Fan Shows Warner Bros. How to Digitally Remove Henry Cavill’s Mustache

If you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere over the past six months, then let me fill you in…

Henry Cavill was in the midst of filming “Mission Impossible: Fallout” for Paramount Studios, in which his character sports a fairly prominent mustache. The problem was, Henry was also being asked to film reshoots as Superman for the “Justice League” movie for Warner Bros. Cavill was expected to be able to finish shooting the sixth “Mission Impossible” film before needing to don Superman’s spandex again. That didn’t happen, which required Henry to jump back and forth from each production. Paramount would not allow Cavill to shave the facial hair while production was taking place, which meant the mustache he grew for his character in the “Mission Impossible” sequel had to be digitally removed in post-production… and it didn’t look good.

Today, the people over at DeepFakes Club have released a video showing how they, with the purchase of a $500 used computer and their own free software, were able to teach an A.I. how to remove Henry Cavill’s mustache. They’ve used various sources of video footage to show the final result, even doing a better job on actual footage from the “Justice League” movie itself.

“While deepfaking usually involves swapping two faces,” explains the visual artist, “I instead trained the computer model on two different version, mustached and shaven, of the same face. The model did a decent job of removing Cavill’s mustache, at least as cleanly as the average rushed morning shaving session. Due to the inflexibility of the current blending functions in the deepfaking software, I saved the shaved images without any blurring or blending functions. I then masked the shaved mouths and combined them with the original clips in video editing software.”

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redcape
redcape
February 7, 2018 5:00 pm

Personally I don’t think either looks like Cavill.

MattComics
MattComics
February 7, 2018 9:52 pm

It’s just such an absurd and needless situation in the first place.

car2nst
car2nst
February 8, 2018 9:42 am

How long did it take this fan to have the mustache removed by tusing his/her $500 laptop and this program? The Studio was at the “crunch time” before the movie had to be finalized before shipping to Theaters when these reshot scenes were added, so time restraint does play a factor, not to mention I’m sure the fan did not have a 4k (or higher) digital master of the video files, since these images have to be projected on huge screens and most CGI are high renders. I agree what we got in the movie was subpar & could have… Read more »

kal-bert
kal-bert
February 8, 2018 8:06 pm
Reply to  car2nst

Well at this point we have 2 different videos: This one where you can clearly see it can be done better than it was. More expensive equipment combined with a team of dozens of professionals can cut production time in an extreme way. Then the 2nd one. Mike Habjan’s Superman vs Hulk. Yes, it took him nearly 4 years but…HE IS DOING IT COMPLETELY ALONE. A guy that has a job and a family and that can just work on it on his spare time. And it looks infinitely better than most of Superman’s CGI in JL. To be fair,… Read more »

car2nst
car2nst
February 9, 2018 12:52 pm
Reply to  kal-bert

The result of his removal does look pretty good…on a laptop screen @ the limit of the 720p video feed but I’d still like to see those results of this guys work on an Imax screen to actually judge the quality. Anytime you enlarge your image you loose clarity. Well I am sure it can be done I find it interesting people compare a $500 laptop to the $300 million production as if the entire budget went solely into that scene to make his point more negatively impactful. Yes, great things can be made on a short & small budget,… Read more »

kal-bert
kal-bert
February 9, 2018 7:39 pm
Reply to  car2nst

I agree in nearly everything you said. But the point of the “moustache” video wasn’t exactly that. The point was to show Warner that if they could do that with the equipment they had, imagine what could have Warner done with their million dollar tools and people working 9-5 everyday. I also agree with what you said about paying (Paramount? I don’t remember now) the fine for Henry shaving his moustache, but I’d think the actor wouldn’t want to go that way. It could be a problem for him and future jobs with the company. My way in that part… Read more »

Kal-Ed
February 10, 2018 2:35 am

Looks a wee bit better than the 300 million they spent hahahaha. Oh the irony.

What I can imagine is Henry jumping between studios for the reshoots and every time hip hopping back and forth from the WB to Paramount’s, the make up department and Paramaount’s executives would approach him and take a pinch out of Henry’s moustache just to know if it’s still on. ‘Yep. It’s real. Back to work.’

Superman2878
February 15, 2018 10:03 am

They both look the same to me.
I can still tell that the mustache is digitally removed. Maybe they should’ve thought of using this software instead of the one that they used to save money.