Behind the scenes of ‘Better Man’.
In Michael Gracey’s Better Man biopic film, pop singer Robbie Williams is portrayed as a chimpanzee. Wētā FX was responsible for the digital character, which ranges in ages and also goes through 250 different costume changes and 50 separate hair styles (and, yes, even sports Williams’ trademark tattoos).
On set, actor Jonno Davies performed the role of Williams through the use of performance capture, largely following the workflow Wētā FX has employed on the Apes films and, of course, from its long history of bringing various CG creatures to life.
befores & afters got to chat to Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Luke Millar and animation supervisor David Clayton to walk through, step-by-step, the making of ambitious project, which includes several dazzling musical numbers and perhaps the most f-bombs by a CG character in the history of film.
It started with a huge previs effort
The musical moments—which include an ever-increasing dance number around London’s Regent Street, a 100,000+ audience-filled Knebworth Park concert, and a performance at Royal Albert Hall—were previsualized by Wētā FX before any other visual effects work commenced, and even before the film was fully greenlit.
“Michael Gracey was very keen to previs the musical numbers, time them all out to the music, and really get the details of all the transitional shots and how the ebb and flow of the visuals and sound would work together, to really chase down that emotional connection,” explains Clayton, who oversaw the previs. “It was really fun work because we already had the template of the soundtrack. They’d also story-boarded some moments and used video-vis of others to piece together the sequences. We were then able to layer on more detailed previs and explore camera design compositions and action.”
Wētā FX utilized its own motion capture stage as part of the previs process. Gracey also visited the studio in Wellington during this stage of production, where he was able to help block out action and iterate on the all-important virtual camera and lighting cues. “That previs was the first step of showing people what this movie could be,” observes Millar. “It was definitely a catalyst that helped with getting the movie funded and advancing to shooting and production.”
The performance capture methodology
Armed with a previs of the key parts of the film, Wētā FX then helped Gracey establish how it would be shot. “The most important thing for me was to shoot this like a regular picture,” says Millar. “I said to the team, ‘We shoot it like Jonno is in the movie. We light it like Jonno’s in the movie. We frame up like Jonno’s in the movie. We pull focus like Jonno is the person who will be in the final picture.’”
Davies was captured in an active marker performance capture suit. However, with the handheld camera work in the film, and some close and intimate action that needed to be captured, sometimes decisions were made to rely less on the technology and concentrate on the performance.
“There’s a scene where it becomes clear that Robbie’s nan (Betty, played by Alison Steadman) is getting dementia,” relates Millar. “It was a very powerful scene to watch them shoot. At the end of it, Nan embraces Robbie’s head and strokes his hair. In the first couple of takes, Jonno was wearing a motion capture helmet with little bobbles on it, and Alison Steadman was trying to figure out what she could and could not touch. You could see her trying to stroke these plastic bobbles and it was killing the moment. In that instance, we said, ‘Let’s lose the helmet’. We ended up sacrificing the technology in order to make that moment the incredibly touching and intimate moment it is in the movie. Even though it creates more work on the back-end for animators who will obviously have to translate Jonno’s facial performance by hand rather than being able to solve it based on a camera rig, we can’t fix a performance that doesn’t feel convincing in the photography.”
For Davies’ performance as Williams on set, the actor referenced countless hours of the singer’s past performances. He also had the benefit of Williams being on set for the first couple of weeks of the shoot. This included for filming of the finale ‘My Way’. “We got Robbie rigged up in a mocap suit and he came out and did the performance,” shares Millar. “The performance was incredible. There was the level of engagement from all the extras. Everyone was just so, so good. But he missed half the lines. He wasn’t in the right part of the stage. He wasn’t looking iin the right direction when he should be. It was a very clear thing that he’s a great entertainer that absolutely shone on the stage, but he is not an actor. He did run through a few scenes and we did get a lot of great reference material to see how he moved.”
Building chimp Robbie
The CG chimpanzee version of Robbie Williams was crafted to resemble the singer, particularly his notable eyes and brows. Wētā FX relied on photogrammetry scans, texture reference shoots and facial poses to build up their model and puppet. “When building him,” notes Clayton, “we wanted him to feel a bit like Robbie and have the charisma and some signature looks of the real Williams, but we didn’t want it to be a funny monkey face version of Robbie Williams. So, we respected the line of the eyebrows and the shapes of the eyes, but it needed to feel very much like a chimpanzee first and then the likenesses, we just tried to ease them in there.”
