Living With Yourself

Living with Yourself is an American comedy series created by Timothy Greenberg that premiered on Netflix on October 18, 2019. It stars Aisling Bea and Paul Rudd, who also executive produces alongside Greenberg, Anthony Bregman, Jeff Stern, Tony Hernandez, Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, and Jeffrey Blitz. The series follows a man who, after undergoing a mysterious treatment that promises the allure of a better life, discovers that he has been replaced by a doppelganger.

SCANable provided LiDAR and 3D body scanning for the production, capturing full-body photogrammetric data for the series’ digital-double work — a natural fit for a show built around two Paul Rudds.

When the copy shares the frame with the original

Most digital doubles are asked to pass at a glance, in motion, or at distance. A doppelganger premise asks for something harder: the double and the original occupy the same shot, hold still, and are looked at side by side for the length of a scene.

There is no misdirection available. Whatever the two versions do not share is on screen simultaneously, which turns every small inaccuracy into a direct comparison rather than a fleeting impression.

The only way through that is a capture of the performer accurate enough that the copy is not an interpretation. Measured full-body scanning is what makes the two halves of the frame agree.

Wardrobe is geometry, not texture

Clothing is frequently treated as a surface problem — get the fabric shader right and the costume is solved. It is not. A jacket has volume, a collar has a specific fold, a shirt hangs off a specific set of shoulders, and none of that is describable as a texture map.

Capturing a performer dressed captures the garment as it actually sits on that body, with the creases and the drape it had on the day. That geometry is what a cloth simulation should be built from and what a digital costume should match.

It also solves a continuity problem quietly: the scanned wardrobe is the wardrobe from the shooting day, not a rebuilt approximation of it.

The unremarkable close-up

Genre spectacle gives visual effects somewhere to hide — motion blur, darkness, chaos in the frame. A domestic comedy gives none of it. The scenes are people talking in ordinary rooms under ordinary light, framed close.

That is the most exposing environment a digital human can be placed in, and it is why the capture standard for a show like this is no lower than for a large-scale feature. If anything it is higher, because nothing else in the frame is competing for attention.

Every camera in our arrays fires at the same instant, so there is no drift from breathing between passes and no cleanup pass eroding likeness afterwards. See cyberscanning for the method and Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios for how it reaches a production’s schedule.

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