Identical twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan) face off against an ancient evil in Sinners, a new horror feature from writer/director Ryan Coogler. Set in 1932, this genre-bending film follows the pair of charmingly-entrepreneurial brothers as they leave their troubled life in Chicago behind to open a juke joint in their Mississippi hometown.
Smoke and Stack recruit friends and family to make their dream a reality — including their cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), an aspiring musician who unknowingly summons spirits of the past and future with his revelatory blues prowess. The joint’s successful launch night is thrown into turmoil when a bloodthirsty vampire known as Remmick (Jack O’Connell) is drawn to the otherworldly music and arrives at the front door.
Captured in large-format IMAX 65mm and Ultra Panavision 70 by director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners is a cinematic spectacle from start to finish. The film drew large audiences to theaters when it was released in March, becoming a runaway box office success.
VFX supervisor Michael Ralla (who previously worked with Coogler and Durald Arkapaw on Wakanda Forever) and VFX producer James Alexander played a vital role in crafting the film’s captivating visuals — a project that required massive amounts of collaboration across departments throughout production and post. From groundbreaking “twinning” effects for the leads, to a transcendent musical sequence that conjures ancestral spirits and sets the roof on fire in a dazzling blaze, the team seamlessly merged digital effects with large-format film photography. Here, longtime collaborators Ralla and Alexander share an inside look at the process of bringing this thrilling story to life on-screen.
How did you work with Autumn Durald Arkapaw to translate her cinematography into the digital realm?
Michael Ralla: “In the past, Autumn has told me, ‘For some reason I have never really been happy with a lot of the visual effects work that I’m seeing on my projects, because it seems as if the VFX folks make shit up.’ One of the big reasons for that is because she is very lens-centric. The glass that she uses is custom-made or detuned to her liking. It’s part of her visual language, and that’s a really big challenge for digital visual effects to replicate because they’re somewhat unpredictable. So on Wakanda Forever I studied them, and I had to learn the terminology to describe the different aberrations. We had to find ways to actually replicate what the lenses do with our visual effects tools, and that was one thing that made us collaborate very closely. She really appreciated that effort.
“Wakanda Forever was digital, so it was all about the lenses. Now we’re shooting large-format film, five-perf 70mm as well as 15-perf IMAX. So now it’s all about the film and the lenses, as if the lenses weren’t enough. This time I also asked her to explain her lighting more in detail, and had a lot of conversations with her chief lighting technician, Brian Bartolini, so I could study it more. A visual effects artist has so much power to change the image. You can essentially change everything — make this dark, brighten that up, change the lighting. But often we found ourselves in a situation where people were lighting her shots who she’s never met, who have never talked to her, and who, as a result, don’t understand what she’s doing, creatively and technically. We were trying to bridge and fill in that disconnect, which means you want to get as much info and data from the shoot into post — and have Autumn talk to the CG lighting and compositing teams. If you don’t want us to ‘make shit up,’ then we have to shoot it or inform people better of the creative intent. Something that we can either use directly in our shots and composite it in, or that we can at least use as a reference.
“For Remmick’s death, what you see in the film, except for the face, is all digital. But we didn’t make that up. We scanned the special effects supervisor’s work — Mike Fontaine and his team — and we replicated it. We shot those scenes for real, in the actual location, and always used that as a starting point.
“Production designer Hannah Beachler’s team had to build an infinity pool to protect talent from full-sized alligators in the swamp location. When the final vampire flames start, we shot a burning stunt guy as reference. Stunt supervisor Andy Gill’s team set someone on fire. The SFX [special effects] team, under Donnie Dean’s supervision, created a practical fire tornado as a separate element. Massive swirling flames, hugely impressive. Sometimes we were using that footage to actually composite it together. But if we didn’t, then we knew exactly what the CGI elements needed to look like, and what their exposure level and color had to be.
“That’s the case for pretty much everything in this film. We didn’t make shit up. We always had very targeted references to work towards. There actually are a lot of all-CG shots in this film — way more than you would think — but they’re always respecting the visual language and the lenses and the lighting of the movie. Something that does exist in reality through, Autumn’s cameras and the film stock that she used.”
James Alexander: “It’s all about being true to the image that Ryan and Autumn are creating. Michael put an enormous amount of work into prepping all of our visual effects partners, explaining the process that he’d been through with Autumn on Wakanda Forever in terms of understanding — both technically and creatively — her visual style and process. Some of the partners that we worked with, Storm, for instance, had already been through the process before and knew the rigor that we had to apply to make sure the digital work we were applying to Autumn’s work was as true as could be. Michael created a bible that we shared with our visual effects partners that went into a huge amount of detail on the lensing, the way we were shooting and the way we needed to treat it to make sure everything was integrated as seamlessly as possible. That was a real milestone, when we first presented some of our work to Autumn and we got her sign-off. We established that trust, and then we knew we had a flow that would allow us to maintain that throughout the show.”
How did the VFX team collaborate with other departments throughout production and post?
Michael Ralla: “I think a lot of the visual effects work on this film was what we call front-loaded, so there was really intense, complex and sophisticated planning. We had a fantastic previs partner at Baraboom in LA, with an extended team in Spain. They were turning things around so fast using Unreal Engine — it was truly unreal — and we used their output as a communication tool to figure things out with other departments.
“I always felt it was going to be around 700 shots, but it ended up being more than 1,000: The cotton fields, Remmick’s death, train station, surreal montage, digital scars, vampire eyes and more.
“Then, obviously, the twinning — the VFX work — Sinners would not work without. For moments with lots of physical touch and interactivity, we developed some new technology called the HaloRig, pioneered because none of the technology that we found was good enough to do a full head replacement for Michael [B. Jordan] in 65mm, whenever we shot with the body double. At the same time, we pushed really hard to shoot real Michael as much as possible, including in that cigarette handoff shot that a lot of people seem to be talking about. Some shots are simple split screens, others are highly sophisticated, multi-pass composites shot with a repeatable Technodolly crane, operated by Ron Tatham, involving complicated syncing and preparation with sound and VTR (video tape recorder) departments.
“We were having tons of conversations to get everyone on-board. There was a constant dialogue, and I am a strong believer that just because we can basically do almost everything with our VFX tool kit, doesn’t mean we should. We were also trying to connect special effects from on-set with the people doing the same work in post, to get them to talk to each other. That was a really important thing for Autumn, to make sure that what we talk about on-set also makes it all the way through to the people who are doing the work behind their computer screens, in a different country, at a later point in time, so they understand the storytelling, the message, her lighting, her lenses, what the film does.”
James Alexander: “After filming for weeks in the swamp, the culmination of that part of the production was Remmick’s death scene. We collaborated with the special effects, special-effects makeup and stunts teams —being interwoven with production design, costume design, cinematography and everything else. The real reward, I think, is the culmination of the communication that we had up until that point. Of course, Ryan drives everything. But when Ryan’s dealing with other things, I see visual effects as a nexus of communication. We want to bring in all of the other departments and work with them as collaboratively as possible, so we can achieve the very best results.
“It’s always challenging. It’s really tough to keep all of those plates spinning. But when it comes together —as I think it did in that scene — it’s so cool to see. I think it’s the communication between the departments, the collaboration and bringing everyone together that is the most satisfying part of the job.”