Red One

Red One is a 2024 Christmas action-adventure comedy from Amazon MGM Studios starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. Directed by Jake Kasdan and written by Chris Morgan from an original story by Hiram Garcia, the film also stars Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Liu, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, J. K. Simmons, Nick Kroll, and Kristofer Hivju, with Johnson, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia, Kasdan, Melvin Mar, and Morgan producing. Made in association with Seven Bucks Productions, The Detective Agency, and Chris Morgan Productions, it reimagines holiday mythology as the first entry in a potential franchise.

SCANable provided ground and aerial photogrammetry along with 3D laser scanning of props, sets, characters, and locations for the film, delivering production-ready digital assets for its extensive visual effects work.

Invented worlds lean harder on measurement

It seems backwards, but the more of a film that is fabricated, the more precisely its real components need to be recorded.

A drama set in a real kitchen has a plate full of true geometry holding everything together. A fantasy sequence has almost none — the environment is authored, the scale is invented, and the only fixed points are the practical elements that were actually photographed.

Those fixed points therefore carry the whole shot. If the practical set, the prop, and the performer are measured accurately, the invented material around them inherits a sense of physical truth. If they are approximated, there is nothing in frame for the audience’s eye to trust.

Air and ground registered as one dataset

Aerial and terrestrial capture answer different questions, and their value multiplies when they are solved together rather than delivered as two separate products.

Terrestrial LiDAR gives high geometric certainty at human scale — the set, the interior, the immediate surroundings. Flown photogrammetry covers extent: terrain, roof planes, and everything beyond walking distance.

Registered into a single real-world coordinate space, the two describe one continuous environment rather than a detailed island floating inside a vague one. A camera can then travel from a close interior out to a wide aerial without anything being re-scaled by hand along the way. Our aerial photogrammetry is planned alongside set and location scanning with that merge in mind.

Performers in places they never stood

Large-scale fantasy generates shot after shot in which a character occupies an environment that did not exist during production.

Those shots need a double that is not merely similar to the actor but dimensionally identical, because it will be cut directly against coverage of the real person. It also needs to be built to be relit, since the digital environment’s lighting will bear no relation to whatever was on the stage that day.

Digital doubles captured as full-body scans in costume answer both requirements, and they ship after retopology, texturing, and render-ready builds so the receiving facility can rig them immediately.

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