Respect

Respect is Universal Pictures’ 2021 biographical drama about Aretha Franklin, starring Jennifer Hudson and directed by Liesl Tommy. Released theatrically in August 2021, the film features Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Audra McDonald, Marc Maron, Tituss Burgess, Tate Donovan, and Mary J. Blige in supporting roles as it traces the life of the Queen of Soul.

SCANable performed LiDAR and 3D scanning for the production, capturing sets, actors, props, and other key items and delivering modeled digital assets in support of the film’s visual effects.

Crowds built out of real people

A packed room is one of the most expensive things a film can stage and one of the easiest for an audience to disbelieve. Procedural crowd systems solve the numbers; they do not solve credibility.

What sells a digital crowd is that the individuals in it were people. Real proportions, real posture, real clothing with real drape — variation that comes from having been measured rather than from a slider.

Full-body capture of background performers gives a crowd system a library of genuine bodies to instance and vary. The result holds up under the thing that usually breaks CG crowds: a camera that pushes in close enough for the audience to look at one figure instead of the mass.

Hero objects at conversational distance

Some props are set dressing. Others are held, played, spoken into, and framed in close-up for minutes at a time, and those are effectively hero objects.

Instruments, microphones, and stage hardware are dense with the kind of detail an audience already knows — machined edges, worn finish, the specific way old metal reflects. That knowledge is why an approximated version fails so quickly.

Capturing the physical object at high resolution produces geometry and surface detail that match the practical article because they were taken from it. Delivery is finished with retopology, UV layout, and render-ready builds, so the asset can be lit alongside the real one without special handling.

A life story moves through a great many rooms

A biographical film is structurally a multi-location shoot. Decades of a life mean studios, theatres, homes, and streets, shot out of order across a long schedule, sometimes in cities that stand in for other cities.

Handled loosely, that produces a scattered pile of reference from a dozen places, each captured to its own conventions. Handled as one programme of work, it produces a single library at consistent scale with consistent naming.

The second version is what a VFX vendor can actually build on. Set and location scanning run to one standard across the schedule means an asset created in week three is still usable in week twenty without anyone re-deriving what units it was in.

See more feature film projects, or read about how cyberscanning works.