Deadpool & Wolverine | The Visual Effects of Cassandra Nova's Powers
Get a behind-the-scenes look at how Cassandra Nova’s fingers go under people’s skin and in their minds, with Deadpool & Wolverine VFX Supervisor Swen Gillberg.
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00:00One of the highlight scenes of Hands Through Face would be a scene with
00:04Cassandra's hands going through Mr. Paradox's face. You literally see every
00:08pore on his face. It's fantastic effects. Very, very cringeworthy.
00:15In our development process we played with different skin thicknesses and I
00:19liked it thinner because we actually want to start seeing the details of her
00:23like knuckles in his skin. There's definitely a skull in those heads and
00:28she definitely works around it and then when the fingers go over the eyeballs
00:32the eyeballs pop out and it's it's great.
00:41So for Hands Through Face, Sean and the VFX team started out with comic book reference.
00:45There's some key comic book frames that we really tried to match where it goes
00:50straight up through here and her fingers like to come out the nostrils and the
00:53eyeballs and the ears. Whenever we are replacing limbs or replacing faces we'll
01:00often put tracking markers on. Emma's hand has to go somewhere so we would
01:04just put it off to the side or this side or out of frame. Then we would do clean
01:09plates on the day to clean up the arm of the hand and then in post we would do a
01:13fully digital hand and arm and then into a mostly digital Matthew McFadyen face.
01:19Then we go into detailed animation and that would be getting the details of the
01:24fingers sliding over the skull just right, getting it over the forehead and
01:29dipping into the eye socket that kind of thing. And then we go into a final
01:33detailed sculpting and creature pass and that's where you really would figure out
01:38like if she was wearing a ring you would see the ring in there or the knuckle.
01:41Ring please. Oh my god.
01:45Our heroes go to Cassandra's lair twice. The first time they go that's when
01:49Cassandra meets them all and when she puts her hands through Deadpool's face.
01:53The second time they go we call it the assault and it's the big battle near the
01:57end of the movie. That's when Wolvie gets his hands-through-face routine.
02:01What's going on in here?
02:06The assault is a really great example of just a huge collaboration between stunts, camera
02:11department, visual effects, props, everything. For a superhero movie we tried
02:15to keep the whole movie fairly grounded. Whenever we can do live-action stunts we
02:20do them always as much as we can.
02:24Emma's performance really nailed Cassandra. They just absolutely crushed it.
02:29It's really really one of the best villains I've seen in a long time.
02:32Basically a complex psychopath but a villain that we all have grown to love, to hate.
02:37Why is this so silly?