How Does Deadpool's Mask Move?
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- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2025
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When looking at the film Deadpool - it has a lot of pretty outlandish moments - From gruesome murders, made to be funny; to all the fun things you can do with a tiny hand - This film is just filled with messed up themes.
But one thing that you wouldn't expect to be too crazy, is what happened behind the scenes when it came to making this film's visual effects.
Because compared to typical superhero movies, which are often packed to the brim with VFX filled action and spectacle - Deadpool was much more about comedy, story and character; so you'd think it would just be a standard outing for the VFX artists who worked on it, just using their skills to enhance to the film and get the plot from point A to point B.
So when I decided to do a little research into how they made Deadpool's mask emote, I was shocked at the VFX rabbit hole i uncovered - a rabbit hole of creativity and ingenuity dug by some very unsung heroes, who are some of the only reasons - that it is was possible to pull of a film like Deadpool off on its low budget of 58 million Dollars.
So, put your brown pants on - as we explore the crazy world of Deadpools visual effects.
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It's so smart and subtle that as a viewer I didn't even think twice about the expressions on his mask. I find that the most clever part of it.
Yeah, that's what really impresses me when I think about it in retrospect. Half an hour (or more?) of his mask moving with huge expressiveness and I didn't even think about it once. It was so perfect that my brain just accepted it as Deadpool's face, not a mask.
I was going to write exactly that. I never ever questioned how good were his expressions, I just accepted it like that!
And that is the sad thing about vfx. If you did it too good people will not notice. They only call out the bad vfx scenes and act like practical effects are good and VFX/CGI are bad
Perversely, this approach works precisely *because* the mask is so inexpressive and relatively featureless. It allows you to distort it however you want without tripping over any uncanny valley issues.
the most human emotion lies in the eyes, and thats conveniently the only feature on deadpools mask while being the easiest to manipulate
That is the smartest and dumbest solution I have ever heard to such a complex problem and of course it was executed perfectly with Deadpool out of anyone. Bravo to whoever thought of it so simply
Not dumb at all.
If it's stupid and it works it's not stupid
It’s stupid because no one would ever think to do that
whats dumb about it
@@DiamondThing the things no one ever thinks about is one's own brilliance - Regret 2024
It's also very easy to replicate on an even smaller budget, which means he gets to have emoting masks in any promos or youtube videos, like in the Deadpool musicals exclusively for youtube.
I had no idea that's how they made the mask work. Brilliant!
Yea when I was watching the movie this effect was a true "how the f did they do that" moment 😅
@@CGWHYFr. You don't really think about it because it's just so natural until you stop for minute and think, "Wait. How is he doing that so seamlessly?"
The mask animations were also not in the initial budget. They were an agreed to thing to take a look at once the rest of the movie was mostly complete and make a judgement on based on whether the movie appeared to have come out good enough to merit the extra costs to go in and animate the mask. This has a lot to do with how they ended up animating it in such a post-process way, rather than traditional VFX supervised pipeline fashion.
A stupid problem meets a silly solution. A classic Deadpool maneuver.
Shoutout Hugo Weaving in V For Vendetta for giving one of the most amazing performances being a masked character who’s face you never get to see. He did so much with his voice and bodily expressions to convey what the character was thinking and feeling.
They did technically have slightly different painted masks to match emotions of certain scenes / not to mention lighting. And everyone, including this video’s author forgets… body language
V for Vendetta and Dredd leads who don't need faces.
@@pathologicaldoubtwould be an interesting video in itself, i dont recall them being painted differently thats cool! Probably not for this channel tho. But he was also not the main character, or at least not most screentime. We are after all seeing more of portmans character
@@morgantrias3103 Darth Vader is another good one.
Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach also deserves a mention.
This is genuinely one of the coolest uses of CGI effects I've ever heard of and seen. It also makes me appreciate that they made this movie with such a small budget in comparison to other comic book films. Talk about on the job problem solving.
This goes to show, that the best thing you can do to a movie is constrain its budget. The solutions film makers will come up with when having to deal with a constrained budget are always a joy to learn about and can often be added to the toolkit of the industry.
