumes and fur were treated as though they were characters in the movie. As Clayton explains, “Without those feeling completely tangible, real and interacting properly, the character is not going to feel real anymore, and we don’t want it to be a gimmick,” he remarks. “We weren’t saying, ‘Here is a caricature of a monkey amongst all of these live-action actors.’ We’re saying, ‘He’s in there with them.’ If his costume didn’t hang or crinkle or light the same way, you’re going to isolate him as a CG intruder. Some shots where he’s dancing in Regent Street, side by side with the Take That boys, his costume looks as every bit of real as theirs does.”

Luke Millar c/o Weta FX
Luka Millar

The film’s most complicated interaction takes place during the “She’s the One” scene. “It’s an intricate dance number between Robbie and Nicole Appleton,” explains Millar. “There are lifts and spins. They literally touch each other in every single shot. To do that, we had a detailed match-move of Nicole, and then Dave started animating Robbie to where Nicole is, but that still doesn’t take into account the costume. There’s a lot of back and forth with moving the hair and re-simulating it; that goes most of the way there. Then we end up sculpting things around the fingers to make sure that connection is 100% believable, because if it’s not it will be the first thing people will spot.”

 

Not only did Ape Robbie have to speak — he also needed to sing. “I learned a lot about breathing, which is a huge part of a singing performance,” explains Clayton. “I was focused on making sure that you saw our character’s shoulders and chest slightly deflating and letting the air out. Singing is not just [about] the way the mouth is but the way the whole body engages. In the ‘Let Me Entertain You’ sequence, he’s belting it out to a crowd of 125,000. Whereas in one of the first musical numbers, like ‘Feel’ or ‘Something Beautiful,’ he’s vulnerable and quiet, almost whispering some of the lines. We had a full array of singing types.”

Over the course of his career, Robbie Williams’ appearance has evolved, so the same had to be true in the biopic. “Obviously, Robbie has got a rich history in terms of the looks that he has had throughout the years, and he has accrued a number of tattoos throughout his career as well,” says Millar. “We wanted to represent that historical parity between Ape Robbie and Real Robbie. With the tattoos, we came up with the idea of rather [than] actually tattooing ink under the skin, as you would, why don’t we shave the tattoos into his fur like hair art? We went through a number of iterations and had tattoos in stages, because he didn’t get them all done in one go; Robbie got them done over a period of time, so we accumulate them. It worked well. It lent itself to the chimplike character and was also a nice take on how to tattoo a chimp.”

Better Man "Knebworth" [c/o Wētā FX]
Animation pass for “Knebworth” sequence, comparing the digital character’s facial and body performance to Robbie Williams from the original concert.

Better Man "Knebworth" [c/o Wētā FX]
Final render.

In order to emulate concert lighting properly, the pipeline had to be overhauled. “The thing about concert lighting is it’s repeatable and programmed into a lightboard,” says Millar. “The lightboard operators always give us their files, but we can’t do anything with them. When you’re dealing with a concert, there are about 100 different light fixtures that are all being controlled to music timecode. I sat down for a long time with the physical lighting team and learned as much as I could about their software and how we could re-create what they’ve done within the computer. There were some things that we couldn’t do, but we had to come up with alternatives. Their software doesn’t care where this thing lives within space, whereas we need to know where these things are. We shot LiDARs where the lights would be and HDRIs to know [about] the exposures and colors of the lights. We wrote a pass to import the lighting software information and then rebuild those lighting concerts within the computer. Given that they’re all timecoded as well, it meant that we were essentially retiming the timecode of the song slightly to that moment. We would get all of the lights in the same position. That was a real win.”

Around 2,000 extras were brought in for the iconic Knebworth Park concert scene. “When they started arriving, I went, ‘Oh, my God, this is so many people,’” recalls Millar. “And then they clustered them around the stage, and I was like, ‘That’s 2,000 people?’ But it was enough to do the close-ups and medium stage shots and have everyone in camera. It was only when we went wide that we had to start fleshing out with the digital crowd.”

Dave Clayton [c/o Wētā FX]

“We weren’t saying, ‘Here is a caricature of a monkey amongst all of these live-action actors.’ We’re saying, ‘He’s in there with them.’ If his costume didn’t hang or crinkle or light the same way, you’re going to isolate him as a CG intruder.”

— Dave Clayton, animation supervisor

 

Better Man [Paramount Pictures]

Afterward, 108,000 digital extras were added. “It was always important to Michael to make a convincing crowd because so often they can look fake,” says the supervisor. “We tried to put a lot of interest into them. People talking to each other or holding little cameras. An inflatable couch bounces around there quite a bit. We called it ‘crowd detritus.’ The other important thing is you couldn’t do a loop the whole time. We observed in the historical footage from the real concert that when Robbie goes, ‘Jump!,’ you can actually physically see the delay it takes for the sound to hit the people in the back versus the ones in front. The jump is like this pulsing wave that goes down outwards, emanating from the stage. We even simulated that motion into our crowds.”

In total, there were 1,968 visual effects shots, with 60 being entirely CG. “I hope that when people see films like Better Man it will encourage more projects like it. It’s enjoyable to push the creative envelope and not just the technical one, which is what visual effects tends to always lean towards,” observes Millar. “Seeing what you can do with that technology is exciting.”

 


Paramount’s Better Man is nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The movie is currently playing in theaters around the world.

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