Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’

The Mist is a 2017 Spike television series based on a story by Stephen King, following a small town suddenly cut off from the world by an eerie mist. The series centers on a family torn apart by a brutal crime; as they deal with the fallout, the mist rolls in, isolating residents from one another as family, friends, and adversaries become strange bedfellows — battling the mist’s mysterious threats while fighting to maintain morality and sanity as the rules of society break down. It stars Morgan Spector, Alyssa Sutherland, Gus Birney, Danica Curcic, Okezie Morro, Luke Cosgrove, Darren Pettie, Russell Posner, Dan Butler, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Frances Conroy.

SCANable provided LiDAR and 3D scanning and modeling services for the production, including body scanning of talent in support of the show’s visual effects.

There is exactly one window

A television schedule does not pause for data collection. A location is available for the days it is available, a standing set is up until the next block needs the stage, and a performer is in a given costume and makeup state for as long as that scene is shooting.

Scanning is one of the few production tasks with no second attempt. A plate can be reshot, a line can be looped, a colour decision can be revisited months later. A set that has been struck cannot be measured.

That is why capture is scheduled around the shoot rather than after it, and why set and location scanning is worth the hour it costs on the day.

Scan the performer in the state the show requires

A scan is only useful if it matches what is on screen. That means capturing talent as they appear in the episode — in wardrobe, in the hair and makeup they are actually wearing, in the physical condition the story has put them in.

A clean neutral capture in street clothes is a different asset, and it will not intercut. Makeup, prosthetic application, sweat, dirt and damage all change silhouette and surface, and all of them have to be recorded rather than added later by an artist guessing at how the practical version looked.

Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios exist so that capture can happen between setups, on the production’s schedule, without sending anyone back to hair and makeup a second time.

Atmosphere sits on top of geometry

Fog, mist and haze are rendered as volume, and volume needs depth. A digital atmosphere placed into a shot has to know how far away every surface is, or it will sit at a uniform density and read as a filter laid over the image rather than as air in a room.

Measured environment geometry gives the effect something to occupy. Objects occlude correctly, near surfaces stay clear, distant ones fall away, and the atmosphere behaves like a physical medium.

Assets are delivered after retopology and render-ready modeling, scaled to real-world units so depth means something downstream.

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