Our Flag Means Death

Our Flag Means Death is an HBO Max period romantic comedy loosely based on the life of Stede Bonnet, which premiered March 3, 2022. In 1717, Captain Bonnet is an aristocrat who abandons his comfortable life and family to prove himself as a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy — despite having no aptitude for the role. Sailing aboard his ship the Revenge, Bonnet and his dysfunctional crew struggle to survive deadly threats from naval warships and bloodthirsty rival pirates across the ten-episode first season.

SCANable provided 3D scanning services for the series, capturing talent and environments to support the show’s visual effects and set-extension work.

Assets that have to hold for a whole season

A feature has one continuous post schedule. An episodic series has ten, running in parallel, often at different vendors, finishing months apart.

The same ship, the same costumes, and the same faces have to appear identical in episode two and episode nine, even though the shots were built by different artists who never compared notes.

Scan data is what makes that possible. A single measured asset library is the shared reference every episode draws from, so consistency is a property of the source rather than something each team has to achieve independently. Continuity stops being a matter of vigilance and becomes a matter of everyone working from the same numbers.

A ship is a set that never stays put

A vessel built for photography is not a static location. It sits on a stage, it may be sectioned, it gets reconfigured between blocks, and the version standing in week one is frequently not the version standing in week eight.

Capturing it produces a fixed record of a build that is otherwise in constant flux — decks, rigging, companionways, and the relationships between them, measured while they are actually assembled that way.

That record is what allows a shot to place a character on a part of the ship the practical build never had in one piece. Our set and location scanning treats a stage build the same way it treats a real location: as something to survey before it changes.

Everything past the gunwale

A practical ship set ends at its own edges. Sea, sky, horizon, coastline, and any second vessel are all added, and they have to agree with the built article at the exact line where they meet it.

That agreement is geometric before it is artistic. The waterline sits where the hull’s measured dimensions put it. The horizon falls at the height the deck’s real elevation implies. Get either wrong and the ship reads as a model on a table.

Talent capture serves the same continuity. Doubles built from full-body scans in costume can be placed anywhere in that extended world, and our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios put the capture rig where the production already is, so a performer in full period wardrobe is scanned between setups rather than on a separate travel day.

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