The Idea of You

The Idea of You is a 2024 romantic comedy from Amazon Prime Video starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, directed by Michael Showalter. Based on the novel by Robinne Lee and written by Showalter with Jennifer Westfeldt, the film chronicles the love affair between a single mother and the lead singer of a popular boy band. Cinematographer Jim Frohna shot the film predominantly in Georgia in late 2022, with a score by Siddhartha Khosla and original songs by Savan Kotecha.

SCANable provided 3D scanning for the production, capturing performers and environments through photogrammetry to support the film’s visual effects work.

Filling a venue with people who were really there

Concert and festival sequences need crowds far larger than a production can hire. The gap is closed digitally, and the result is only convincing when the digital figures derive from real, measured people.

Scanned background performers bring genuine proportion, real wardrobe and real variation — differences in height, posture and build that no procedural system invents believably. Crowds populated from a handful of generic models produce a pattern the eye finds within seconds, however well each individual figure is rendered.

Stage light is unforgiving

Performance lighting is hard, colored, moving and highly directional. It sculpts a face in ways that expose any weakness in geometry or texture, and it changes several times inside a single shot.

An asset captured under controlled, even conditions and separated into diffuse and specular components can be lit to sit inside that environment. An asset with lighting baked into its texture cannot — it arrives carrying highlights from a room it is no longer in.

Backgrounds carry more than they are credited for

Romantic comedy is not a visual effects genre in the way audiences think about it, and that is exactly why its effects work has to disappear.

Environment and background capture supports the unglamorous half of the job: clean-ups, extensions, replaced skylines, removed equipment, and the crowd of small fixes that make a location behave the way the script needs. Each of those depends on the real space having been measured rather than approximated, or the fix draws attention to the thing it was meant to hide.

Likeness at conversational distance

Much of the film plays in close two-shots. Any digital work involving a performer at that range has almost no tolerance for approximation.

That is why capture happens as full-body and head scanning through cyberscanning, with the performer in costume and in the condition the film requires, rather than as a generic body model adjusted afterward. Digital doubles built that way survive being cut against real coverage.

There is more feature film projects to look through, alongside the full service list.