How Does Deadpool's Mask Move?

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

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.

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.

I had no idea that's how they made the mask work. Brilliant!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You just waffled for 10 mins then finally got to the point

I knew they did some CGI trickery with the mask, but didn't know the details. Great breakdown of a pretty cool technique.

Aha! I had wondered how they did it. Thanks.

Me patiently hanging on at 5:29, eagerly anticipating the moment when the narrator of this video finally gets to the fucking point!

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.

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.

This was weird. The lens distortion tangent made no sense, as the actual technique has nothing to do with it. You talked about how much work went into a normal cgi shot, with one needing to track the footage, make a digital double, and composite everything in, but this technique also requires the footage to be tracked, also requires a digital double, and also requires everything to be composited.

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.

This guy managed to make a 3 minute script into an 11 minute video