Archive translation. This report was published in October 2021 and describes Digital Domain’s Masquerade 2.0 facial-capture work from that period. Capabilities, workflows and availability may have changed.
In brief: Digital Domain’s second-generation Masquerade facial-capture system played an important role in translating Josh Brolin’s performance into the facial animation of Marvel antagonist Thanos.
The technology was developed to capture and reconstruct detailed facial performance, helping the studio preserve the actor’s expressions while adapting them to a substantially different digital character. Masquerade 2.0 extended that work with a more advanced capture and processing pipeline.
Digital Domain also used related technology to recreate civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. for a TIME magazine project. That application demonstrated how the system could support historically grounded digital-human work as well as fictional characters.
Martin Luther King Jr.: Recreating an Icon in Virtual Reality
