The Residence

The Residence is Netflix’s 2025 mystery series starring Uzo Aduba as a detective unraveling a murder at a White House state dinner. Inspired by Kate Andersen Brower’s book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, the series premiered on March 20, 2025, blending intrigue and humor as Detective Cordelia Cupp navigates the complex web of relationships among the 157 staff members of the 132-room mansion to uncover the truth behind the crime.

Visual effects house Crafty Apes created the series’ VFX — meticulous set extensions and digital enhancements that authentically recreate the White House’s iconic interiors — with SCANable providing 3D character scans in a supporting role. These photogrammetric head and body captures helped the VFX team maintain the show’s visual authenticity, immersing viewers in the opulence and grandeur of the presidential residence.

Nothing gets closer scrutiny than a face

Most digital work is protected by distance, motion, or darkness. Face replacement is protected by none of it. The shot is usually close, usually well lit, and usually held long enough for an audience to read an expression.

Humans are also specialists at faces. A viewer who could not describe the shape of a nose still registers, in a fraction of a second, that a face is not quite the person.

That is why the underlying capture has to be measured rather than interpreted. A head scan built from a simultaneous camera array records the actual proportions of a specific skull, the actual asymmetry, the actual set of the eyes — the small, unremarkable facts that add up to a likeness. Our CyberSCAN™ arrays exist for that job.

Separating what skin is from how it was lit

A scanned face is not finished when the geometry is correct. It has to hold up under lighting that did not exist on the day of capture.

Cross-polarized photography separates what skin does into its parts: a diffuse response that describes color underneath the surface, and a specular response that describes how the surface itself reflects. Captured separately, they can be recombined under any lighting rig a shot requires.

Bake a highlight into a texture and the asset is locked to one lighting condition forever. Photometric capture keeps the face usable in a scene relit three months later.

Arriving in the shape the facility expects

When a facility is already carrying the show’s visual effects, scan data has to arrive in the shape their pipeline expects — not in the shape most convenient to produce.

That means agreed topology on faces, sensible UV layout, consistent scale, known units, and file naming that matches the vendor’s asset convention. It means cleanup done before delivery rather than discovered after.

None of it is glamorous, and all of it decides whether an asset is usable on arrival. Retopology and render-ready builds are part of the deliverable, not an upsell on it.

Capture that fits a shooting day

Series schedules do not pause for scanning. Principals are available in gaps between setups, in costume and in makeup, and often for a short window.

Mobile CyberSCAN Studios deploy to the production for that reason — the capture goes where the cast already is, and nobody loses a shooting day to travel.

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