Warning: SPOILERS for Sinners!Ryan Coogler’s Sinners intertwines the lore of music and vampires to create a dramatic horror movie that became an instant darling among film critics. Loosely drawn from the story of blues icon Robert Johnson who, legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for musical talent, Sinners tells the story of a young guitarist who runs afoul of bloodthirsty monsters while pursuing his musical dreams. Naturally, the vampires in Sinners are musicians too, and have a mystical yet ᴅᴇᴀᴅly look unique to Coogler’s film.

Although Sinners is largely about the aforementioned blues musician Sammie (played by Miles Caton) the film’s biggest star is Michael B. Jordan, who plays twins called Smoke and Stack. ScreenRant’s Sinners review called the movie “one of his best performances to date,” but it took a village to seamlessly integrate Jordan’s work into the film. Two of the special effects wizards responsible for that achievement are visual effects supervisor Michael Ralla and VFX producer James Alexander.

ScreenRant spoke with Michael Ralla and James Alexander about their collaboration with Ryan Coogler and their work on Sinners. The pair discussed implementing unique pieces of technology to get pristine captures of Michael B. Jordan and make his twin characters, Smoke and Stack, appear totally real. They also shared insights about the creation of the film’s stunning multi-era music scene and the making of the vampires.

Sinners’ VFX Team Had To Please Worldwide Audiences… And Michael B. Jordan

Michael Ralla Details The Biggest Challenges They Faced From The Start

VFX supervisor Michael Ralla first met Ryan Coogler, and his cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, when he worked on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as the second unit VFX supervisor. “That’s … how I met Autumn and learned about the intricacy of her style and her lenses, which can be quite challenging for the FX to figure out. But, once you understand them, they actually help our work.”

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was a mᴀssive, effects-driven film, but Sinners presented its own challenges, beginning with the fact that “we were shooting not just 65-millimeter celluloid film, but IMAX 15perf, which is a frame that’s significantly larger than your standard 35-millimeter celluloid film.” This meant bigger frames and less room to hide, especially because “Ryan made it very clear that they were going to project this on the largest screens not only in the nation, but worldwide.”

Sinners is not a movie about bombastic effects, but it does survive on the strength of them, especially considering Michael B. Jordan acts alongside himself as twin characters Smoke and Stack for the vast majority of the film. No pressure, thought Ralla: “We heard that there was going to be a lot of twinning and not just [of] somebody, but actually Michael B. Jordan, who happens to be a very close friend of Ryan’s, [and] a superstar actor that [the whole world] is very familiar with.”

Faced with the question of “how do we do this?”, Ralla and co. explored their options. “We looked at everything that was out there, went to a bunch of different companies in LA, and had them do demos for us. It was really interesting because everyone was like, ‘Well, let’s do a face swap. I’ve seen it on TikTok and Instagram–that’s easy.’”

“But once you look at the reality of doing that on a 65-millimeter, 15perf IMAX frame, we’re like, ‘None of this is good enough. This is not going to work.’”

The VFX team would go on to utilize a number of approaches to achieve a twinning effect. “One of the most simple approaches is a split screen,” Ralla said, referencing a technique where an actor can perform both parts, one after the other, in front of a stationary camera, for those takes to then be joined–the left side of the screen showing one take, while the right shows the next, etc. This technique is “a very safe way” of twinning–at least, as long as the two characters don’t have to physically interact.

But that’s not Sinners. “I heard vampires, I heard twins, [and I] was like, ‘Oh, they’re going to end up fighting each other,’” Ralla said. “You can’t do split screens in a fight scene where you have all this intricate interaction between the two,” he continued, “So it was clear that [in] some form, we’re going to use a body double. Finding a good body double for Michael actually wasn’t all that easy, and once you look at the body double, you understand how much work Michael actually put into developing the two characters, Smoke and Stack.”

“Michael would see our work in progress, and he was like, ‘That’s not my ears. That’s not my hairline.’”

And, when it came to the VFX, Jordan had notes: “What we thought to do was a really good face replacement,” Ralla shared, “[but] we had to do a full head replacement, because Michael [is] friends with Ryan, and he would see the film all along [the process]. Michael would see our work in progress, and he was like, ‘That’s not my ears. That’s not my hairline.’”

