Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a Prime Video spy series created by Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover that premiered February 2, 2024. Inspired by the 2005 film of the same name, the series stars Glover and Maya Erskine as two strangers paired as spies who must live undercover as a married couple — John and Jane Smith are aliases assigned to them and to the other agents working for the same organization.

SCANable provided 3D scanning services for the series, capturing talent and environments to support the show’s visual effects, from camera tracking and set extensions to digital doubles.

Assets that have to hold for a season

A series accumulates. An environment captured for episode two can be needed again in episode seven, months later, by a different artist at a different facility.

That only works if the asset was built to a stated convention in the first place — real-world scale, agreed orientation, predictable naming — rather than to whatever was convenient on the day. An episodic asset library is a maintenance problem as much as a capture problem, and the decisions that make it maintainable are all made before the first scan.

Two people, many identities

A show whose premise is assumed identity puts its leads in a different presentation almost every episode. Wardrobe, hair and physical bearing change constantly, and each variation is a distinct geometry problem the moment it needs a digital counterpart.

Capturing performers in costume, per look, is the only way to end up with digital doubles that match what was actually shot, rather than one generic body that has to be redressed digitally every time. Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios deploy to the unit precisely so a capture fits inside a shooting day instead of requiring one.

Confined interiors and moving cameras

Much of the series plays inside apartments, offices, restaurants and vehicles — small practical spaces covered handheld.

Those are among the hardest plates to track. There is little parallax to work with, a great deal of occlusion, and surfaces that repeat. A measured point cloud of the room gives the solve real geometry to lock against, and capturing it while the unit is still in the space is enormously cheaper than reconstructing it afterward from the footage. Set and location scanning is what makes those shots routine.

Capturing for shots that have not been written

A series shot across dozens of locations returns to almost none of them, and the visual effects list for later episodes is rarely settled when the unit is standing in the space.

That changes the question being asked on the day. It is not what the current shot needs, but what any shot in the remaining episodes might plausibly need — because there is no second visit, no reshoot budget for reference, and the location will have changed by the time anyone thinks to ask.

More TV scanning work is in the portfolio, or see the full service list.