Not only that but it keeps the movies from being bloated. Idk why we can't have more low budget superhero movies that make a billion dollars.
That's like saying; we should tie the hands of people to their backs so they could learn how to manipulate things with their feet. Yeah, it's cool that they could write with their feet, but why were their hands tied behind their backs in the first place.
limitation is what breeds creativity
@@iqbalindaryono8984horrible analogy
@@ninjanibba4259 why
I can’t remember for which of the three live action Spider-Men this was for, but they solved the mask acting problem by having him use a lot of body language and full-body gestures. Worked out alright actually.
probably andrew, as tobey's spider-man is mentioned extensively in this as having expression issues and tom's mask features lenses which change shape to show expressions
i thought andrew was a fantastic spiderman i was a little sad when his third movie got canceled but tom is great in his own way too
I actually remember Tom Holland talking about that. He mentioned that even though it would look silly in normal acting, it worked well as Spider-Man.
Green goblin with a mask has like perfect body expression in the movie
@@foodisscarceI think with some Raimi Spider-Man shots they would have his mouth movements go thru the mask, but yea other than that it was pretty static
Aha! I had wondered how they did it. Thanks.
Funny seeing you here
Out of all the people I would expect to see in this comment section, I think you were the one I expected the least.
Oh cool, Lindybeige in the wild.
Wheres the damn comic
beige man
I knew they did some CGI trickery with the mask, but didn't know the details. Great breakdown of a pretty cool technique.
I hate to nitpick here, but you kind of explained the method they used for the head in a really convoluted way that isn't accurate to the FXguide article. It has nothing to do with camera lens distortion. They created a fake blendshape setup using a 3D render in 'headspace' and 3d track of his head converted to UV space. Basically manipulating the UVs of his head to give a more accurate warp. The reason why a lot of people assume the head is CG is because they also used a CG specular pass to make the lighting blend better with the warp.
That makes actually way more sense. Especially since the blendshape head is shown in the video footage somewhere. And my head immediately went like "huh, so those arent blendshapes that I am looking at? But camera distortion?
manipulating the UVs is actually pretty clever
I always thought it was strange that other superhero movies haven't picked up on this technique. The white featureless eyes that make expressions with their shape is in no way unique to Deadpool in the comics, but is a feature of virtually every superhero character who wears a mask. I'd love to see if they could make it work with Batman.
They did it with wolverine in the new movie
Most of the other MCU superheroes don't wear masks
They kinda did this with MCU Spider-Man with the suit that tony stark gives him.
Conveying and extending the 1-minute information into an 11:39-minute video is really an art. Good Job CGY
Deadpool’s mask is friggin awesome. Not only is it very accurate to the comics, but it also looks cool in general
Great video! I do have a minor critique though: You spent 3 minutes in the beginning of the video explaining the problem (which could've been done in 30 seconds) and then you quickly glossed over the actual technique. For example, you didn't mention that they have to track all of his head movements in 3D so that the distortion and lighting overlays sits correctly on top of his face in every shot.
Agreed
8:58 you're welcome
@@fire17102 thank you for saving me so much time wasted on unnecessary yapping.
It's because of watch time. Short form content gets you nothing on RUclips
This guy managed to make a 3 minute script into an 11 minute video
this guy also managed to explain niche cgi effects that i have never heard of and thoroughly explained not only the thought process and importance behind the filmmakers reason to animate deadpool’s face, but also exactly how they did it all in one very well made video
@@liminal91yeah it's better than just "they did this" not explain it at all then end the video
RUclips in a nutshell.
I noticed that.
@@liminal91don’t give him credit. It was done to get $$$$$ that’s all. Maddening and all the more usual these days.
This sounds so simple but it’s also bending my brain just thinking about it.
It sounds like tracking and 3D and animation is all still part of the process but they circumvented the entire compositing and rendering steps you’d normally have with a larger budget.
as far as I understand it, they circumvented having to track all the little face details and re-map them more or less manually to the mask every frame - and all they had to track was basically just the overall head position and rotation.
The deformation of the face was done by something called blendshapes that were deformed via manipulating the UVs.
