Wētā VFX Supervisor Daniel Macarin Unmasks the Visuals of ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’

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Disney scored a huge hit with this past summer’s Marvel bromance Deadpool & Wolverine. This cinematic partnership, which began with the 2009 feature, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, reaches a new height in director Shawn Levy’s superhero pic, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in the titular roles. Among the visual effects companies taking part in the R-rated romp is Wētā FX, which had to create 630 shots under the supervision of Swen Gillberg. The VFX tasks included ensuring that the masks worn by the heroes enhanced their performances, augmenting Wolverine’s corpse and extending the world-building of the TVA and Void.

‘Everything we did had to stick with the physical belief that it’s leather around his eyes and a tight fabric in the red sections.’

— VFX supervisor Daniel Macarin

 

According to Daniel Macarin, VFX supervisor at Wētā FX, iPhone footage shot by Reynolds was key reference material for the mask animation of Deadpool. “You’re looking at him and going, ‘He turned his head a lot, blinked numerous times, and I can see where his eyes are going, but I can’t translate that to the mask,” he says. “How do I taken what his intent was and give you that feeling with the mask? A lot of that is subtle cues which people can see but won’t be able to verbally explain that they saw it.”

He adds, “The way that his mask is designed has an inward, downward V, which looks cool and gives him an angry look [which is not always the intent]. We had to do things like turning that V up and using that V shape as an eyebrow. We curved, bent and lifted it to convey the emotions we were trying to get across.”

Leather Around the Eyes

Obviously, creative license was taken with the hero’s facial muscles. “When a person moves their eyebrows or twitches their face, they can move it at a speed that is much faster than if you put them in mask,” says Macarin. “There is a delay in the fabric moving because it’s getting pulled, so if we put too much movement into the forehead or underneath the cheek, then it would start to look like an animated face and gets into that cartoony realm. Everything we did had to stick with the physical belief that it’s leather around his eyes and a tight fabric in the red sections. We don’t want that pattern to stretch, pull too much or quiver like skin.”

Deadpool’s buddy, Wolverine, has a permanent angry wrinkle in the center of his mask. “As we adjust the shape on the mask, we have a 2D relighting system that allows us to accent and see the wrinkles more,” he explains. “The hardest part on Wolverine’s mask is the metal on the wings and across his face. You can move metal a little bit, but the more you do it turns to rubber and looks animated.”

When traversing the various timelines, Deadpool encounters Wolverine’s corpse. “We had our art team do numerous designs on zombifying Hugh Jackman’s face, and Ryan’s directive was, ‘I want to desecrate Hugh Jackman’s body and for him to watch this and be horrified and laugh at the same time of how far I’m going to take this,’” explains Macarin. “If you want to play around with a skeleton and have it be funny, then we need the skin to move, dangly skin and hair — something that will draw your attention to Ryan making motions at the skeleton. You also get into a comic book fan questions of, ‘Wouldn’t his skin regenerate? Would it die off? How mummified would it be? Would it be dry? What color tone would it be? How dusty would it be because it was in the ground? Should it be just his face or body? What parts are there?’”

The VFX supervisor says there were a lot of artistic discussions before the team actually got into that process. “Once the art team had all of the dangly bits, color tones, what the eyes should look like and what the connection to the metal skull should be, then it became a normal digital process,” he explains.

The fact that Wētā FX has been a mainstay of MCU movies and TV shows was clearly beneficial for the world-building. “We had several things in the library that could be thrown in the Void,” says Macarin. The question that comes up is always a creative one: Is there any history that we need to worry about? Are there Easter eggs that we want to throw in? It goes back and forth a lot until you find the right balance.”

One of the VFX challenges involved a road trip through a desert wasteland. “The transition of going from a cornfield into a wasteland actually came from an absolutely gorgeous plate shot in South America,” says Macarin. “The sky and ground are exactly what was captured, but then it’s things like, ‘The water isn’t quite as blue as we want. Can you add more corn into this section? Do we have a path that the car took through the corn? Let’s add submarines or boats to hide things in the water.’ Once you add all of these things into a desert wasteland, it’s making sure that the viewer’s eyes still focus on the point of the shot.”

The TVA environment was previously established with the Disney+ series Loki. “The vendors that did the time doors on Loki provided an ingredient list and told us what different layers needed to be created and how they should be combined,” says Macarin. “We did notice across the reference that there were still differences shot to shot, movie to movie, with time doors, TVA logos and what graphics are on the pads. All of those things have to go through a process of putting reference side by side and getting the creatives to say if they wanted to do it any different and finding out if that is going to be disruptive. Once that was answered, we dialed it to taste.”

Good Machines

Interestingly enough, machine learning was part of the tool set. “Machine learning helps in certain ways but is never a magic button,” says the seasoned VFX artist. “What we generally use ML for on the show was a first pass of dialogue, and this is for the masks specifically. It takes the audio and compares it to all of the audio from every single shot that we’ve done previously. It does a lot of filtering. We went through finding the right level and what audio tone has to be removed to get it to work. Then ML looks at the volume and speed of the wave pattern to find a facial expression from a previous shot it thinks matches that.”

Macarin says one of his favorite scenes in the movie is one of the first he worked on. “Ryan and Hugh are in the Honda Odyssey talking back and forth,” he recalls. “Hugh gives this absolutely emotional performance which was so good that we had to make sure that Ryan was able to express the same amount of emotion back. I hope that people take away how good that acting was between the two of them in that scene.”

 

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Disney’s Deadpool & Wolverine is currently playing in theaters all over the world, and will release on Blu-ray on October 1. The movie had the sixth biggest domestic film opening of all time and the biggest R-rated opening of all time, both domestically and globally.