TVB Europe – UNIT Studios bring to life the VFX & Design on 2024 British biopic Feature film ‘Midas Man’ about the life of The Beatles manager Brian Epstein

Hey Jude, I Want to Hold Your Hand, In My Life… Who doesn’t love The Beatles?!

UNIT the boutique, Fitzrovia based longform and shortform creative studio is proud to have worked closely with Studio Pow to bring the forthcoming Midas Man biopic feature film VFX and Design to life.

The upcoming British feature Midas Man, stars Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, most recently known for playing detective Charles Whiteman in Netflix’s crime 

drama series ‘Bodies’, as well as  Eddie Marsan, Jay Leno, Blake Richardson and Omari Douglas – charting the life of music entrepreneur Brian Epstein who managed iconic English rock band ‘The Beatles.’

Midas Man will be the definitive telling of an extraordinary life. The first, last and most respectful cinematic portrait ever painted of Brian Epstein. And one which helps him achieve something he dreamed of in life, but never achieved: to become a star of the silver screen. ‍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 music artist management. The figure with a finger on the very pulse of the Swinging Sixties. The film spans a period of extraordinary cultural change and convulsion. From desolate streets of wartime Liverpool to the psychedelic haze of Abbey Road.

‍UNIT was first introduced to the Midas Man project when Director Joe Stephenson first approached UNIT’s Design Collective to look after the motion design on the film. 

The Midas Man project saw the UNIT team create two extended montage sequences incorporating the already shot green screen footage of actor Jacob Fortune-Lloyd. 

Midas Man Director Joe Stepehenson provided a wide range of archive material for the team to work from and this is where he turned to the UNIT Design collective team for creative ideas on how to bring the shots to life. 

We caught up with UNIT’s Creative Director Tom Wansbrough-Jones, along with Senior Motion Designer, Matt Rowley, to dive into the process of creating the montage in the feature film.

Q: What was the brief you received for Midas Man and what was your initial reaction to it? 

TWJ – “ Jo, the Director, came to us having already shot the two sequences on green screen. We bounced some ideas off each other once he explained the story behind each shot and where they appeared within the film. This actually reminded me of a Stanley Kubrick exhibition I went to at the Design Museum back in 2019. As you enter the exhibition, you walk through several rows of panels playing various clips of his most iconic films. It looked so cool and I remember standing there for about 20 mins just taking it all in! I still had loads of pictures  from it on my phone so I was able to give an immediate sense of what was in my head! This seemed like something we could base the idea on. The character is immersed in a world of playful visuals based on his conversation to camera. We put a deck together throwing lots of other thoughts into the mix but eventually decided this was still the strongest and most interesting way to go.” 

Q: What appealed to you the most about working on this film?

TWJ – We had just finished working on about 200 GFX shots for The Creator. These had all been very short UI motion graphics style shots so it was really nice to get stuck into something completely different in style and length! There’s also that small factor that the film is about The Beatles which made it even more special.

MR –  I loved the idea of learning more about the whole Beatlemania era and this drew me to the project. Having the chance to dig through so much incredible old footage from that iconic time in music history and implement it into an ambitious motion piece was a real highlight to this brief. 

Q: What was the most challenging part of the design process to overcome? 

TWJ – Both sequences represented very different moods, one being lighthearted and fun and in the other he’s a lugubrious mess!  So finding the right method to keep our overall style was really challenging. As both shots are about 2 mins long, we had to keep pushing the idea further to keep the viewer engaged with the content. This included adding extra elements such as walking through clouds, screens coming together to form one image and even jelly beans filling the screen!

MR – Working with long and detailed sequences also involved the sourcing, licensing and of  course editorial approval of a great deal of carefully chosen archive content. Building complex, hi-resolution comps with all this material and implementing a workflow that easily enabled quick editorial control was an interesting challenge, we were still swapping different footage elements in due to usage rights even on the day of final delivery! 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. 

Q: How did the way the scene was shot affect / enhance the Design Process? 

MR – One tricky challenge was to play with the lighting at various points in the sequences to reflect mood and add additional moments of interest. The plates had been shot to include some camera flashes but other than that the light was consistent throughout each one. We therefore had to adjust the plates in comp to match any points where we chose to enhance the environment lighting. The pace and animation of the characters walking towards the camera also presented a challenge. At one stage we opted for counting his paces to calculate his speed of movement in order to build the camera moves to match!  

Q:What was your favourite part of the whole project? 

MR – Each sequence was built at a hi resolution and combined literally hundreds of simultaneous layers in comp. It meant that while we were working we couldn’t review the full 2mins plus duration without a full export from the farm. The best part was putting together a new version each time by implementing adjustments throughout, then seeing all the improvements put together as one piece over the full timeline! 

TWJ – Once we had blocked out the whole of each sequence, this was the part where we could start adding more ideas and get creative with it! 

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