Why ‘Better Man’ Became A ‘Passion Piece’ For Director Michael Gracey And VFX Supervisor Luke Millar [Video]

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 …