From survey stakes to sound stages.

MONTGOMERY, TEXAS

The drafting table came before the degree.

Travis grew up in small-town Texas as a land surveyor’s son. He finished high school at home, which meant schoolwork in the mornings and AutoCAD in the afternoons, drawing up his father’s surveys. He was good at the drawing. He hated the field: swinging a machete through the brush, driving stakes, mosquitoes, ticks, and water moccasins.

At eighteen a Woodlands engineering firm hired him as a junior CAD draftsman. Two months later he was the CAD manager. There was no degree behind it, and that mattered more than anyone knew — without one to fall back on, he felt permanent pressure to prove himself. The answer to every request became the same three words: yeah, I can do that. Then he would go figure out how.

MID-NINETIES

Selling a place that didn’t exist yet.

Working for the operating company behind one of the largest master-planned communities in the country, he taught himself 3D animation and video editing and started building walkthroughs of land that had not been cleared — golf courses rendered from a designer’s routing plan, homes flown through before the slab was poured, a single waterway bus-stop awning that took three days to model.

It was the first version of the thing he still does: build a believable version of a place, and let someone make a decision inside it. Decades later the clients are visual effects supervisors instead of developers, and the places are real instead of proposed. The job description barely moved.

SRC / MEASURED ARCHITECTURE / SCAN TO MODEL

1999 / THE MACHINE

“Lazy man surveying.”

In 1999 he started reading about something called 3D laser scanning. The first commercial system had just arrived from Cyra Technologies — the Cyrax — and the pitch landed on him like a personal message. No machete. No stakes. Point the instrument at the world and it returns the world.

He called it lazy man surveying, and he meant it as praise. It is basically taking a 3D picture. That instinct — find the version of this that takes a fraction of the time — is the single most consistent thing about how SCANable builds anything, and it is the direct ancestor of a studio that drives to your stage instead of asking your actor to drive to it.

The work in those years was industrial and historical: plants, structures, and old buildings scanned so their ornate detail survived whatever happened to them next. He still describes what SCANable does that way — historical preservation. A set gets struck and it is never the same again. The scan is the only version that outlives it.

2012 / THE LAST DAY

The company started with a phone call he almost missed.

He landed what he calls his dream job — chief operating officer at a global laser-scanning manufacturer. Eleven months in, the company was acquired and the position was redundant. Offered a sales role at half the salary, he took the severance instead.

On his last day, walking out the door with a box, an assistant called him back: a client he had worked with for years was on the phone with a project in Dallas. It paid well enough to get the family through the holidays. SCANable was incorporated in November 2012. The next month, a call came in about a commercial shoot in Mexico City — PlayStation’s “Greatness Awaits.” That was the first job in entertainment, and it was an accident.

THE NAME

scanable.com was a blog before it was a company.

Years before there was a company to attach it to, he bought the domain for about $1,200 and ran it as an industry news site. No product, no pitch — just everything he was learning about laser scanning, published as he learned it, on the theory that the way you establish yourself as an industry leader is to share what you know. It was read globally, and it is why the name was already worth something on the day the company needed one.

That is also why this site still runs a deep archive of industry writing that has nothing to do with selling anything.

2017 / WATCHMEN

He said yes, then learned what genlock meant.

HBO’s Watchmen came with a problem nobody had solved for them: the show needed holograms, and it needed them in about two weeks. Typical fashion — he said yes, hung up, and started figuring it out.

The answer was a twelve-camera 6K array shooting in the round, inside a 360° green screen the grip team built to spec. The part he did not know going in was genlock — not just triggering cameras together but locking their shutters to one clock, so twelve angles are one instant instead of twelve nearly-instants. It is the difference between a volume that is measured and one that is averaged, and it is still the hard requirement behind every 4D shot we take.

The job was a day of shooting after weeks of prep, and it barely broke even — he priced it for the learning. That array became C.A.L.V.I.N.N., and the whole story is on the hologram capture page.

