VFX Artist Reveals How Marvel Perfectly Revived Chris Evans’ Human Torch in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’

The success of ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ can in large part be attributed to the presence of legacy characters and a generous amount of fan service. One character that fans did not expect to see in the movie was Chris Evans’ Human Torch who appeared in ‘Fantastic Four’ released in 2005, and ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’ released in 2007.

Both movies were flawed and weren’t all that successful, especially when you compared them with today’s major superhero releases, however, one aspect of Evans’ character was praised even back then, his flames.

A group of VFX experts called Corridor Crew shared a video on YouTube reviewing good and bad CGI in movies. Around 14:41 in the video, they praised the CGI in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine,’ especially the fire effects for the Human Torch.

One of them, Niko, noticed the fire effects looked very similar to the ones from the original ‘Fantastic Four’ movies. They then showed a clip of Johnny Storm from those films to explain their point.

Niko: Now the question I want to ask you guys, did they do the original ‘Fantastic Four’ fire effect?
Oh, interesting, it does look based on my dusty recollection – very similar
It does look very similar.

Like it may be slightly updated but, yeah. The heart is still there. So like the old ‘Fantastic Four’ fire effect because of the way you had to like render the fire you had to kind of like artificially tell it to be like “make this part bright, make this part dark.” Feels like the same effect.

It does feel like they’re trying to be very true to the original style.
It almost looks like it’s plate photography of fire composited on.
And I will say too for this entire movie what often gets dramatically overlooked in every major blockbuster is the environment work.

Like it’s crazy how much, you don’t even register it even when you’re visual effect artist, you don’t even think about it when you’re watching the movie, which is obviously the goal. But, it’s like they built the whole world in the sheer amount of like full CG takeovers.

Wow, that’s 100 % CG it’s just we’re in the “you can do it” era now.
This was interesting, they have real footage but then they have a full CG replica, and they combined them for some reason.

I guess it’s because they relit the whole thing. They’re taking the raw plate, they’re pulling an Albedo channel aka the color, they’re pulling the luminance AKA you know shading, and high pass which is probably for the detail noise. And then making a rough CG version of it possibly from a photo scan, lighting that and then it’s taking that lighting pass and putting on top of the real footage to change the lighting.

But they have real footage broken out to the different channels so they can manipulate it.

Now you’ve heard it from the pros, Human Torch’s CGI in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ was a work of art, no matter how brief the scene was a lot of effort was put into it. The choice to mimic the 2000s movies fits well, as ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ closely follows the original source material, showing even more respect for Johnny Storm than expected.

You can check out the whole video below:

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