To test the model, Wētā FX created some side-by-side performances with real footage of Williams from past interviews, including those where, as Clayton notes, “Robbie is being quite genuine and in the moment when responding to questions. When we put that onto our digital Robbie and it really worked, that was a breakthrough moment where it’s like, ‘Oh, this is going to sell.’ I mean, it is true that if Robbie were an animal, he would be a monkey. He’s cheeky, he’s an entertainer. He’s quite sharp and in the moment and spontaneous.”
While Wētā FX has extensive experience in crafting apes, chimpanzee Robbie Williams was a different kind of challenge to previous projects. “In the Planet of the Apes franchise,” details Millar, “the apes start off as chimps and slowly evolve to become more human. Whereas, in Better Man, we’re basically representing a human being as a chimp. Everything a human being needs to do, Robbie needs to do—sing, be emotional, angry, happy. The full range of human emotions.”
“There was also a huge amount of dialogue,” adds Clayton, mentioning the intense swearing required, too. “He’s a chatterbox and he’s in pretty much every shot of the movie and driving the narrative, so he’s talking a lot, and that needed to feel convincing.””
In terms of animating the character, breathing became a central part of the process. “Breathing is a big part of singing and speaking and performing,” confirms Clayton. “I was always ‘eyes on’ with the breathing controls to make sure that the inhales were happening, then cascading down through the exhales as he’s talking or singing, before another intake of breath, and away you go again. That’s such a big part of making a digital character, getting that convincing breathing pass in there. Nostrils, too. Humans don’t really flare their nostrils a whole lot. Here, we could use it as a way to just bring a variety and a contrast to the movement of the face and make him flare his nostrils to reflect certain emotional beats and add a complexity and a nuance to the landscape of his face.”
With so much reference of Robbie Williams for everyone to pull from, Wētā FX artists and Jonno Davies became extremely adept in collaborating to craft the performance of ape Robbie. Clayton details: “It is actually fun in that way. We were not inventing this new character, well, we were inventing a new version of the character, but we were are also retelling historical events of something that’s happened. Robbie’s very cavalier. He’s not trying to be famous. He’s not trying to pander to people. He’s just being himself so that genuine charisma is always there. As animators, it’s one of the first times as we’ve got try to replicate this reality, this genuine, charming reality. It was very cool.”
One of the significant aspects of the chimpanzee build was representing Williams’ real-life hairstyles and tattoos in the character. The digital ape model was made up of 1,356,167 strands of fur, with 225,712 of those strands being shaved to replicate Williams’ tattoos. Says Millar: “We went through and pulled different hairstyles from Robbie’s life over the years and mapped them to the eras as they appear in the movie. Initially, we just tried to take a human haircut and block it on his head, which looked terrible. It looked like an ape wearing a wig, which is not where we wanted to be so we ended up going back to more the chimpanzee hairline and shaving the hairstyle. The direction I gave to the team was, ‘Imagine a chimp grew out their hair and then went into a barber and said, ‘Make me look like Robbie Williams. What would the barber do?’”
In one particular scene, Williams is shown with bleached blonde hair. “The first pass that the groom artist did for that,” discusses Millar, “was that they bleached his hair and then put this line around the back where a human hair line would end. Well, if you’re a chimp, why would you stop there? So we ended up bleaching the whole body.”
A similar methodology was relied upon for the tattoos, shares Millar. “Rather than just placing ink under the skin for a regular tattoo, we ended up—because you wouldn’t see them because of all the fur—we ended up shaving them into the fur, like hair art. It was a very challenging groom situation, not one we are usually presented with. Our artists did a fantastic job of replicating all that detail as different lengths of density and lengths of fur.”
The more than 200 Robbie Williams costume changes in the film required Wētā FX to collaborate closely with the costume department. “They sourced, made, borrowed, rented every outfit that you see in the movie,” advises Millar. “We scanned them all. We used them on set for reference, but essentially none of those costumes were ever going to actually be in front of the camera. So we had to make all those unique costumes, and then add in more variations for the fight where Robbie is fighting a whole load of different versions of himself.”
