Watch How the ‘Sinners’ VFX Team Makes the Dead Look Alive

One of the most exciting aspects of “Sinners” is just how aware the Ryan Coogler film is of where it sits in time. The opening of the Smokestack twins’ (both Michael B. Jordan) juke joint may take place in the early days of Mississippi Delta Blues, but the film is animated by a love of storytelling that is even more timeless than roving Irish rogue vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) and in communion, through the music young Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) and his guitar, with both its ancestors and the future.

That connection to the past and the future is built into every frame of the film — and especially into the over 1,000 visual effects shots “Sinners” required, to say nothing of the performance capture/head replacement work done so that Michael B. Jordan could pass a lit cigarette back and forth between himself, in real time.

“ The crew pushed multipass twinning to its limit, but more interactive shots demanded more advanced solutions, and custom technology had to be invented. The VFX team developed a new piece of film technology called the Halo Camera Rig, a 10-camera array that captured Michael’s performance on a set using a Gaussian avatar pipeline. That made it possible to reference Michael’s photographic head performances from any angle. Every expression you see, every blink and breath, is 100 percent Michael,” actor Omar Benson Miller, who played Cornbread in the film, explains in the video above.

It’s one thing to know that Jordan’s double performance was painstakingly captured and rendered, but it’s another to see the halo rig in action — maybe the most expensive head-cone ever devised — and the layers of nuance that VFX artists were able to preserve.

But in the IndieWire-exclusive video above, you can watch how the “Sinners” VFX team helped facilitate Michael B. Jordan’s twin performances as Smoke and Stack and how they added supernatural details to its action sequences that could stand up to the size of an IMAX screen. The steps involved in recreating the “I Lied To You” oner are as rich as the layers of history the shot moves through, but even the VFX shots that are meant to be invisible — endless cotton fields and old-time train stations — help stretch the magic powers of ‘Sinners.”