SRC / GENLOCKED ARRAY / IN THE ROUND

BROOKLYN

The first photogrammetry rig was built in his house.

The next ask was a full-body scan of an actor in New York. There was no rig, so he built one — about thirty cameras, assembled and tested in his own house in Tomball, Texas, then broken down, shipped to Brooklyn, and rebuilt over a day in an old Pfizer building. It worked.

The New York mobile studio is based out of that same neighborhood today, which is either a coincidence or the industry’s sense of humor. What mattered at the time was the conclusion he drew walking out: if thirty cameras work, more will work. Our current arrays run 150+.

SRC / PHOTOGRAMMETRY ARRAY / 150+ CAMERAS

2020 / THE TRAILER

Nobody planned a mobile studio.

Marvel productions in Atlanta had locations where actors could not come to a scanning space, and asked whether the scanning space could come to them. The honest answer was that a rig built for a ten-foot room would have to survive being folded into something eight and a half feet wide, on a highway.

So he bought a stacker trailer, gutted it, blacked it out, and spent a weekend of sixteen-hour days hoping it would still work on the other end of the drive. The first job it ever ran was for Netflix, twenty-odd miles up the road, with no proof it would survive the trip. It did. Production got their scans without giving up stage space, and the Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios existed.

The fleet grew from there, including one built from bare steel — axles, air ride, gooseneck, the whole thing — with a fabricator in Atlanta, purpose-designed instead of retrofitted. The details that get remembered are not the cameras: a hydraulic floor so the rig meets any performer at their own height, sound, lighting, and scent. Talent walks in and stops feeling like an asset being processed. Some of them stay and hang out after the capture is done, which is the highest review the work gets.

SRC / MOBILE CYBERSCAN STUDIO / ON LOCATION

THE CRAFT

The goal is that you never notice.

Ask him what the work is actually for and he does not talk about resolution. “If it’s not believable — if you do anything to take somebody out of the story — you failed.” A digital double exists so the audience never wonders whether that was really the actor going down the stairwell. A set extension exists so nobody counts the floors. The best outcome is that no one thinks about us at all.

That is also the standard for how a crew behaves on a stage. Visual effects teams arrive with budget pressure, schedule changes, and problems that were not theirs an hour ago. The instruction he gives everyone at SCANable is one sentence: make their day easier. Tell us the gag, point us at the right AD, and go do your job.

SRC / DIGITAL DOUBLE / FINISHED ASSET

2023

Seven months with the industry switched off.

The strikes stopped everything. For a company whose equipment is useful almost nowhere else, seven months without production is not a slow patch — it is an open question about whether there is a company on the other side. He describes it as the hardest thing he has been through, and he was carrying employees, family, and a fleet through it.

What got everyone across was not a strategy. It was that the people who hire us are, for the most part, people we know — supervisors and producers who have worked with this crew for years, and who behaved like it when it counted. The industry looks enormous from outside. From inside it is a small town, and reputation compounds in both directions.

WHAT HE ACTUALLY BELIEVES

Four things, repeated until they stuck.

• The greatest talent is availabilityBorrowed from his father-in-law’s pulpit. Roughly all of what we get paid for is being there, ready, when the schedule moves.
• Never be afraid of failureEvery problem solved on set traces back to something that broke decades earlier and taught him how it works.
• Follow the opportunity, not the planHe has never been a five-year-plan person. Twice he walked away from inheriting a survey company the night before starting.
• Make everyone else’s job easierWe are a small part of a big machine. If our part adds friction, we did it wrong regardless of how the data looks.

[ FOUNDED NOV 2012 / ENGINEERING-LED / STILL ON SET ]

THE LONG VERSION

Hear it in his own words.

Most of this page comes from an hour-long conversation on our own channel — Survey Stakes to Sound Stages — covering the early career, the first Hollywood jobs, the rigs, and a fair number of stories that did not make it here.

Watch the episode →

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