‘Rock DJ’: crafting the Regent Street oner
In a three minute and 42 second long (5,334 frames) oner, Williams with band Take That are shown having signed their first record deal and bursting out onto Regent Street in London to celebrate. As the ‘Rock DJ’ dance and musical sequence progresses, they are initially not that well known, so few people around them react. However, as the group transitions into different looks throughout their careers and continue dancing down the street, more and more people are ‘swallowed’ into the celebration and a flash mob-like dance ensues.
Vid-ref acquired by animators under Clayton proved critical for imagining the sequence in previs form. “We definitely didn’t shy away from embodying the character, let’s say,” admits Clayton. “Especially in the previs, a bunch of us went into some of the musical numbers. We learned the dance moves that were going to be done in Regent Street. I mean, you could just key frame that in a simple way, but it doesn’t give you bearings the same as if you’ve got real motion capture, even if it’s from computer nerds, such as myself, dancing down Regent Street. We had a great motion capture day where we broke the whole musical number into about 20 parts, and we just captured them.
“Our lead who played Robbie for the previs was Kate Venables,” adds Clayton. “She’s a dancer, so she nailed it, but the rest of us were making the best of it. When you put that motion capture into the Lidar scan of Regent Street that we had, all of a sudden it just springs to life. You can check your lenses, you can check your camera moves. Everything just starts to feel infinitely more real.”
The previs was provided to director of photography Erik A. Wilson. “He went down Regent Street with an iPhone trying to map out the path that Dave had come up with,” states Millar. “There were certain ways that he couldn’t quite move the camera as in the previs, so we figured out a physical path that we could actually take down the street. There was then a techvis path after that to further figure out how to move the camera and whether it was going to be crane, human mounted, et cetera, and to figure out the lensing which varied throughout the sections.”
A four day night shoot in Regent Street followed to film the plates, with Davies performing as Williams and many dancers also on set. To animate the CG Williams over the nearly four-minute sequence, Wētā FX split it into multiple parts. “We were able to do the regular treatment of overlaying our Robbie ape over the top,” says Clayton, “but there was a lot of scrutiny from Michael and his team, as there should be. It’s one of the high points of the film, a real centerpiece, super ambitious, so it needed to look as perfect as we could make it.”
“We had to pay particular attention to some transitional moments, say when he spins around and does a costume change,” continues Clayton. “Although here we could have relied on computer graphics cheats to fade things on and off, we didn’t want to go that way. We wanted to make it feel like it could have really been done in camera and all the imperfections that go with that. It was the same with the moment he jumps onto a taxi and then on the back of an iconic London double-decker bus. The physicality of that needed to be the priority. We never wanted to venture into superhero looking stuff.”
A major effort was also involved in stitching together plates and providing for building and set extensions. The action goes inside and outside shops on Regent Street. Interiors were filmed in Melbourne prior to the London shoot, and would need to be married up to the shop fronts on Regent Street. Wētā FX added in digital traffic including buses and cars. Combining all the different interior and exterior plates, and CG elements, was a massive task, says Millar. “I think it’s got the record for the most amount of roto-tasks ever created here at Wētā FX.”
“The shot also has many period-correct components,” adds Millar. “We had control over a few of the shopfronts, so they were dressed, and then there were the ones which we weren’t allowed to touch, so they had to be replaced, including right at the end of Regent Street which is Piccadilly Circus. Back in the 90s, it was a huge advertising board with fluorescent tubes, whereas now it’s an LED screen. We had to replace that and take it back to its 90s look. There was one building that just happened to be under renovation. It was covered in scaffolding, so we then had to patch that so it was back to looking pristine again. Because we’re transitioning through time as we’re going down the street, by the time we get to the end, it’s Christmas time. That meant we had to put all of the iconic Christmas lights down Regent Street and put Christmas decorations in the windows. There was a lot of augmentation work to tell that story as well.”
