The Outsider

The Outsider is HBO’s 10-episode series based on Stephen King’s novel, starring Ben Mendelsohn as a detective facing a truly unexplainable crime. Mendelsohn plays police detective Ralph Anderson, who sets out to investigate the mutilated body of 11-year-old Frankie Peterson, found in the Georgia woods. The mysterious circumstances surrounding the horrifying crime lead Ralph — still grieving the recent death of his own son — to bring in unorthodox private investigator Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), whose uncanny abilities he hopes will help explain the unexplainable.

SCANable performed 3D body scanning of Jason Bateman and several other cast members for the series, capturing high-resolution photogrammetric data to support the show’s visual effects and digital double work.

Episodic work punishes inconsistency

A feature is one continuous problem. A ten-episode series is ten of them, shot over months, cut by different editors, and finished by visual effects teams working on overlapping schedules.

An asset that is close enough in episode two is not close enough by episode nine, because the errors do not average out — they accumulate into a character who subtly changes across the season. The audience will not identify the cause, but the sense that something is off is real.

Capturing a cast once, to a single standard, in one measured session removes that drift at the source. Every episode is then working from the same geometry rather than from separate approximations of the same person.

Scanning an ensemble, not a lead

Feature work often revolves around one or two principals. A series like this one has a large cast, and any of them may end up in a shot that requires a double long after the scanning day is over.

The economical approach is breadth: capture the ensemble to the same specification in one pass, rather than returning for individuals as the schedule reveals who is needed. A scan that is never used costs a few minutes. A scan that is needed and does not exist costs a sequence.

That is what a full-body scanning block on a series is for — coverage of the cast as a unit, not a bespoke session per actor.

Measured likeness versus sculpted likeness

A modeler working from photographs is making judgment calls constantly — about depth the images do not describe, about proportion the lens has distorted, about what a shadow is hiding.

Those judgments are individually small and collectively decisive. The result reads as a good likeness rather than as the person, and no amount of texture detail recovers what the geometry got wrong.

Photogrammetric capture removes the judgment. What is recorded is what was there, including the asymmetries and irregularities nobody would have chosen to model. See cyberscanning for how the arrays work, and Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios for how they reach a production on location.

See more television VFX work, or the full list of services.