And thats the clever part about it. But understanding why it is clever is a bit difficult to explain to a person that normally doesnt do anything with CGI.
They rendered out the head seperately and layed it over the filmed footage, I think.
But I could be wrong, anyone feel free to correct me
Great video! although I felt like the entire script was like when I was in school trying to make an essay longer adding more words 😅
I always wished they would do Spidey this way, but the MCU moving iris is a cool solution too.
But I’m a fan of the magic moving mask… let Spidey have the crazy expressions and massive eyes!
the curving around the edges of the frame is called barreling... cheaper or less expensive lenses/zoom-in lenses tend to have more of it around the edges and it takes quite a high-quality lens to avoid it entirely but most photo's made by cell-phones these days don't have it at all since software to auto-corrects for it. More often than not it is like bokeh in that it is a deliberate choice being made by the photographer than an artifact of crappy equipment. Very neat though that they used that concept to effectively short-cut the 3d animation for his facial expressions... makes sense though, since our muscle structure tends to only expand or contract, why not do the same but with the mask?
Me patiently hanging on at 5:29, eagerly anticipating the moment when the narrator of this video finally gets to the fucking point!
or maybe just watch the actual video with your low ass attention span.
How could they do this? They could try this... but that's too much. But they have no choice but to do this. And that involves all these steps. So they did this!
@@kilroy987 hahaha
people these days really cant wait five fucking minutes huh
@@gameplays1792 No. 5 mins is very important.
I was always in awe of the expressive mask, because it did look so real. This is brilliant.
One of the big things I heard Ryan talk about with the third movie is when the first movie got its budget slashed so much that it had to resort to thinking smarter and creatively for solutions, that by the time they got such a large budget, they never lost sight of how to use what they learned with the first film. I think that's why they went with cameos and getting actors back on screen rather than spectacle. Because I think if anything many of us as viewers are getting bored with spectacle because it just comes across as so lazy now.
9:00 is when things really start, it’s basically the answer. 7:43 is a more in depth look at distortion. Everything before that is mostly unnecessary talk about the importance of showing emotions to viewers and how it’s always been a hurdle with super hero movies due to masks and helmets.
Holy shit yeah the yappening I can't stand it
THANK YOU
make this the top coment
Are you from Finland as also - salute your taste in humor
Thank you
So fun fact about this, Tobey Maguire’e Spider-Man also used a hard undershell in the mask. In fact all the modern live action Spider-Men use this. The reason why is so that the face had the right profile for the camera and so that it would look the same between the actor and their stunt doubles. It was also so that the eyes could be removable and could be swapped out for things like stunts for better vision, just like how the Deadpool mask system worked.
Watch "Dredd"... Karl Urban nailed the character's demeanor and character just by only seeing his face from the top lip down. His gruff voice and dialog told you all you needed to know about him. Genius! 🙂
this made me respect the deadpool film vfx soo much more. this is dope. im a leraning vfx artist so i appreciate these inside looks
I honestly thought that wasn't 3d generated. I thought it was actually a mask. Shows how great it was
The mask being literally real is one of the biggest surprises ever. Especially because in all the promotion material or interviews or talk shows, the mask looks the same, so you get that uncanny valley when watching the movie where you can't tell if its cgi or not.
First off amazing video. I always assumed that Ryan was wearing some type of padding on his eyebrows under the mask and that it was all practical. The fact is wasn't was shocking.
The effect of Deadpool’s expressiveness is so seamless, you don’t even question it. It’s an amazing special effect, but it’s so good that you just accept it as real.
I never even thought about how Deadpool had facial expressions despite his mask until I saw 3, rewatched 1 and 2 and then 3 again. It took all of that for me to notice that his mask was emoting which brought me here. They did a great job to me since I only just noticed
How dare you say "fine, that works" to Sam Raimi's Peter Parker taking off his mask.
this is really cool, and you told the story beautifully
Insane that it’s took 7:30 minutes to answer the question
Props to Tim Miller and his crew for figuring this out
I have watched the 3 Deadpool movies 5, 4, and 2 times, and it was only on my 5th watch of the first movie I realized why the character felt so much more expressive than other heroes, a few hours later and here I am, the curiosity compelled me to search for this video.
