Deadpool & Wolverine follows wisecracking mercenary Wade Wilson, a.k.a. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), as he discovers that a megalomaniac Time Variance Authority agent known as Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) is conspiring to speed up the death of his timeline in the multiverse. Determined to save his beloved Earth-10005, the “Merc with a Mouth” recruits a very reluctant Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) from an alternate universe. Amidst their heroic pursuits, the unlikely duo encounter the telepathic wrath of Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) and meet a massive corps of Deadpool variants — including the alluring Lady Deadpool and the adorable Dogpool.
Marking the official Marvel Cinematic Universe debut of its titular characters, the action-packed comedy follows 20th Century Fox’s previous pair of Deadpool installments. After surpassing $1.3 billion at the box office, it dethroned 2019’s Joker as the highest grossing R-rated film of all time.
Directed by Shawn Levy, the film achieved its signature blend of stylized violence, fourth wall-busting humor and multiversal mayhem thanks to visual effects wizardry by Framestore. The award-winning studio’s teams in Vancouver, Montreal, London, Mumbai and Melbourne delivered over 420 final VFX shots and 900-plus previs, techvis and postvis shots for the project.
Framestore VFX supervisor Matthew Twyford, who previously leant his talents to Thor: Love and Thunder and the Loki series, shared an inside look at bringing Deadpool & Wolverine’s most memorable moments to life.
What interested you most about this project when you first signed on?
“It was actually the people involved. I’d worked previously with Lisa Marra, the visual effects producer on Thor 4, and really enjoyed that process. It was a similar sort of show — something that had a bit of a sense of humor, but with the fantastic sort of mythology and science and craziness that you get from Marvel. Most visual effects artists want to do Marvel shows because they’re always pushing the limits of what can be achieved visually. They always seem to come up with new ideas — new things that have never been done before.”
With teams spread out across the globe, how did you set up such a large-scale, collaborative workflow?
“Communication is so important. We’ve been working multi-site now for over ten years, so we’ve got a strong infrastructure in place. I personally traveled out to Vancouver. They had the majority of the show, so that’s where we decided to set up our hub. Every site had a defined project to look after. We ended up having four distinct visual effects supervisors (Matthew Twyford, Robert Allman, Arek Komorowski and João Sita) because we could break it up quite nicely into discrete areas.
“The team that (visualization supervisor) Kaya Jabar and FPS (Framestore Pre-Production Services) put together really gelled well with the director and (overall VFX supervisor) Swen Gillberg. They were so open to collaboration, which allowed the artists to really bloom and bring personal contributions — more so than I’ve seen on any other show.
“Because Swen has such a history with the director and the production team, there was a lot of trust there. Also, being the third movie in a franchise, everyone knows what the feeling is — the scene’s been set. The majority of the artists are just massive fans, and to be honest, Marvel nerds. They are masters of the genre. They know what it’s about, and they can bring so much to the game if you let them.”
The opening credits set the stage for the film’s over-the-top visuals and wild sense of humor. Tell us about crafting this memorable sequence.
“It was a sequence that started off very strongly out of previs and postvis. It was the first sequence to be shot, and was actually shot before the strike. We knew what we were doing creatively, but the preparation, the body tracking, the environmental work, all had to be very meticulous — and meticulous means time.
“Our models for Deadpool and the Minutemen were all looking fantastic at that stage, which allowed us to spend time on the simulations. Swen had already given us the brief, ‘You can go a little bit crazy on this…We think the movie’s going to handle it.’ So we went massively over the top. The cinematic style, the tight shots, the re-times…It made it very graphic and really echoed those comic frames.
“The blood was beautifully art directed to do certain shapes. The artists were looking at Jackson Pollock paintings, and we were trying to make everything very cinematic. That beautiful snowy backdrop with the bright red blood…it really makes it pop. It is horribly violent, but we gave it that slightly — I would say ‘comic’ in terms of the genre of comics rather than the comedic — touches, to take the edge off the grossness, the violence, the goriness of it. That allowed us to have that volume of blood because it made it a little less…icky. It allowed us to push that further without it becoming a little disturbing, which it could easily have been.
“Shawn wanted to make it feel almost blasphemous, the way Deadpool was abusing Wolverine’s skeleton. He wanted people to react. The way he’s using blunt bones as stabbing weapons — you not only had stabs, but blunt-force trauma. It was all very tongue-in-cheek. Even though these guys are wearing armor, we were shattering huge shards of it everywhere. Putting the credits on the bones was another lovely touch. It allowed you to step back for a moment and reset…and then it’s back to the violence. It allowed us to have some real fun while also definitely being in the R-rated category.
“The dancing actually came along later. The original sequence was just more of the blood and violence. I think the dancing was just to take you away from the violence a little, to lighten the atmosphere. The performance was outstanding, and it linked to a few little bits in the backstory of Deadpool. Marvel is a master of chaining things together.”
