The Politician – Presented by Netflix

The Politician is a Netflix comedy-drama series from Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan that premiered on September 27, 2019. The series stars Ben Platt alongside Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Lange, Zoey Deutch, Lucy Boynton, Bob Balaban, David Corenswet, Julia Schlaepfer, Laura Dreyfuss, Theo Germaine, Rahne Jones, and Benjamin Barrett.

SCANable performed 3D body scanning of Ben Platt for the title sequence of the Netflix series, capturing a full-body photogrammetry scan used in the show’s opening titles.

A scan made for design rather than for a shot

Most capture on a production exists to serve continuity — the double has to match the plate, the set extension has to match the build. A main-title sequence has no plate to match. It is a designed object, and the scan is raw material for a graphic designer rather than a stand-in for something photographed.

That changes the priorities. Nobody is checking the asset against adjacent live-action coverage, but everybody is looking at it in isolation, held on screen, often in a stylized treatment that strips away color and lighting and leaves the geometry itself doing the work.

Silhouette, proportion, and surface detail carry the whole thing. There is nothing else in frame to carry it instead.

Seen more often than any shot in the series

A title sequence returns every episode. Whatever is built for it will be seen more times than any single shot in the series, at the same size, by the same audience, with nothing else happening.

A scan intended for that use has to withstand being examined rather than glimpsed, and it has to remain usable as the design evolves — cut apart, exploded, re-lit, re-textured, or reduced to a wireframe, without the underlying mesh falling apart.

That is a delivery question as much as a capture question. Clean topology and a sensible UV layout are what let a designer keep iterating, which is what modeling and asset preparation is for.

Short windows, fixed dates

Title design work runs on a schedule that does not move. The sequence is due when the series is due, and the performer is available for a fraction of a day somewhere in the middle of a shooting block.

Photogrammetric capture suits that constraint because the subject’s time commitment is minutes, not hours. Every camera in the array fires simultaneously and the session is over; the processing happens afterwards, away from the production.

Bringing the array to the talent rather than the other way around removes the remaining scheduling problem. That is the reason Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios exist, and cyberscanning explains how the capture itself works.

More TV scanning work are in the portfolio, or see the services available to a production.