Vice

Vice is Adam McKay’s 2018 biographical comedy-drama from Plan B Entertainment, starring Christian Bale as Vice President Dick Cheney. Written and directed by McKay, the film follows Cheney on his path to becoming the most powerful Vice President in American history, with Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, and Jesse Plemons in supporting roles. It is the second theatrical film to depict the presidency of George W. Bush, following Oliver Stone’s W. (2008).

SCANable performed LiDAR and 3D scanning and modelling for the film, providing measured scan data and spatial reference in support of its visual effects.

Recreating rooms that no longer stand

A film that moves through five decades of American political life is a film about places as they were, not as they are.

Some of those interiors have been remodelled. Some are not available to a film crew at any price. Some no longer exist at all. What can be built practically gets built, and the rest is extended or reconstructed — which only works if the built portion is measured precisely enough to extend from.

Set and location scanning supplies that measurement as a point cloud: real dimensions, real proportions, no interpretation between the room and the data.

Many locations, one asset library

Period work spreads across a lot of addresses. Stages, practical interiors, exteriors standing in for other cities, and returns to the same place weeks apart.

Handled loosely, that becomes dozens of unrelated datasets in dozens of orientations. Handled properly, it becomes one library in one convention, where any two captures can be brought into the same scene without anybody rebuilding a transform first.

The value compounds through post. A visual effects team that trusts the library stops verifying it and starts using it.

Scale, units, and the unexciting agreements

Every scanning job carries decisions that sound clerical and are not: what the working unit is, where the origin sits, which axis is up, how a capture is named.

Those conventions are what let a set scan, a prop, and a performer assemble into one shot at the correct size on the first attempt. Getting them wrong produces no obvious failure — it produces a slow leak of artist hours across an entire show, and a set of small mismatches nobody can trace.

Assets ship after retopology, UV layout, and render-ready builds, in the convention the receiving vendor asked for.

Related feature film projects sits in the portfolio, and the full service list explains the methods behind it.