Sinners’ Unique Halo Rig, Explained

The Technology Was Developed For On-The-Go Data Capture

So Michael Ralla, James Alexander, and the rest of the VFX team had to discover how to do an entire head replacement for Michael B. Jordan’s characters. “Fortunately enough,” Ralla said, “I have this reputation of collecting lots and lots of data. At some point, we were like, ‘Let’s develop a rig that captures a full head performance, [in] 360 [degrees] all around.” This became the Halo–12 cameras attached to a lightweight, circular carbon fiber ring on a shoulder-worn harness that Jordan would throw on immediately after finishing a take.

“Momentum is very important for Ryan,” Ralla shared, “because he’s got a sports background. To grab Michael and then send him into a trailer to do this whole thing again in a completely different setting… that was never going to be an option. We knew it had to happen on location, in the moment, and that’s what we built this Halo rig for.” What the Halo captured would then be sent to Australian VFX shop Rising Sun Pictures, who “basically recreated his performance from that capture to put on the body double’s head.”

The key thing above all, according to Ralla, was that Jordan’s actual performance not be changed. “It’s not the body double driving Michael’s face. This is Michael.”

James Alexander weighed in, saying, “We wanted to film Michael and have him for real as often as possible. The Halo rig allows us to have the lighting reference per scene and deploy it very quickly … to preserve Michael B. Jordan’s performance. It always had to be Michael’s acting on any digital face replacement that we did. There are a lot of tools out there that allow you to put your hero actor’s face [on someone and] be driven by the double’s performance, or the stunt performer’s performance, but we knew that wasn’t going to work in this case.”

Alexander continued: “The whole story plays out over 24 hours, [so] it’s often the case that we’re rushing to make sure the lighting conditions are consistent from one setup to the next. So, when we had a twinning sH๏τ for which we needed the Halo rig, it could be that Ryan calls cut … and while everything else is rushing to set up for the next pᴀss, we’re doing the Halo pᴀss while the whole production is shifting around us.”

“[Michael] actually enjoyed it at some point,” Ralla shared. “I have a video of him where Michael goes, like, ‘Ah. This never gets old.’”

How Sinners’ Cigarette Swap Became The Movie’s Most Important VFX Scene

“We Did It The Hard Way”

For a movie about vampires, it might be surprising to learn that one of the most important VFX scenes in Sinners, if not the most important scene, was an early one in which the twins Smoke and Stack hand a cigarette and lighter off to one another a number of times in an elaborate lighting ritual. “No matter what that sH๏τ was going to be like, I told Ryan we were going to shoot that for real,” Ralla said.

“It ended up being really, really hard.”

“There was a lot of coordination [and] a lot of logistics [in] the syncing between different departments,” Ralla continued, “We actually sH๏τ Michael twice–I think it was 18 takes–and the producers [were] freaking out at some point, but we were like, ‘Hold on, we talked about this. This is how we’re going to do it.’ I was dreading the day we were going to shoot it, to be honest.”

“It was in the heat of the day,” James Alexander said, “[with] Michael leaning against that car in a heavy woolen suit, smoking endless cigarettes.”

As it turns out, the sH๏τ even became more complicated as exciting possibilities presented themselves. “When that sH๏τ was first conceived,” Alexander shared, “I think it was [that] Stack rolls a cigarette, hands it to Smoke, he takes a puff, and hands it back.” But, in the VFX producer’s words, “When it came to the day, we put in many more handoffs.”

That made things much harder. As Alexander said, on top of Jordan’s acting against himself, the filmmaking team “needed to take that take, understand exactly where he positioned his hands to pᴀss off the cigarette, and place a marker there so he could match that with his B-side performance. Then, you’ve got to add in having a period-correct World War I-era cigarette lighter, being able to roll a cigarette, get a spark, get that light, take a drag, pᴀss it off, hit the mark, and do that multiple times.”

“That sH๏τ took longer per second of screen time than any other sH๏τ we filmed for the movie.”

The fact that the cigarette scene was so early in the film also made it of crucial importance. Alexander called it their “footprint in the snow” moment, which is a visual effects term referencing a moment in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back when the Empire’s giant mechanical AT-AT walkers bear down on the Rebel base on the ice planet H๏τh. “From my understanding, it was difficult to get the foot contact in visual effects,” Alexander said, “and it was that footprint in the snow moment that sells it. You understand those things are coming down heavy.”

Regarding the cigarette scene in Sinners, Alexander said, “We did it the hard way, and that’s Michael for real, twice handing cigarettes off to himself with the smoke billowing over the top and very complex compositing over the top of it to reach the final sH๏τ. That was our ‘footprint in the snow’. If this is a slam dunk and we completely sell this to the audience [where] they’re not thinking about the visual effects … then we’re in, and the movie can flow on.”

