What an honor to be invited back to work on Deadpool & Wolverine.
My team and I had the unique privilege of pitching concepts and ideas to the one and only Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy for the opening sequence of their film.
My favorite aspect of the Deadpool character is his ability to break the fourth wall and become ultra aware that he’s in the middle of an action scene in a Marvel movie. I felt strongly that if Deadpool consciously knows that he is in this fight scene that is being cut to Bye Bye Bye, he might just feel inclined to bust out some of the iconic N’Sync dance moves while killing off the bad guys.
To try and sell this idea to the filmmakers, I taught myself how to do the Bye Bye Bye choreography via YouTube videos, and proceeded to record the moves while I was wearing a motion capture suit. After I retargeted the mocap data to our previs Deadpool character rig, I animated handheld camera moves to make it feel like shots out of a music video. There was a lot of creative exploration about what kind of environment the dancing moments would happen in, but the stylized hyper-real forest scene was everyone’s favorite. Ryan and Shawn thought it was hilarious, cracking up on the pitch call, and knew immediately it was going to work.
Shawn told me, “It’s a one in a million idea and you nailed it!”
Shortly after, they hired on Choreographer Nick Pauley to do the dance properly in the Deadpool suit and shoot it on blue screen. From there we brought the live action dance into the stylized 3D environment comps and animated custom camera moves in post.
We also knew that this high-octane fight scene deserved a lot more than just basic credits placed on top of it, so we developed the idea of having the credits be right in the middle of the action and even get in the way at some points. For example, when we see Deadpool go to kick the enemy, we see him kick through some of the credits as well, or his victims would crash into the typography, sending the letters scattering through the scene.
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