Motor City

Motor City is an Independent Film Company feature directed by Potsy Ponciroli, starring Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster, and Pablo Schreiber.

SCANable supported the visual effects production of Motor City by delivering high-resolution 3D character scanning for the film’s cast. Using its mobile photogrammetric capture system, the team produced full-body scans and head scans with detailed facial and body geometry, providing VFX artists with production-ready digital doubles for visual effects, stunt augmentation, and post-production workflows. By producing precise, true-to-life scans on set, SCANable helped streamline the creation of realistic digital characters while ensuring continuity and efficiency throughout the VFX pipeline.

No distance, no motion, nothing to hide behind

Most digital doubles are seen at distance, in motion, or partly obscured. A face replacement is none of those things.

When a performer’s head is composited onto a stunt double’s body, the audience is looking directly at the one part of a human being they are evolutionarily trained to read. Millimeter error in the brow, the nasolabial fold, or the set of the jaw registers as wrong before a viewer can say why.

That is why a face-replacement scan is captured at a different density than a background double, and why the likeness has to come out of measurement rather than out of an artist’s hand. See what that produces under digital doubles.

A single instant, not a sweep

A person cannot hold still. Breathing alone moves the chest, the shoulders, and the soft tissue of the face by more than a facial capture can tolerate.

Any method that sweeps around a subject, or takes several passes to cover them, accumulates that movement as drift. The drift is then cleaned up by hand, and hand cleanup is exactly where likeness gets quietly eroded.

Our arrays trigger every camera simultaneously, so the whole subject is sampled in a single moment. Nothing has to be corrected downstream because nothing moved. That principle is the core of cyberscanning.

Doubles for the shots an actor cannot take

Vehicle work, impacts, and sequences staged around real hazards generate coverage the lead performer is not going to be in.

Those shots only cut against the practical footage if the digital version of the actor is faithful in silhouette, proportion, and surface. A double that is close but not exact is worse than no double, because the audience notices the substitution rather than the stunt.

Scanning on the production’s schedule

Talent time is the scarcest resource on any show. A capture that requires performers to travel to a facility competes directly with the shooting day.

Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios deploy to the production instead, so cast can be scanned in wardrobe between setups. Everything ships after retopology, texturing, and render-ready builds, scaled and named to the receiving vendor’s convention.

More feature-film capture work is in the portfolio, or see the full service list.