American Sniper

American Sniper is Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning 2015 film about Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, whose pinpoint accuracy made him a battlefield legend. Kyle’s skill saves countless lives on the battlefield, but back home with his wife and kids after four tours of duty, he finds that it is the war he can’t leave behind.

The SCANable team in New York City provided on-location 3D face scans of Jake McDorman, who plays Ryan “Biggles” Job in the film. That photogrammetric head-scan data was used by the visual effects team to supplement the appearance of the wounds his character sustains from a gunshot to the face.

Damage is built on an undamaged baseline

Injury and prosthetic work in visual effects is as often subtractive as additive. Something is being altered on a face the audience has already spent an hour looking at intact.

It only holds together if there is an accurate record of the undamaged face to work from — true proportions, real asymmetry, the actual shape of the structure underneath. Modelled damage applied to a modelled head compounds two approximations, and the result tends to sit on the face rather than in it.

A measured head scan hands the effects team a surface that is already correct, so the only thing being invented is the change itself.

Faces are the highest bar a scan gets held to

People are specialists in faces. They read them constantly, from infancy, at every distance and under every kind of light.

Nothing else in a frame carries that level of scrutiny. A slightly wrong building is still a building. A slightly wrong face is unsettling, and an audience registers the wrongness well before anyone can name what caused it.

Which is why facial work sets the standard for the whole discipline. Capture resolution, geometric accuracy, relightable diffuse and specular texture — the requirements that look excessive for a prop or a wall are exactly right for a face.

Capture that travels to the production

Actors are the least movable element of a shooting schedule. They are on set, in the makeup chair, or released for the day, and a scan session competes with all three.

Asking talent to travel to a facility adds a day nobody has budgeted. Bringing the array to the production removes it — capture happens between setups, in the city where the unit already is, in whatever state of hair, makeup and wardrobe the film requires that week.

Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios exist for that reason, and everything ships after retopology, texturing and render-ready builds.

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