UNIT Brings VFX and Design to Life on British Biopic ‘Midas Man’

UNIT, the Fitzrovia based boutique longform and shortform creative studio, is proud to have worked closely with Studio Pow to bring the VFX and Design to life in the British biopic feature film, MIDAS MAN, which premiered at PACT Liverpool on 29th October. 

MIDAS MAN is the first major cinematic portrayal of music entrepreneur Brian Epstein, who forever changed the music world by discovering and managing iconic English rock band, The Beatles. MIDAS MAN charts the life of a man who often struggled to find his place in the world yet who is today universally recognised as the creator of the blueprint for artist management with a finger on the very pulse of the Swinging Sixties. The film spans a period of extraordinary cultural change, from the desolate streets of wartime Liverpool to the psychedelic haze of Abbey Road, and is the definitive telling of an extraordinary life.

Starring Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (Netflix’s Bodies, The Queen’s Gambit) as Brian Epstein as well as Ed Speleers (Star Trek: Picard), Eddie Izzard (Ocean’s Thirteen) and Jay Leno with Eddie Marsan, Emily Watson, Blake Richardson, Jonah Lees, Leo Harvey-Elledge, Campbell Wallace, Darci Shaw, Adam Lawrence and Omari Douglas. MIDAS MAN was written by Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeman and directed by Joe Stephenson (Doctor Jekyll).

MIDAS MAN was produced by Perry Trevers, Trevor Beattie, Jeremy Chatterton, William Dietrich, Richard Holmes and Tom Reeve p.g.e. executive producers include Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Steffen Wild (It’s a Wonderful Knife), Asaf Nawi (Sisters), Mark Borkowski, Peter Dunne, Saskia Thomas (Blackwater Lane) and Ian Hutchinson (Under the Skin). MIDAS MAN is a Studio POW and Trevor Beattie Films production in association with Fourth Culture Films and Mister Smith Entertainment.

Director Joe Stephenson brought the MIDAS MAN project to UNIT in order to create some special screen magic to amplify and accentuate the script’s storytelling. UNIT’s VFX Team, led by Leire Eatock, UNIT senior nuke compositor, and Iñaki Gegundez, UNIT senior VFX artist, was briefed to create the 1960s New York City skyline for a pivotal scene initially filmed on green screen in which Brian steps out onto a balcony and looks out across the vast Manhattan skyline. This cinematic moment represents all the exciting opportunities America offers together with Brian’s hopes and fears of the imminent change ahead.

Leire Eatock, UNIT senior nuke compositor recalls, “I loved the idea of a 180-degree pan slowly revealing a beautiful skyline, bringing New York in the '60s back to life.” The VFX Team conducted extensive research of the buildings standing on the horizon of Manhattan in 1963 and recreated the skyline through the use of 3D animation and modelling, giving a special moment of gravitas to the film. Iñaki Gegundez, UNIT senior VFX artist adds, ‘The Manhattan skyline is the most changing skyline in the world. From one year to another new buildings and skyscrapers pop up and disappear, so the shots became even more complex every time we decided to remove a landmark. A great deal of research was required to try to get a skyline as close as possible to what it would have looked like.” 

Iñaki Gegundez, UNIT senior VFX artist continues, “In the context of the film, ‘The Beatles’ had just landed in the US so we didn't want to give the feeling that the entire city just surrendered to their feet. We wanted to convey that the city was there, in front of them, just waiting to be conquered. So we decided to test different heights, just to know the feeling you would get. In the end we decided to bring it down to a 200 metre point of view, levelled with the surrounding buildings, which was a point of view that did not exist in real life. We also decided to move the terrace slightly forward so that we were right above the 49th East Street and during the 180 turn, we could see all along it and feel a part of it. The cinematographic language is very important to the story and the point of view is a big part of that.”

MIDAS MAN director Joe Stephenson turned to UNIT’s Design Collective led by creative director Tom Wansbrough-Jones and lead motion designer Matt Rowley to create two extended montages of archival material for the film, incorporating previously shot greenscreen footage of actor Jacob Fortune-Lloyd. Matt remarked, “I loved the idea of learning more about the Beatlemania era and having a chance to dig through so much incredible old footage from that iconic time in music history to implement it into two ambitious motion pieces.”

UNIT’s Design Collective created two emotionally charged montage scenes representing the excitement of the US Tour and 'breaking' America and the troubled World Tour in which we begin to see first-hand Brian’s chaos and turmoil begin to unfold. Creative director Tom Wansbrough-Jones explained, “Both sequences represented very different moods, one being light hearted and fun and in the other Epstein is a lugubrious mess! Finding the right method to keep our overall style was really challenging and we had to keep pushing the idea further to keep the viewer engaged with the content.” Lead motion designer Matt Rowley adds, “To help with this we added additional points of interest between all the archive footage by incorporating bespoke graphic maps and cgi sections. We created simulations in C4D of jelly beans filling a large tank and 3D volumetric clouds and combined them with our existing animated cameras from After Effects. These additional elements were then rendered separately and combined in comp to create the finished build.” 

Each sequence was built at a high resolution and combined literally hundreds of simultaneous layers in compositing. Lead motion designer Matt Rowley elaborates, “Building complex, hi-resolution comps with all this material and implementing a workflow that easily enabled quick editorial control was an interesting challenge. It meant that while we were working, we couldn't review the full two mins plus duration without a full export from the farm. The best part was putting together a new version by implementing adjustments throughout and then seeing all the improvements put together as one piece over the full timeline!” 

MIDAS MAN premiered on 29th October 2024 at FACT Liverpool. Signature Entertainment launched the movie on Amazon Prime Video on 30th October, which has since grown to Amazon’s #1 Film in the UK and Ireland.