How Michael Blended Michael Jackson, Jaafar Jackson's Singing Voices
Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson and KeiLyn Durrel Jones as Bill Bray in 'Michael.'
Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
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Jaafar Jackson’s portrayal of his uncle Michael Jackson in the eponymous Michael will assuredly be a talking point among the film’s viewers for months ahead, as the younger Jackson delivers an impressive, spot-on take on the King of Pop, from his look to his mannerisms, smile, dance moves — and yes — his voice.
Regarding the speaking voices, that’s all Jaafar and Juliano Valdi, who portrayed a 10-year-old, Jackson 5-era Michael in an equally convincing performance. But getting Jackson’s iconic singing vocals requires savvy sound editing, with the team blending Jaafar and Valdi’s live vocals that they performed on set with Michael’s original recordings.
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The actors’ voices are heard in the singing performances when there isn’t a genuine Jackson recording, such as scenes where Jaafar scats in the studio while recording “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” or when Valdi does the initial takes of “I Want You Back.” Michael’s voice becomes more dominant when the pure recording is allowed to take over.
“We had the discussion a lot, could we have Jaafar and Juliano go to a studio and record those songs, and the answer was yes,” says Michael music supervisor John Warhurst. “They were capable of delivering those vocals. But then it becomes more an overall philosophy of when people go see the movie, do they want real Michael to be a part of this movie, or do they want it to just be 100 percent Giuliano and Jaafar? Every movie is different, but here we think people want Michael to be a part of it.”
Warhurst has worked on several of the most prominent music films of the past decade, including Bob Marley: One Love, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Bohemian Rhapsody, the latter of which earned him an Oscar. Below, he breaks down the extensive process on how Michael handled the vocals.
Let’s start from the top. How did you guys actually do it?
I’ve worked on quite a few musical films over the years, there’s a few different ways you can approach the vocals. But the best way I’ve found is to approach it like a live musical. That entails the the actor going on set and performing the pieces themselves. Ignore how we’re going to put it together in post-production at this stage. When you use recordings, one of the first things you need is what I call the visual canvas. You can’t put an incredibly powerful voice on a face that doesn’t look like it’s projecting that kind of power. The actors need to learn the songs so that they can actually sing them with the same sort of energy and power as the original artist and then perform it.
Often with these scenes, we’re pretending that we’re in a recording studio, and that means we can actually record. The actor’s wearing headphones. We have a huge microphone in front of them. We should be able to shoot it exactly as if we were recording it for an album. The next important ingredient is as many live takes as you can get without music on it.
It’s more complicated when we do the stadium performances. It isn’t as much like a recording session. There’s more outside of the recording. You see Jaafar doing more of his own bits and pieces and ad libs. And when you’ve got a set that size, you need to really sort of vibe it up a lot. You want the ground to shake. You want everybody to feel it in the room, and it to be that sort of atmosphere.
It sounds like you’re essentially getting stems of their vocals.
Yeah, of their performance. Once we’ve got that right visual canvas and the recordings, when you get to post-production, we’ve got 15 to 20 takes of Jaafar or or Juliano and the one take of Michael with his recording. That’s where the blend comes into it. In that scene when Jaafar is performing as Michael recording “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” he does that scatting stuff. I call that “dialog.” We don’t have Michael doing that. That is Jaafar.
Or that scene of Juliano doing the opening lines of “I Want You Back” where Berry Gordy has to stop Michael and tell him he’s moving too much. If we used Michael on the first take, when we use him again on the final, it̵