How Weta Workshop turned Robbie Williams into an ape for pop-star biopic ‘Better Man’

Weta Workshop, the New Zealand-based visual-effects company founded by Peter Jackson, was initially tasked with helping pre-vis 10 dance numbers for Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. But when director Michael Gracey decided to make his main character an ape, it turned into almost 2,000 visual-effects shots and three years of work.

“A lot of the technology we developed for Planet Of The Apes, for Avatar, was employed on this. But this movie does stand apart,” begins Luke Millar, Better Man’s visual-effects supervisor whose credits include Thor: Love And Thunder and Dawn Of The Planet of The Apes.

“In Planet Of The Apes and Avatar, we’ve got digital characters and digital environments in the frame together, whereas in Better Man, we’ve got one digital character in the real world. Robbie [appears as] an ape. He’s essentially human, the way everyone interacts with him is human, and no-one ever acknowledges he is an ape. It’s a visual representation.”

To design simian Robbie, Weta started with a sliding scale. “At one end you’ve got a 100% photo of a real chimp, at the other you’ve got Robbie Williams the human, and the design is going to land somewhere along this scale,” says Millar.

“Very early on, Michael and the team were focused on likeness. They wanted to make sure people would instantly see Robbie in the design, so we worked up a series of concept frames using a chimp as a base, then introducing Robbie elements to it. Do we go human with the teeth? How much of Robbie’s mouth do we incorporate? There’s obviously going to be physical differences between a chimp and Robbie Williams, but at what point do we blend these things together?” 

In the end, Millar felt the connection to the digital Robbie would be through his eyes, so lent heavily into the real Williams for that. “I said to Michael, ‘Let’s go 100% with Robbie for the eyes.’ And, by extension, the eyebrows. It’s the first time we’ve done an ape with eyebrows.” 

Weta scanned Williams’ face and took close-up reference photography of his eyes and body, including tattoos. “We recreated the eyes 100% into the chimp, then lent more into the chimp physiology everywhere else in the face, with the muzzle, nose and ears. That hit the sweet spot we were looking for between recognising Robbie but also understanding this is a chimp as well.”

The final version featured more than one million strands of digital fur. But designing the look is only half the job.

“The other half is performance,” says Millar. “If the performance feels like Robbie and the ape looks like Robbie, then, when you put those two things together, you’ll see Robbie. The first motion test we did was a piece Robbie did to his iPhone explaining why he’s an ape in the movie but rendered as an ape. That was the moment we realised it was going to work.”

Clothes horse

On set, Williams was played “90%” of the time by actor Jonno Davies, who wore a full performance-capture suit with 53 markers on the body and 101 on his face. Using Davies’ physical and facial performance as reference, Weta then created not just ape Robbie, but also his clothes.

“Robbie wears a different costume in every scene. It ended up being around 300 different costumes,” reveals Millar. “This is where we need to give props to the costume department, because even though Robbie was a digital character, they still made, sourced and hired every single costume you see.”

Weta employed a costume stand-in and scanned every outfit Williams wore in the film. “His name’s Adrian. We’d get him onto set to stand within the lighting, doing a similar movement to what was in the scene,” says Millar.

“Someone asked, ‘Why did we not just have a human being wearing clothes and replace the head?’ But there’s a lot of time you see Robbie with a shirt off. You see Robbie naked. The body is very ape-like and trying to replace that would end up looking weird if it was a human with an ape head glued on.”

Finally, there was ape Robbie’s hair and makeup. “The first time we did it, we took an ape skull and stuck a haircut on top of it, and it looked like an ape in a toupee,” laughs Millar.

“The struggle was trying to fit a human hairline onto an ape forehead, which is very sloped. The way we approached it was to imagine you’ve got a chimp, he’s grown all his hair out, and he goes into a barber shop and says, ‘Can you make me look like Robbie Williams?’ What would the barber do? He’d start to shave the forehead and trim it.”

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