Sinners’ Musical Time Machine Moment Took Immense Collaboration

“I Have A Feeling That May Be The Longest IMAX SH๏τ In History”

Arguably the most groundbreaking sequence in Sinners is when Sammie performs at Smoke and Stack’s juke joint and his music conjures musicians from throughout the past and future of humankind. Not only was it artistically daring, but Michael Ralla said “I have a feeling that may be the longest IMAX sH๏τ in history.” And while as much of that sequence as possible was done practically, the VFX team was crucial in its execution.

“Conceptualy, we helped a lot with pre-vis for that sH๏τ,” Ralla shared, continuing, “It was sH๏τ in sections, because the magazine of the camera that we could put on the Steadicam actually only held, I think, 90 seconds. So, we had to slice it up … we went through a lot of iterations to plan all this.”

“We had four sтιтch points,” Alexander said, “so there were five component parts in the oner, as it appears in the film. The visualization helped us plan where those sтιтch points would be. It also helped us understand how the camera had to move through the environment–the speed that it had to move, the placement and composition of the characters within it, [and] how the camera operator would get up onto the stage and move through [the environment.]”

Poetically, the last thing filmed on set was the climax of that scene in which the camera tilts up to reveal the venue’s burning roof in partial reference to 1984’s “The Roof is on Fire” by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three. “We did set the roof of the actual juke joint on fire on the last day,” Ralla said, “I remember what a trek it was to get to that point, but we did shoot an IMAX element of the actual roof on fire together with our SFX team. It was the last thing that we got in camera.”

The camera eventually pushed through the burning roof, following embers floating through the sky. “There are ancestors in every Ryan Coogler film,” said Ralla, “There’s always a spiritual component. He wanted to be with them, so he wanted to follow the embers through the burning roof and see the starry sky.”

Sinners’ Vampires Were Real… At Least, Their Eyes Were

Michael Ralla Explains The Lifelike Look Of The Movie’s Monsters

The vampires in Sinners were led by Jack O’Connell’s musically talented Irish singer Remmick whose vampire eyes, Ralla revealed, were brought to life by a collaboration between the special and visual effects teams. “Remmick’s eyes were actual practical contact lenses,” the supervisor revealed. “They look really cool,” he said, but continued, “Unfortunately, the actors couldn’t see with them.”

“So, any time that somebody’s moving or walking,” Ralla said, “they’re digital. But that’s the one thing that’s really important for this film: we never made anything up. There’s a physical equivalent for everything that we created digitally, and that’s one thing that was also really important to Ryan–that everything’s grounded in reality. [The vampires’ eyes are based on] an effect called tapetum lucidum, where the back of the retina reflects [light] … we boost them a little bit [and] there’s a good amount of digital eyes in there, but they’re based on those lenses.”

“We didn’t make anything up.”

The First Scene SH๏τ For Sinners Is Not What You Expect

James Alexander Reflects On Working With A Blues Legend

Just when you think Sinners is over, the movie reveals its most fitting cameos in the form of 88-year-old blues legend Buddy Guy playing a much older version of Sammie. As it turns out, “That was the first time that we ever sH๏τ something that was going to be in the movie,” according to Michael Ralla.

But it was James Alexander who spent time with the icon and walked away with a story to tell. “Old Sammie, played by Buddy, has scars on his face. For some of that, it’s a prosthetic that we were able to put on Buddy, but Ryan was understandably really concerned. He didn’t want to make Buddy uncomfortable, so we were planning to put digital scars on his face to match the design of the special effects makeup.”

“But he was on stage doing his thing, and I have to tell you,” Alexander continued, “the tone that he could ring out of that Flying V was just unreal. It’s not in the final, [but] him just hitting a single note with a little bend in it is in the soundtrack. [And] the sH๏τ of him just hitting a single note on that beautiful guitar when he was on stage in that New Orleans jazz club was just amazing.”

When Guy was pulled for facial scanning, Alexander shared, “He’s a born entertainer … and he told me a bunch of stories … he’s just mesmerizing, because he’s got one of those faces [where] you can tell he’s just got a million stories behind those eyes. And he started telling me stories about Aretha Franklin [and] stories from New York in the sixties and the seventies.”

“10 minutes later,” Alexander continued, “I’ve got one of the ADs outside the window going, ‘What’s going on?’ I’m going, ‘I can’t cut him off. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.’ It was a real honor to be in his presence, and I think he does an amazing job in the film.”

Sinners is out in theaters now.