‘Let me entertain you’: The Knebworth Park concert
Williams’ enormously attended 2003 Knebworth Park concert was re-created in Serbia. This location allowed production to film with around 2,000 extras, while a further 123,000 would be added in as digital crowd members by Wētā FX. During the shoot, Millar helped co-ordinate the shooting of small chunks of 50-people sized crowds for close-up shots around the stage. “It turned out,” he says, “with 2,000 extras, we could actually get most of the medium and the close-ups all in camera without needing to go digital. Essentially what we did was put on a gig in Serbia. The stage wasn’t really a set, it was rented from an actual stage company that built it for concerts. The same with the lighting. We were on a studio backlot, but it was essentially a music festival that played half a song and nothing else for the entire four days that we were there. All of the band and stage workers are in-camera, and then it’s the wider extension and the big crowds that became digital extensions after that.”
Some archival footage from the actual Knebworth Park event was able to be intercut with the Serbia scenes. “That gave us a great goal to match to as well, both in terms of what was in the event at the time, but also the quality of the finished image, which essentially was early 2000s digital video,” notes Millar. Clayton adds that the original footage informed Wētā FX about what they called ‘crowd detritus’, objects like inflatable toys, flags and beach balls, that would be included in the scenes. Disposable cameras and film cameras were also elements added .
‘She’s the One’: dancing on a yacht
Another musical number occurs on a yacht in Saint-Tropez, where Williams and Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) dance. This, of course, required a close level of interaction between the two characters. “It’s another centerpiece moment of the film where Robbie falls in love with Nicole,” describes Clayton, “but it’s also a beautiful interweaving of transitions and going forward in time, back in time and back to the yacht. The performance was paramount and getting that interaction and that feeling that they’re there together was very important. We match moved really accurately to Nicole Appleton’s actress, and then it was a lot of careful work to prioritize the feeling that they’re right there, they’re interacting seamlessly.”
“I’d say it’s the hardest work for sure when you’ve got a real person and a digital person and they’re that intertwined,” notes Millar. “That was all captured live. It’s worth noting that Raechelle, who plays Nicole, did all the dance work herself. Some people have asked us, ‘Did you replace her head?’, but we didn’t. For Robbie, it was a dance double who wore a very tight-fitting mocap suit with blue fabric all over the top. That let us get the actual mocap data from that shoot.”
The animation team would then animate chimp Robbie, knowing that additional work would be required to simulate clothing and solve for hands and other close interactions. “Once Dave’s got it as close as he could,” explains Millar, “it then literally came down to going through frame by frame and saying, ‘Okay, this bit here needs to be smoothed down on this frame, and we need to pull that bit tight and create a hand impression here when she puts her hand there.’ It just becomes very painstaking detail work, which is the detail that you don’t notice when you watch it, it just flies past. But if it wasn’t there, it would look weird and fake.”
Clayton makes a point of mentioning a moment during the yacht dance where Nicole runs her hand through Robbie’s hair. “Because we’ve got the match move of her hand, we can have his hair simulating and responding to that hand. Here, too, we had to deal with ape Robbie’s ears, which are quite big. That would come up quite often, more often than you might think, actually. He would touch his own ears and so we had animation controls for them. Other people might brush against them, so we just flopped them out of the way.”
‘My Way’: At Royal Albert Hall
For Williams’ performance at Royal Albert Hall, production filmed in two halves. First, a replica stage and floor area was built at Docklands Studio in Melbourne. “We had a full orchestra and all the extras sitting around the tables in front of the stage were all part of that shoot that took place in Melbourne,” details Millar. “Robbie then had a concert about 10 months later at the real Royal Albert Hall where it was requested that everyone came wearing black tie, so we shot corresponding plates for everything that we filmed in Melbourne during that concert in the Royal Albert Hall.”
This meant that wider views of the concert generally included the London audience, while Davies’ performance of Robbie, the audience on the ground, and the orchestra pit all acquired in Melbourne, complete with extras. Wētā FX then combined the plates to ultimately produce an audience of 5,500 people.
