Red Notice

Red Notice is a 2021 Netflix action comedy starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot, directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. Johnson, who also produced, plays an FBI agent who reluctantly teams up with a renowned art thief (Reynolds) to catch an even more notorious criminal (Gadot) — the third collaboration between Thurber and Johnson after Central Intelligence (2016) and Skyscraper (2018). Originally planned for release by Universal Pictures, the film was acquired by Netflix, opening in limited theaters on November 5, 2021, before streaming on November 12. Praised by audiences for its cast, humor, and action, it became the platform’s most-watched film both in its debut weekend and within 28 days of release, and the fifth most-streamed movie title of 2021.

SCANable provided 3D scanning services for the production, capturing talent, props, and set reference in support of the film’s visual effects, from digital doubles and face replacement to set extensions.

Face replacement is the highest bar in capture

Most scan work has a comfortable margin. Face replacement does not.

Putting a performer’s face onto another body — a stunt double, a digital body, a plate shot without them — means the geometry has to track against real head movement while holding likeness at cinema scale. Every error compounds across a shot rather than averaging out.

The tolerance is set by the audience, not the pipeline. Viewers cannot describe why a face looks wrong, but they detect it in a fraction of a second, and once they do the shot is lost.

Star faces are the hardest faces

There is a practical wrinkle that has nothing to do with technique: the more familiar an actor is, the less room there is for error.

An audience that has watched someone for twenty years has an internal model of that face more precise than they realize. A cast of that recognizability means every replacement shot is being checked against deep familiarity.

That is why the underlying capture has to be measurement rather than interpretation. Digital doubles built from faithful geometry survive that scrutiny; doubles sculpted from reference photography do not.

Simultaneous capture and why it matters here

Our arrays fire every camera at the same instant. A method that sweeps or takes multiple passes asks a person to hold perfectly still, and no one can — they breathe, they settle, they micro-shift.

The resulting drift produces soft or doubled geometry around exactly the features that carry likeness: the eyes, the mouth, the bridge of the nose. Repairing it by hand is where a face stops being that person’s face.

Removing the problem at capture rather than correcting it downstream is the core idea behind cyberscanning.

Skin has to be captured, not just shape

Geometry gets a face into position. Surface response is what makes it read as skin.

Cross-polarized photography separates diffuse color from specular reflection, so a modeler receives both what the skin looks like and how it behaves under light. That is what allows a replaced face to sit correctly in lighting the capture session never had — which, on a film moving between wildly different locations, it always will.

For assets that need to survive dramatic relighting, our photometric and OLAT capture extends this further.

Props, set reference, and the rest of the job

Alongside the character work, the production needed props and set reference captured — the unglamorous data that lets extensions, backgrounds, and CG elements sit correctly in a real space.

That runs through our set and location scanning, and everything ships after retopology, texturing, and render-ready builds, correctly scaled and named to the show’s convention.

For productions on the move, our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios capture wherever the film is shooting.

Additional feature film work is collected in the portfolio, next to the full service list.