How ‘Better Man’ Turns Robbie Williams Into a Singing and Dancing Chimp
Who else but Wētā FX could pull off turning English rock star Robbie Williams into a chimp for Michael Gracey’s “Better Man” musical biopic? After all, Peter Jackson’s New Zealand VFX studio is the king of CG ape movies, which finds itself in a simian face-off this awards season with “Better Man” and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.”
But the animated ape styles are polar opposites. Whereas the chimps have evolved into becoming more human-like across all four “Planet of the Apes” films, Williams merely resembles a chimp while being totally human in the way he acts, sings, and dresses. That’s because Williams saw himself as a trained monkey while becoming famous as the youngest member of the boyband Take That. Gracey seized on the metaphor to depict Williams as unevolved throughout his tumultuous rise and fall and final redemption.
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“‘Better Man’ is like a human being represented as an ape,” Wētā VFX supervisor Luke Millar told IndieWire. This necessitated the creation of 226 different costumes and 50 different hairstyles for Williams in the film, including peroxide blond covering his entire body.
“ But one thing which was quite different is that Robbie’s the only digital character in the picture — everything else is real and human,” added Millar. This created a challenge for simulated cloth interaction with the other actors, especially during the musical numbers.
It also created a major technical problem for the performance capture of actor Jonno Davies (who plays Williams between the ages of 7 and 30) during the musical numbers where he interacts with lots of other actors. Since Davies’ head cam and the witness cameras picked up too many distracting objects on set (such as boom mics), this either interrupted his performance or was too difficult to paint out in post.
As a result, Wētā was forced to remove Davies’ head cam and move the witness cameras farther back. This meant they still captured the performance of his body but used the facial capture footage primarily as reference. It was then up to the animators (under the supervision of Dave Clayton) to match Davies’ performance exactly, relying on their own acting abilities to get greater nuance in the keyframe animation.
“We did solve some of the faces,” Millar said. “It wasn’t all hand done. But it was just a large number because of the nature of the film. Michael created a rough draft that had Jonno in all of the frames, and that was the performance obviously that he loved. But the animation team was able to embellish moments. There were certain things where Jonno would smile, but Michael wanted a smile that was more Robbie Williams. We called them ‘Robbie-isms’ that were injected throughout the picture. And that’s just to create that quintessential likeness to the person we’re representing.”
Great care was taken to recreate Williams’ eyes, brows, and tattoos when building his ape model, using reference captured when Williams visited the set to maintain his likeness and recognizability. “Michael wanted people to be able to look at Robbie the ape and see Robbie the singer,” Millar added. “So we worked up a lot of concept work trying to lean into the human aspects. We tried human teeth, human hairstyles, human eyes, human everything, and we very quickly got into a very strange place where we were starting to lose the chimp at that point, creating something which would bump people out of the movie.
“And my pitch to Michael was to lean into Robbie’s eyes and eyebrows because so much of the connection with the character is from that area. And then we just went into the chimp with the rest of the face, but we ended up sticking with the chimp teeth. We just made them look very cared for because this guy’s a multi-million dollar rock star.”
The interactions between the furry digital Williams and his real-life counterparts and environments were so central to the VFX that Millar and the Wētā team did previs versions of 10 musical numbers, which Gracey used to secure funding for his indie feature. These ranged from “Let Me Entertain You,” the recreation of Williams’ famed 2003 Knebworth Park concert (filmed in Serbia featuring 108,000 digital extras and a dreamlike sequence where Williams battles 110,000 CG apes as past versions of himself); “She’s the One,” a dance number on a yacht in Saint-Tropez, where he meets his future fiancée, Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), a member of All Saints; and the “My Way” finale, partially filmed at Royal Albert Hall, with the real Williams performing live in front of a packed crowd for greater authenticity.
However, the most spectacular sequence was “Rock DJ,” the highly choreographed one-shot lasting 3:42 minutes and filmed on London’s Regent Street over four evenings. It boasts five digital costume changes and 500 dancers and needed the most work to match the previs.
It also required new tech that enabled Wētā’s VFX pipeline to receive data files from concert stage lightboards to accurately recreate them digitally. ”The number of fixtures that make up constant lighting is often over 100 lights, and they change color and exposure,” Millar said. “ It’s a very complicated light rig. So I talked to the lighting board operator and then passed it off to one of the team members back at Wētā to see if they could reconstruct the information. We were able to recreate, from that lighting board data, all of the movement of all those lights.”
Turns out, though, that “Rock DJ” didn’t start out well. Not only was the last day of rehearsal cut short because of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, but they couldn’t cover all of Regent Street with their mocap cameras. So, they mounted two offset cameras to the main camera to get a stereo view of Davies’ performance. This was accompanied by witness cameras on ladder pods that were mounted farther back.
The sequence, which stitched together the choreographed dancing throughout the street into a single shot, took four months to shoot. For Wētā, it began with studying dance videos from choreographer Ashley Warren. “ We motion captured them at a previous level, and then we were able to block out the dance down to essentially a simple version of the street that we had,” Millar said.
“Once we had something Michael was happy with,” he added, “that got passed back to Erik Wilson, the DP, who took some dancers onto Regent Street with an iPhone and started to see if they could do the same path down the street. And then we had to make some adjustments because our previs didn’t have a phone booth or a street lamp like would be there on the day. Erik refined the camera path and we prevised again to the new achievable camera.
Once they had the timing mapped for the camera, Wētā started all of the digital work on top of that, including shop fronts and traffic. Plus, there were the gumball machines, Christmas lights, and iconic advertisements you’d see on Piccadilly Circus in the ’90s: fluorescent tubes that would light up and be animated.
“Then there was all of the hand-match moving of Jonno’s street dancing,” Millar said. “ He is not a trained dancer, but he learned all the dance moves and was the one performing it on the street. And then we had stunt performers doing a break dance on top of a piano and a stunt parkour performer who did the leap. That had to be stitched into Jonno’s performance, obviously integrating his animated character with all of his live performance.
“I think ‘Rock DJ’s’ probably got the Wētā record for the most amount of roto tasks and paint tiles ever created for the shoot,” Millar added. “And there’s little to no blue screen at all because we had to see everything.”
“Better Man,” now playing in select theaters, opens wide on January 10.
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