I agree with the first bit 0:50 but acting is more that just the face. Take the mandalorian for example. Acting can be done without facial expressions
half of the success of Din Djarin as well, was Pascal's subtle head and body movements. he was able to get a huge amount of emotion across just with those.
The Zamboni scene is amazing and it's even better for me because my father knows the creator of the Zamboni
Clever solution, reminds me of the tricks they had to pull when CGI wasn't an option. And shows that CGI isn't always the best solution either.
Brilliant! Not only a CGI mask would have cost more, it would have probably looked worse.
I think it also helps Deadpool expresses a lot through his body language; you can get a lot of his emotions conveyed despite the mask because he expresses them so exaggeratedly. He’s quite a unique case in that 1. He has to wear the mask 2. Enough is expressed through both exaggerated body language and cgi facial movements. He’s one of the few characters where wearing a mask+exaggeration of emotion works both character wise and film wise. This would be much more difficult to play off for even a slightly more stoic character
I'm so glad that such creative solutions aren't completely dead in modern times. Wonderful that there's still such ingenuity in the cgi space of modern media.
Now that I know it’s just edited footage and the mask isn’t actually moving, I can’t unsee it.
great video the fact you have so few subscribers is criminal
Thank you!
@@CGWHY I'm a still photographer who appreciates how you reduce the complexity of movie production to something I can understand.
Please continue making excellent videos featuring recreations and demonstrations of techniques.
Lots of them. Lots and lots and lots.
Best superhero visual effects ever.
Actual explanation starts at 8:57
I love this kind of problem solving in media
I'll be honest I really don't understand what the difference here is between using a digital squash and stretch but in glad it worked!
Lol we used to warp photos as a kid in photoshop to make them look funny, so it’s funny seeing this technique used on the big screen
I’m so glad this video passed my recs because I was just thinking about this. Recently on the Hot Ones interview, I was introduced to Ryan’s quote where “the enemy of creativity is too much time and money”. And that is exactly what I’m thinking about as I listen to how they figured out how to make the mask emote.
Imagine if they had the money to throw into CGI-ing Deadpool’s mask. Or all of Deadpool in general. To do that whole 7-step process to make Deadpool as Deadpool as possible while maybe sacrificing some of Ryan’s zaniness. But no, they didn’t have the money. So they had to get CREATIVE and resulted in the most unobstructed Deadpool performance ever. I love it and I hope they kept that approach for the rest of the movies because it’s brilliant.
I have no idea how this doesn’t look absolutely terrible, what an amazing effect!
Man, so I guess it's basically just the lighting of the mask that gives it a kind of CGI look? It explains why it looks so damn good if it's just the lighting that looks not quite 100% perfect. Absolutely crazy ingenuity.
Sounds like a gamedev style solution to the problem. I like it lol
i found the recent one ...in deadpool and wolverine more expressive than the last movies must be because of good budget that they got this time...
The deadpool movies have been exceptional at adapting comic/cartoon humor into live action, especially in the newest deadpool/wolverine movie they pulled off the physical humour of animation that I thought was almost impossible to translate into live action, of course it was pulled off BY animating it but they did it SO WELL. A specific example is in the beginning when deadpool dives behind a car with logans skeleton, and just the way it bends and flops is so cartoonishly comedic but it worked so well, and there was lots of moments like that. I just feel like this kind of stuff is what is lost in a lot of live action remakes and this is the only one I've seen manage to keep that element and it amazed me. I think its the reason why shows like the live action avatar the last air bender haven't worked, its these missing elements
That's fascinating. I did just assume it was full CGI.
I've seen this effect done in motion comics, it never occurred to me that it could be done in a live-action film!