How did you orchestrate the massive Deadpool Corps sequence?
“A huge amount of preparation went into that, and the whole sequence is well over 200 shots — some very complicated visual effects, which are effectively invisible on-screen. We knew we were never going to have hundreds of Deadpools. We had somewhere between 30 and 50, depending on how available the stunt guys were.
“We used traditional crowd replication techniques, and we shot with blue screen so we could do split screens and top-ups as well. In the end, 90 percent of it is elements of plate. We did add in some digital doubles, but they were always for a specific reason: story development, a bit of extra humor and the usual sort of Marvel — I wouldn’t say Easter eggs — but that little bit of everything linking together and having a reason.
“The shoot was quite intense because shooting multiple plates, exterior, in British wintertime, was very challenging. It was bitter and miserable out there in Pinewood in the middle of December. Everyone was being a real trooper. The crew were fantastic. You could see their trust in Swen. They were so comfortable with the visual effects requests and requirements.
“I was very lucky to be on-set, and invited along for that period and see all that preparation that they put in come through. We were very lucky that we were shooting what we’d seen on storyboard and on the previs. They were churning out all those costumes, and there was a constant train of Deadpool variants going off to the scanning booth. Everyone really got into the groove and had a great understanding of what was required.”
Tell us about your work on Dogpool, the fan-favorite variant who undeniably stole the show.
“Peggy, which is her real name, was great. She was obviously a massive favorite on-set with the crew. We’d originally built a very high-quality digi double for her because she was expected to do so much, and there’s only one of her. She’s obviously very unique, so you can’t have a series of dogs in case she gets tired.
“She had to wear a superhero outfit, do stunts and be in an environment with hundreds of people, running around pyro explosions. It turned out Peggy did everything. She wore the outfit. She did the stunts. She was fantastic with the special effects and the pyro. She was great with all the people running around. She was obviously fantastic with Ryan, and all of that interaction was great.
“We got everything in-camera, but there were a few things we thought we could work out a little bit more. There were a few uses for the digi double, but 99 percent was her, and she was fantastic. The goggles were in the original artwork, but they looked completely different. They only came back after everything had been shot. It was new artwork, newly-designed goggles. We did a quick digital version and stuck it on. You lose a bit of her character because she has so much fur in front of her eyes, which is a shame because she has beautiful eyes. We couldn’t use the plate eyes because they’re still covered, so we used our digital eyes because we’ve got a great model of her.
“Then there was a suggestion from Marvel: ‘Why don’t we magnify them? Give them that slightly Mr. Magoo cartoon look?’ They actually gave us a cartoon as reference. We had to thicken up the glass because we’re using a physics-based renderer. We had to do it with real glass mathematics and force the optical refractions. We matched her performance and did tests. We said, ‘It’s going to work, but can you make her look over there?’ That opened the doors for the animators to come in. It gave her this massive new boost of character because it meant we could actually make her react to the performances of Hugh, Ryan and all the other characters, and that was fantastic.”
How did you create the mind-bending Time Ripper sequences?
“Out of all the work we did, these are the ones that weren’t well defined when we started the visual effects. There was postvis for everything, which is great for the timing and the performances, but I don’t think we’d really locked down what it was going to look like. Marvel is great at coming up with words describing something that has never been seen before. Our job is to come up with the visuals.
“The big thing for us was Cassandra’s atomization, which we knew had to be really close up. We’ve got a fantastic digital double of Emma. We had to build all the subsurface stuff — skull, brains, everything — because we knew we would have to disintegrate her. She was fantastic in the scanning machine — sitting in there with that many strobe lights is really quite distressing.
“We went through this whole process of what ‘atomization’ was. We were running all sorts of things: videos of sandblasting fruits and using jets on faces. Her disintegration evolved and changed. As I said in some of my notes, she died a thousand deaths in our machines. We came up with so many different ways to disintegrate her, shred her...The final result is five or six different techniques all blended together. We got a full :20 sequence of her just slowly disintegrating…and then it gets cut into very small cutaways in the film because it’s actually quite distressing in its entirety.
“The Time Ripper was always going to shatter and explode. Every single nut and bolt of that machine goes flying off and exploding everywhere. We thought, ‘Well, if she has this big reaction, then the environment is going to as well.’ You can see that it’s not just affecting her body, but it’s also tearing apart the room that they’re in.
“It was a constant evolution between the effects artists, and the supervisors and production. I think there were a lot of ideas that were left as renders, which will come back in future films. There were a lot of good ideas, which I think we have banked, which is great.
“Downstairs, what was happening to Deadpool and Wolverine was interesting because we knew it had to be extremely dangerous, extremely painful. You had to really think that these guys were not going to walk away from this. But, of course, they are a slight level removed from Cassandra’s experience upstairs, who is getting the full force of it.