The workflow required a higher level of planning to establish where to place cameras in the Melbourne set that could match the shooting of the real Albert Hall concert months later. “We were able to acquire a quick scan of our set and a quick scan of the real Royal Albert Hall and stick them on top of each other to line the two references up,” outlines Millar. “Then I could say to the DP, ‘Okay, if you stick your camera eight meters up from this point here, then you should end up in box 36.’ For a lot of these key angles, when we were in that space, we had to make sure that we were in legit places where we could get a camera. Production needed to know this information right away so those seats didn’t get sold when the Royal Albert Hall tickets went on sale! ”
After the Melbourne shoot, an edit was done of the performance to help further figure out what real Albert Hall plates needed to be filmed during that concert. “I think it was about 30 or 40 shots that we would need to shoot during the live concert,” says Millar. “The way it worked was, Robbie would come out, do half of his set, then he would disappear off. We would get four minutes to do our take with a series of colored lights on poles, which would be for eyelines because the stages were different heights and shapes. And then there was a voiceover for what the audience had to do, listen and sway or stand up and applause or things like that, which they would, whilst we went through the different lighting scenarios that take place during the musical number.”
The Royal Albert shoot involved some frantic moments, admits Millar. “We only had two nights for this. The first night was a write-off because it was Sunday, and the British public got absolutely blind drunk throughout the whole day, so they didn’t look where they were supposed to be looking! It basically left us with one night and one four-minute take to get every single shot that we needed to get for that scene. In the end we did it, but it was by far the most stressful shoot I’ve ever been a part of. The beauty of it is, when you watch the scene, you can just tell that we are in the Royal Albert Hall, you can tell that those people are real. There’s a certain physicality about that whole thing, which you only get from when you are actually in that space.”
An additional challenge to the Royal Albert Hall sequence came in terms of lighting, that is, Wētā FX needing to match the real stage lighting with their digital lighting. To help do that, Millar recognized that the stage shots were effectively a controlled environment where lighting was timed to a music time code, and therefore repeatable. “So,” he says, “rather than halt filming to wander out with our balls and charts after every take, we said, well, we could use this. On previous shows, I’ve always talked to lighting board operators and said, ‘It would be great if your world and our world could somehow combine.’ They’ve always given us these files and I’ve got back to base, looked at them and can’t make head nor tail of what they are. But on this movie, it was absolutely critical that we could, because there’s literally gantries with 50 to a hundred lights in them, and trying to replicate that after the fact without actually having that information is really hard.”
“I sat down with the concert lighting board operator and talked through how their world works,” continues Millar. “Then we extracted all of this data from them, brought it back to Wētā FX, and then some very clever people took that data and were able to replicate the lighting of the concert within our world. There were certain things that we couldn’t do. Things like the brightness or colors of lights, the worlds just don’t align. So for those, we just shot HDRIs of static lights that we could then source and apply it to the moving lights and also the physical space of a light. In real life, you place it somewhere, whereas obviously in the computer, you need to know where that light is. Lidar got us the position, HDRIs got us the color and the intensity of the lights. It was very satisfying to see it come to life for that first time because you see how many lights are in this thing, and suddenly they’re all moving and they’re doing exactly the same thing that they did on the day. We had all the components then to recreate the whole concert in the computer for when Robbie’s running around on stage, which was really cool.”
When your VFX supervisor becomes a ‘star’ of the film
For several scenes requiring digital extras, Wētā FX happened to place visual effects supervisor Millar into, well, a lot of them. In fact, Millar served as a digital extra 767 times in the film. “It wasn’t for any sort of narcissistic tendencies,” he protests. “It was literally because we had two distinct needs for digital people. One of them was the underwater fans in ‘Come Undone’, and the other one was the paparazzi in ‘Come Undone’ as well. It just so happened that throughout principal photography, whenever we had paparazzi extras, we were always on location, so we weren’t able to scan any of them. We’d get back to the studio and go, ‘We need a paparazzi!’ And the requirement would be someone who’s average build male, middle-aged, and a bit of a creep. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can do that.’”
Millar brought into the studio a collection of different clothes, whereupon he was scanned in different outfits. “Whilst the intention was to just put me in that one scene, once I existed, I ended up everywhere. Normally I’m the security guard or a bus driver or, motorcyclist, or paparazzi. I’m in the movie about 700 times.”
“What’s really funny is,” adds Clayton, “sometimes the extras would be my motion capture, but Luke’s digital double body, merged together. Our powers combined!”
All images: © 2024 PARAMOUNT PICTURES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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