Ever since he made his cinematic debut in the post-credits scene for Marvel’s Avengers, Thanos has had a unique and ongoing part in our pop culture lexicon. The purple-hued titan has grown from a formidable comic character to a major cinematic foe, especially after his presence in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Understandably, Marvel fans have gone to some pretty creative lengths to pay tribute to the character — but a new one might be one of the most inspired yet. TikTok user woolymcwoolface recently went viral for her life-size model of Thanos, which she created entirely through knitting. In addition to multiple progress posts on her Instagram, she chronicled the journey in a series of TikTok videos, a compilation of which has since gone viral.
Videos by ComicBook.com
As she reveals in her full reveal of the Thanos model, the process of creating him took four months, 4kg of yarn, and an absurd amount of stuffing.
This certainly isn’t the first knitting-themed tribute to the Mad Titan – with countless knitted recreations of the Infinity Gauntlet popping up over the years. But woolymcwoolface’s model is definitely a whole other level of epic, not only for the level of time and effort that went into it, but also for how brilliantly it conveys the stature and size of Thanos.
“Obviously, we’re working off motion capture from Josh Brolin and then the big fight sequences often we’re working off motion capture of stunt performers,” Weta Digital visual effects supervisor Matt Aitken told ComicBook.com last year. “But at the same time, we need to take that captured motion and extend it through keyframe animation to really find Thanos in the performance. The thing with Thanos is that he’s eight feet tall. He’s massive. He’s incredibly powerful. So there had to be a process of us layering Thanos on top of the motion that we did, off of our motion capture from these more human-scaled performers. That’s what we call finding the body mechanic and the motion capture performance and that’s a keyframe animation process.”
“There’s definitely that aspect of it, we dial Thanos into the motion-capture performance, we’re finding this new Thanos through that process,” Aitken continued. “But there were also some technical changes we made to how he was set up, which was really not so much about making him a different Thanos, but just improving the Thanos that we had used from Infinity War.“
What do you think of this life-size knitted tribute to Thanos? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