“We worked on them getting superheated internally, generating a sort of internal plasma, which then starts to burst and crack through — that their innate healing was counteracting. You had this horrible cycle of them burning up internally but being healed, and it’s just getting worse and worse until you could feel it overwhelming their superpowers. Deadpool is completely covered in a costume, while Wolverine by this point was partially unclothed, so we had to design two completely-different effects to show the same story.
“Then, eventually, we got the whole environment to fall apart and break away, just like we did upstairs, which allowed us to break everything. I think there were something like 30 or 40 separate effects passes and simulations all going on at the same time to make it feel like a super dangerous environment that only a superhero would last seconds in, let alone walk away from.”
When Cassandra invades Paradox’s mind, we see her fingers emerge from his face in a very surreal fashion. Tell us about crafting these unsettling visuals.
“This was the biggest technical challenge for us. We know our way around full photoreal humans. We can do full-screen with performance, even dialogue. You would never know it’s a digi double. We’ve got 30 years of evolution on our pipeline to make that absolutely work. But now we had to shove a hand through the middle of one of these faces and break everything down. Everything we’ve done is to make it photoreal — to make the bone structures, and the muscles and the skin all work in a realistic way for a normal human.
“Now, we’re going to have to take all of that and really push it and distort it in ways that are not like a human at all. She’s pushing her hand through the skull, it intersects through the skin and it comes out through a nostril, but ignores the teeth. The logic in it is completely bonkers. But we needed people to believe that she was doing this thing, and we wanted everyone to feel like that was the last place in the world they wanted to be — in Paradox’s shoes with Cassandra rummaging around the inside of his head, just in an awful way.
“We literally had one comic book frame of what they wanted it to look like, and we knew it was a full dialogue sequence. Paradox was actually talking. Cassandra was chatting away. We knew it would be close up and the shots were going to be long. We knew our digi double was good, but all the dynamics, facial controls — everything had to be completely rebuilt from scratch. We had to invert our whole process.
“Usually, we put all the simulations on the backend because you want everything to be working: the animation, the dialogue...Then you run the simulations over the top of it to get the skin, the little wrinkles, all that nice stuff. But we knew that if we ran the simulations at the backend, the client would never see what they were going to get until right at the very end.
“I wanted to get into a position where I could present, as early as possible, what was happening to his face, her fingers, her hands. Our hands are fully-CG, fully-animated, but what was happening with the face is very much a mixture of Matthew’s performance — this brutal intrusion into his physiology — and then how he is reacting to that, because he didn’t know what the animation was going to be like. We were using cues from his other performances to know what he might do when this happened.
“We had to get the big performance beats in the animation so we could fast iterate that and get feedback. All those massive deformations were now controlled by the animators, because a lot of that could never be simulated. You could only do it with an animator having some fun. We could get them to sign off on all the really big stuff, and then we could give it to the simulators and effects artists to make it all link together. After we made it feel unreal, we needed it to feel real again.
“We knew very early on that it was going to work, but we also knew it meant 15 years of pipeline work had to go in the bin and be rebuilt in six months.”
Which programs and tools were most vital to your team’s VFX workflow?
“We used pretty much the full gamut. For the main visual effects, we very much relied on the big three, which are Maya, Houdini and Nuke. For things like visualization, we’re definitely using a lot more Blender now. That’s been fully incorporated into our pipeline.
“We’re used to having multiple vendor shows, but now shared vendor shots are much more commonplace. With Marvel, it’s a normal thing now to be sharing not just shots, but assets as well. So over the last ten years, we’ve slowly worked our way back from highly-proprietary tools, because it makes it very difficult to work with other vendors.
“Now we’re using much more open-source tools and exchange formats because we know we’re going to be working with other vendors a lot. We can share assets much faster and rely on the skills of the artists to get us through the unique scenarios.
“We love challenging shows. We very much put ourselves forward and say, ‘If you’ve got something that’s really tricky, we’re up for it.’ We’ve built a team who have the skillset to do new and interesting things. We want to be there challenging those very fringes and pushing the envelopes because that’s what we built a team around, and that’s what that team wants to do.”
Do you have any advice for up-and-coming VFX artists?
“I was a head of department for 2D for many years at Framestore, so I was looking at showreels — for compositors, in particular — probably by the thousands. Showreels are very important. We’re not looking for people being clever and pushing the boundaries on their showreels. We’re looking for quality and consistency. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done the most fantastic shot in the world, if it’s not done professionally. If you’ve done a hundred boring blue-screen shots, but they look really well put together — we like that.
“So it’s not about showing off. It’s about showing your professionalism. The flashy stuff will come with time, because it always does. In the meantime, we’ve got 100 shots and 90 of them are bread-and-butter, need-to-look-perfect shots. We need to impress our clients with how clean, tidy and professional we are.”