Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories is the 2020 streaming reimagining of the anthology series from visionary Steven Spielberg, who also executive produced for Amblin Television. The series transports audiences to worlds of wonder through the lens of today’s most imaginative filmmakers, directors and writers. It premiered on March 6, 2020.

SCANable performed 3D scans of sets, actors, props and other items for the series, delivering LiDAR capture, body scanning and 3D modeling to support the show’s visual effects work.

An anthology is a new production every episode

A continuing series builds a world once and then protects it. An anthology throws it away and starts again — new period, new cast, new sets, new rules for what is physically possible.

That changes what a scanning department is being asked for. There is no accumulating library to draw on and no second chance to go back for something that was missed, because the standing set for episode two does not exist by the time episode four is shooting.

Each block is treated as a self-contained capture: environments measured with LiDAR set scanning, principals recorded as full-body scans, and hero objects captured individually rather than sampled.

Delivering into somebody else’s pipeline

Anthology episodes are frequently divided among different visual effects vendors, and each one arrives with its own expectations for how geometry should be handed over.

Raw scan data is not a deliverable. What a vendor can actually use is a mesh with sane topology, UVs laid out to their convention, correct real-world scale, and a naming scheme that matches their asset tree. Getting that wrong costs a vendor days of remedial work and costs the production the schedule those days were meant to cover.

Our modeling and asset preparation exists to close that gap, so what ships is render-ready rather than merely accurate.

Reference data and hero assets are not the same job

Not everything captured on a show becomes something the audience sees. A large share of it is reference — geometry a VFX team uses to place, scale, light, or track something else correctly.

Reference is unglamorous and cheap to record on the day. It is also impossible to reconstruct once the set is gone, and its absence surfaces months later as a shot that cannot be tracked because nobody knows how far the back wall was from the camera.

Hero assets get the attention. Reference is what quietly keeps the rest of the work from stalling. Both come out of the same 3D scanning service, captured in the same session.

More television VFX work is in the portfolio, or read about how we capture.