Little Women

Little Women (2019) is Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age period drama for Columbia Pictures, the eighth film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel. The film stars Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Timothée Chalamet, Laura Dern, and Meryl Streep, exploring the lives of the March sisters in 1860s New England in the aftermath of the American Civil War. This adaptation focuses more on the sisters’ young adult lives, particularly after Meg, Jo, and Amy leave the family home, jumping back and forth in time and emphasizing themes over linear narrative. It was released theatrically in the United States on December 25, 2019, by Sony Pictures Releasing.

SCANable provided LiDAR scanning, 3D body scanning, and modeling for the production, capturing measured geometry in support of the film’s visual effects work.

A setting with no reference photography

A period film has no reference photography of its own setting. The nineteenth century cannot be scanned, and the places that survive from it have been altered, rebuilt, or surrounded by things that did not exist then.

So the environment gets assembled: a preserved building here, a constructed set there, a location that works from one angle and not the next. What ties those pieces into a single believable place is that each of them is measured, and therefore can be positioned relative to the others at true scale.

Without that, the assembly is done by eye, and the geometry never quite agrees between shots. The audience does not analyze it, but they register a place that behaves inconsistently.

Backgrounds are geometry before they are paintings

A digital matte painting is often described as a painting, which undersells the part that determines whether it works. A painted background is flat. The moment the camera moves, it either has depth or it does not.

Projecting painted detail onto measured geometry gives the background correct parallax — near elements shift against far ones exactly as they would if the place were real, because the distances between them are the distances that were recorded.

That is the difference between a background that survives a dolly move and one that only holds on a locked-off frame. LiDAR set scanning supplies the depth the painting sits on; our set and location scanning covers that capture.

Body scanning on a film with no visible effects

Prestige drama is not where audiences expect visual effects, which is precisely why the work has to be invisible. Nothing here announces itself, and any shot that does has failed.

Body scans on a production like this serve the quiet needs: a double for a shot the schedule or the weather made impossible, a costume element continued into a frame it was not built for, a figure placed into an environment assembled from several sources.

Capture is done in wardrobe, on location, using Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios so cast are scanned between setups. Everything is delivered as render-ready geometry rather than raw data.

More feature film projects are in the portfolio, or see what our digital double work involves.