First They Killed My Father

First They Killed My Father is a 2017 Netflix film directed by Angelina Jolie, adapting Loung Ung’s memoir of surviving the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Ung’s 2000 book recounts her childhood in Phnom Penh as the daughter of a high-ranking government official — until Pol Pot’s army stormed the city in April 1975, forcing her family to flee, hide their identities, and ultimately separate to survive. Loung trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans while her siblings were sent to labor camps; as Vietnamese forces broke the Khmer Rouge, the surviving siblings slowly reunited, and Loung forged a courageous new life.

SCANable performed 3D actor scanning for the film in support of visual effects vendor Lola VFX, capturing cast members as high-resolution photogrammetric body scans used for face replacement and digital character work.

Graded against the plate, frame by frame

Most digital human work is graded against a memory. Face replacement is graded against the plate it is sitting inside, frame by frame, next to the performer’s real neck and real hair.

There is no distance to hide behind and no cut to move on to. The replacement has to match the original skull beneath it, or the head will read as the wrong size on the wrong body — the single most common failure in the discipline, and the one an audience detects without being able to name it.

Accurate underlying geometry is not a refinement here. It is the prerequisite, and it is why head scanning and facial capture is treated as a measurement task rather than a photographic one.

What the scan actually has to carry

A neutral pose alone is not enough for replacement work. The face has to be captured in a range of states, because the plate performance will not sit still and the replacement has to follow it.

Bone landmarks, the eye sockets, the set of the ears and the exact line of the jaw all serve as anchors that a solve registers against. Skin detail at pore scale gives the render something to hold under close inspection. Both come from a single instantaneous exposure across the whole array, so nothing shifts between one camera and the next — the working basis of CyberSCAN™.

Period material has a narrower tolerance

A film set in a specific historical moment is judged by people who know that moment. Costume, hair, and physical bearing all carry period information, and digital work has to respect all of it while replacing the one element it is there to replace.

That constrains what can be fixed downstream. A replacement built from measured data inherits the period-correct wardrobe and framing already in the plate. A replacement built from approximation quietly contradicts them.

Everything ships after retopology, texturing, and render-ready builds, delivered to the receiving vendor’s naming and scale conventions rather than ours.

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