Marvel’s Jessica Jones

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is the Netflix series starring Krysten Ritter as a former superhero turned private detective, which premiered November 20, 2015. Created by Melissa Rosenberg and based on the Marvel Comics character, the series is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and is the second of the shows leading up to the Defenders crossover miniseries, produced by Marvel Television in association with ABC Studios and Tall Girls Productions. Mike Colter, Rachael Taylor, Wil Traval, Erin Moriarty, Eka Darville, Carrie-Anne Moss and David Tennant co-star. Filmed in New York City from February to late August 2015, the series earned critical acclaim for Ritter’s and Tennant’s performances, its noir tone and its unflinching approach to darker subject matter.

SCANable provided various 3D scans for the acclaimed series, including full body scans of Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Kilgrave (David Tennant) — photogrammetric digital doubles supporting Shade VFX’s work behind the visuals.

Coverage no actor can safely deliver

Superhero material generates coverage that no actor can safely deliver. Impacts, falls, throws, and anything staged at a height or a speed a body should not experience.

The traditional answer is a stunt performer, and it still is for most of it. But stunt work has limits too, and the shots beyond those limits are where a digital double earns its cost.

Those cuts sit directly against real coverage of the same character, often within the same scene. The double is not being compared with an idea of the actor — it is being compared with the actor, seconds earlier. Digital doubles built from measured capture are the only version that survives that cut.

A scan is a single instant, or it is an average

Any capture method that sweeps, rotates, or takes multiple passes is recording a subject over a span of time. People are not static over a span of time. Breathing, micro-adjustments of balance, the slow settle of a held pose — all of it accumulates into the reconstruction.

The visible result is soft geometry, and it appears exactly where softness is least acceptable: the face, the shoulders, the line of the jaw.

Firing every camera in an array at the same instant eliminates the cause rather than treating the symptom. There is one moment, described from every angle simultaneously, and nothing to average. That principle is the whole point of cyberscanning.

Clothing is not a surface property

Characters in a grounded series are defined by what they wear as much as by how they look, and clothing is not a surface property. It is volume, drape, thickness at a collar, the way a jacket hangs away from the body rather than lying against it.

A digital double dressed by texturing a nude scan reads as painted-on, because the silhouette is wrong. Silhouette is what an audience actually reads at distance and in motion.

Capturing a performer in costume records the garment as the three-dimensional object it is, so the double’s outline matches the character’s on every frame it appears in. Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios deploy to the production so that scanning in full wardrobe is practical between setups.

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