Big George Foreman

Big George Foreman is Columbia Pictures’ 2023 feature film about the boxer’s rise, his faith and his record-breaking heavyweight comeback. Overcoming a childhood marked by poverty to become one of the most promising young boxers in the world, George Foreman suffers a near-death experience in the ring and vows never to fight again, becoming a Baptist minister and preacher. Years later, with bankruptcy looming over his struggling gym, he gets back in touch with his former trainer and becomes the oldest boxer in history to win the heavyweight championship.

SCANable provided LiDAR and 3D laser scanning of principal characters, backgrounds and props, delivering full-body scans and point-cloud data to support the film’s visual effects work.

What a point cloud actually gives you

A point cloud is not a picture and it is not a model. It is a set of measured coordinates — millions of positions in real space, each one a fact about where a surface was at the moment of capture.

That distinction matters because of what can be asked of it. A dimension can be queried. A camera can be solved against it. Two captures taken weeks apart can be compared to see whether anything moved.

None of that is possible with reference photography, however good. The photograph records appearance; the point cloud records the thing itself, which is why survey-grade spatial reference remains useful long after the visual reference has been superseded.

Relightable skin: diffuse and specular separation

Skin is difficult because it does two things at once. Some light scatters beneath the surface and comes back soft and coloured; some reflects off the oil and moisture on top of it and comes back sharp and white.

Capture that mixes the two produces a texture with highlights permanently baked into it, and an asset that only looks correct under the lighting it was scanned in.

Separating the components at capture — a cross-polarized pass for the diffuse response, an unpolarized pass to isolate the specular — yields a genuinely relightable texture. Our photometric capture work exists to produce exactly that, so an asset can be dropped into a hard practical key or a soft interior without being rebuilt.

One life, several physical states

A biographical film covering decades asks a performer to appear in noticeably different physical condition across the running time, sometimes on the same day of shooting.

For scanning, that means the subject is not one asset but several. A capture taken during one phase of production does not necessarily describe the performer as they appear in a scene shot six weeks later.

Planning around that — capturing to a schedule that follows the film’s chronology rather than the crew’s convenience — is what keeps the digital and photographed versions consistent. Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios make repeat captures practical, since the rig comes to the production instead of the production coming to it.

See more feature film work, or read about the services behind it.