How Morbius Transformed Jared Leto Into a Bloodthirsty Vampire Using Facial ADR

Publish date: 2024-09-02

Digital Domain VFX supervisor Matt Butler is no stranger to visual effects transformations, and his north star is always to ensure the actor’s performance and idiosyncrasies come through. In this case of the new superhero film “Morbius,” Butler had to make sure audiences could still see elements of Jared Leto‘s transformation, while staying true to the character seen in Marvel comic books. “It had to be physically plausible and believable,” Butler says.

In the film, Leto immerses himself in the part of Dr. Michael Morbius, a biochemist who inadvertently turns himself into a vampire when a life-saving scientific experiment goes wrong. The Digital Domain team were responsible for transforming Josh Brolin into Thanos for the “Avengers” movies, and they wanted to top that. “What does his full monster look like? That wasn’t a simple question or answer because there were different phases,” says Butler.

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Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) in Columbia Pictures' MORBIUS.

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They knew they needed to give him pale skin, but not cover him in white paint. Says Butler, “We wanted to give him translucent skin because it had to feel and look like skin. We had to believe it was Jared. So, we went with this very pale English skin and pretty much drained all the blood out of him.” The team sculpted and worked on the skin texture and shades, adding in veins, influenced by the artwork they had pulled from.

Butler explains they knew how important eyes were in reading emotions. “We didn’t want to go full neon bold eye,” Butler explains. “We went with a solution where it was putty much just the iris that was red.”

Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) in Columbia Pictures' MORBIUS.

In transforming Leto’s Morbius, Butler says he didn’t want to make it look cheesy. “He’s struggling to constrain this in a demon so there were moments where he blooms and relaxes back into it,” Butler says.

With no visual clue to hearing or what sound would look like, it was director Daniel Espinosa who had the idea of having flutes of tissue in his ear. “We know bats use echolocation so we said, ‘Let’s indicate that there’s some Pulsewave going out.'” So Butler and his team settled on the theme of wavelength properties to show hearing and sound.

Technology-wise, Butler placed tracking markers on Leto’s face. “That gave us the ability to track Jared’s head in 3D, but we didn’t put those markers on to capture the actual facial performance.” Advances in machine learning algorithm tech meant there is less of a need to overly constrain the face. He says, “We did reserve the right to go and do some pickup work at the end of the shoot for certain specific behaviors where we really wanted to make sure that we were grabbing some very subtle nuances, especially when it related to dialogue.”

Butler used facial ADR in post, a riff of dialogue ADR, to capture those nuances “We made a list of all our key performances and dialogue performances, and we would go back in with Matt Smith and Jared. He would have a helmet-mounted camera. We built an ADR session, we would have playback, there would be lights and the audio. We actually captured audio at the same time too. And we let our director direct Jared again.”

Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) in Columbia Pictures' MORBIUS.

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