That's so clever. Makes you wonder why we don't see this replicated in other films. Imagine Spiderman with a mask that can emote similarly, or any other Superhero with white eyes. Wonder if Moonknight did anything similar
Even after watching this video, I still cannot notice any oddities with the mask
Today I learned that Deadpool is essentially a 3D V-Tuber
This is brilliant because it's believable that a mask like that would naturally stretch. The mask's color looks slightly different from the rest of the suit, but it almost adds a touch of realism to the costume. Maybe you need to breathe through said mask, unlike the rest of the costume. The area around the eyes especially are mostly black, so warping/distorting probably won't be as noticeable.
Also, I just saw footage from when it's not paused, and the mask color difference isn't noticeable at all
Thx i cant unsee it now 😂😂
Smart, money saver, less time consuming and amazing quality tho
It's so smart and so dumb at the same time, it fits Deadpool perfectly... Whoever thought of this needs a raise immediately
Props to them! I always wondered if they had just been really smart with the actual mask, or what but still. I’m glad they solved the problem.
Coolest idea I've heard in a long time
i realy hope the next spiderman does something like this tom holands mask was close but it didnt sell it for me
2:22 it uses his eyes to be expressive
That’s the fucking point
@@joshjohnson5494 jeez no need to be a prick
In every Spider-Man movie, the actors and the stunt guys wear a hard faceshell similiar to what they do in Deadpool movies.
Love Dead Pool meself, but wow!! Did not think they used the process described in your video, love the info and ofcourse, I subbed lol 👍
Mad props to these VFX guys..shít worked amazingly well!
Raimi spiderman always taking off his mask unlike andrew, andrew shows emotion even with the mask on😂 bro body language is phenomenal
So, they find a workaround about the stiffness of the real mask, by making look like it was not stiff. Amazing
Your channel is the best! Really interesting stuff 🤯
And yet even more reason why I love this movie, and why its small budget worked for it in all the best possible ways.
How do RUclipsrs make a 45 second answer into a 12 min video. That’s what I wanna know
man all the marvel footage got me craving og marvel. I gotta go on a watching streak after this...
Deadpool's mask works psychologically because its literally emoticons for speaking/acting. You're welcome.
Oh wow. It always confused me how good the mask expressions looked, I thought surely it's practical?? Thanks for giving me the real answer!
I think it's funny that they gave Tom Holland's Spider-Man a mask with expressive eyes and yet they still have him take it off constantly.
If there is a will, there is a way. And persistence found a new way. BRILLIANT 🔥🤘😆👍🔥
Classic example of creative engineering through limited resources.
1:26, it surprises me you saying that, because I think this is one of the few Super Hero movies that had the most use of the mask, I think the movies has a lot of sequences with spider man with the mask on, except at the end or maybe in specific scenes.
I think Deadpool does that a lot more, specially in the second movie, where he is always without a mask for no reason.
Wow! Always awesome to see what people can come up with when working with a limited budget. Very creative solution that paid off
That's CRAZY! I had no idea! The ingenuity of some people is truly amazing!
It's honestly a genius way to save time and money on the post workflow, but personally speaking it's still an uncanny, hyper real detail that takes me out of my suspension of disbelief. Weird line to draw in a comic book movie, I know, but it is what it is. Other characters emote through their masks in the latest Deadpool movie too and I felt like I was watching a cartoon instead of a live action movie.
This is crazy. I was just thinking about this last night about the faces he was making under his mask.
So its frame by frame image manipulation using a 3D render as the movement targets for points against the mask on the original footage. I don't even think there was any lighting from the render like you said, its literally moving points in reverse from a 3D source! Thats why the mask looks real, because it IS real. Beautiful!
All I ask is that you make more videos. This shit is great.
Amazing what a person can do when their budget is limited. Impressive solution
The best actors are those who can act and be loved with a mask on.
I was taught if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything… but 9 minutes before answering the question the title asks is wild.
I never understood that phrase, what if the truth isn'tnice?
Being work in movie industry, really-really push your creativity out of your brain even further & found a solutions out of the box
Nice video, this was interesting and just what I searched for
Ummmm spideys mask, at least for Tobey's films, has a solid shell in the front, that's why his jaw doesn't move at all when he speaks
and then there's the kamen rider wizard hurricane form laundry short that conveys so much more emotion with just a stationary mask.