Here and Now

Here and Now is an American drama series created by Alan Ball, starring Holly Hunter and Tim Robbins, that premiered on HBO on February 11, 2018. The ten-episode series follows a contemporary multiracial family in the Portland area, with a plot that explores issues including race, identity, and mental illness.

SCANable performed LiDAR and 3D scans of sets, actors, props, and other items for the series, delivering the point cloud data and 3D models used to support the show’s visual effects.

Domestic interiors are a harder scan than a stage

A stage set is open, evenly lit, and designed to be walked through with equipment. A practical house is none of those things.

Rooms are small, sightlines are short, furniture occludes almost everything, and every doorway is a place where one scan has to hand off to the next. Coverage that takes a handful of positions on a stage takes many more in a lived-in interior, and each one has to overlap its neighbours enough to register reliably.

The result justifies the effort: a complete measured record of a space the production will keep returning to.

When the effect is what a character sees

Series that deal in visions, memory, and perception put visual effects inside a character’s head — and the audience judges those images against the ordinary world the show has established around them.

That makes the ordinary world the load-bearing part. A surreal element only reads as a departure if the room it departs from is accurate: correct dimensions, correct proportions, correct relationship to the camera.

Measured environments give the unreal something to be unreal against.

One dataset, several departments

A registered scan is not solely a visual effects deliverable. The same point cloud answers questions for production design, for camera, and for anyone who needs a dimension after the fact.

Because it is a measurement rather than a drawing, it does not have to be re-derived for each use. One capture, one coordinate system, and every department works from the same description of the space. Our set and location scanning is organised around that idea.

Actors, props, and the things that get replaced

Cast scans support digital doubles and any shot placing a performer somewhere they were not. Prop and dressing scans support replacement, duplication, and removal.

Neither is glamorous. Both are the difference between a shot that can be fixed in post and a shot that cannot. Delivery is render-ready, scaled and retopologised to the receiving vendor’s specification.

More episodic television work is in the portfolio.