Elevation

Elevation is a 2024 post-apocalyptic action thriller from Lyrical Media, directed by George Nolfi and starring Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin. Written by John Glenn, Jacob Roman, and Kenny Ryan, with Maddie Hasson co-starring, the film follows a single father and two women who must leave the safety of their home and face monstrous creatures to save the life of a child.

SCANable provided terrestrial LiDAR scanning and aerial photogrammetry of several sets and props for the production. Our scan data was used for camera tracking and matchmoving in support of the film’s additional visual effects, giving the VFX team accurate environments to build on.

A creature has to touch the ground

Digital creatures fail on contact. Not on design, not on animation — on the specific moment where a foot meets a surface, a body passes behind a rock, or a shadow falls across uneven terrain.

All three of those are geometry problems. Contact requires knowing where the ground is to within a few centimeters. Occlusion requires knowing what is nearer than what. A shadow requires a surface with a real slope to land on.

Measured environment data answers all of them from the same dataset, and it answers them consistently across every shot in a sequence rather than shot by shot in comp.

Steep ground is a coverage problem

Flat locations are forgiving. A slope is not. From any single position, a rise hides what is behind it and a drop hides what is below it, so the number of scan positions required climbs quickly with the gradient.

Terrain also removes the easy answer of simply walking further. Sightlines that would take thirty seconds to fill on level ground can take a long detour in real country.

Combining terrestrial coverage with aerial photogrammetry resolves this efficiently: the ground-based instrument handles what is near and detailed, and flown coverage fills the slopes, the ridge tops, and everything the tripod could not see past.

What the matchmove department actually needs

Tracking is often described as though it happens purely in software. In practice it is a fitting exercise, and it needs something to fit to.

Useful tracking data means a registered point cloud at real-world scale, with known units and a known orientation, plus survey reference for the fixed features an artist can lock a solve against. Not a pretty mesh. Not a decimated approximation. The measurements.

Given that, a solve converges quickly and holds through the shot. Without it, an artist spends their time arguing with a solution that looks correct on one frame and slides on the next. Our set and location scanning is specified around what tracking and layout consume.

The window on an exterior closes

Outdoor capture runs on borrowed conditions. Light changes, weather arrives, and access to a location is usually measured in hours.

That makes planning the difference between a complete dataset and a partial one. Coverage gets prioritized before anyone unpacks, so that if conditions cut the session short, the essential geometry is already recorded. Processing, cleanup, and mesh preparation happen afterward, off the clock of the location.

See more feature film work, or read about what we provide productions.