How Clear Angle Studios Is Harnessing the Power of Hollywood's Most Sought-After VFX Tech

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5 hours ago

There's a lot of talk in Hollywood about the U.K.'s production boom. Studios, it seems, are scrambling to find ways to shoot in California, keep talent stateside and claw back some semblance of industry glory that once belonged to L.A. (all while fighting off a president hellbent on terrorizing the rest of the world with his tariffs).
This isn't news: It's no secret that London is benefiting from Hollywood's demise. Its 2024 production revenue topped around £5.6 billion ($7.4 billion) and streaming giants such as Prime Video, Netflix and Disney are currently expanding their U.K. offices. You've no doubt heard about the likes of Pinewood — home to 12 MCU blockbusters — or Sky Studios Elstree (Wicked, Jurassic World: Rebirth), which remain booked out and full to the brim with the most in-demand stars in the world.
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It's a lot of numbers — X amount of sound stages or X amount of dollars invested — but what, exactly, is going on behind closed doors at these enormous movie lots? What kind of work is keeping Britain's film and TV biz thriving? The Hollywood Reporter was recently a guest of Pinewood Studios with a company that is emblematic of the industry's impressive run of form. Spoiler: they've got a monopoly on some futuristic technology.
Clear Angle Studios is a leading 3D capture and processing company with offices all over the world. Headquartered at Pinewood and led by co-founders Dominic Ridley and Christopher Friend, the digital visual effects business operates in cyber scanning and photogrammetry capture. It was born out of a conversation between Ridley and Friend at a Halloween party years ago. In 2013, they kicked off with just 70 cameras and a dream.
Since then, Clear Angle has come to dominate a vital field in the world of film and television, specializing in full body, face, prop and environment scanning that has undoubtedly improved some of your favorite movies and TV shows of the last 10 years.
Have you wondered how Tom Cruise was capable of all his epic stunts in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning? Or maybe why Robert Pattinson was so convincingly a set of twins in Bong Joon Ho's recent sci-fi feature Mickey 17? Ridley's the man to ask.
'We have a very good relationship with Marvel, Lucasfilm, Warners, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, MGM, Universal, Paramount, 20th Century — and we try to do as much as we can without spreading ourselves too thin,' the Clear Angle director tells THR while showcasing the scale of the company's tech. Ridley, whose career-spanning work behind the camera started in the visual effects department, is attempting to put into laymen's words how Clear Angle's ultra-high resolution facial capture system works, a rig made up of 90 individual cameras and fondly named Dorothy.
'Your big superheroes, any big face replacements or face changes, prosthetics — any weird stuff that happens close up on frame,' Ridley beams with pride about Dorothy, 'if you have an actor fighting himself or herself or you need a close up of the same people in the shot, this rig would be useful.'
It's hard to describe the system's spaceship-esque structure, but with 54 Canon SLRs, 22 Sony A7R3s, 13 machine vision cameras and 497 programmable LED light nodes, you can imagine the detail it's able to capture. With the ability to reproduce an actor's exact facial performance with little to no input from an animator, Dorothy can shoot 48 frames a second.
Only three of these exact rigs exist in the entire world. The other two are stationed at Clear Angle's offices in Atlanta and Culver City. But with such frantic activity in London, the Atlanta Dorothy has been shipped over to the U.K. 'There's quite a lot of shooting here, whereas there's not very much going on in Atlanta or L.A., at all, currently.' It's a 180, Ridley adds, after Europe's production plunge post-COVID and Hollywood strikes.
'Europe is getting busy,' he continues. 'The U.K. is picking up. Australia has got some great tax incentives [as well as] Toronto, but Italy, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, they're all starting to pick up. It shows that studios are actually starting to get serious again about rolling out content. There was definitely a reset,' he says, 'and that process took time. But I feel like we're at the end of the tunnel and the light is fast approaching.'
Clear Angle's other international offices cover Vancouver, Athens, Cape Town and Budapest. Worldwide, they have 18 full-body, custom-built photogrammetry rigs, each equipped with 204 cameras and 32 lights. Some of the talent to have stepped into this set-up include the cast of Lucasfilm's Andor, the recent live-action adaptations of Lilo and Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, and even the star-studded lineup from Marvel's Deadpool & Wolverine.
'If somebody's falling off a bridge or jumping out of a high-rise building, these things are just far too dangerous,' Ridley says about where the 3D full body scanning comes in handy. 'There's often a computer-generated takeover [in film and TV] where a stuntman or talent would run and just before they jump through the window, CG takes over. So, arguably, we're saving lives, right?'
Clear Angle can also retrieve a digital likeness of an actor, prop, landscape or animal (Ridley says they've scanned lions, donkeys, zebras, flamingos, seals and a whole lot of horses) through a full body scan, facial capture and even voice capture. This data is then handed over to the VFX vendors to use however they like. Anyone who comes in for a scan is given 24 hours notice of exactly what the systems do and what shots they'll be used for. The talent have to give their explicit permission that they're happy to be captured.
So is using this kind of technology getting increasingly difficult to navigate at a time when artificial intelligence grows more powerful by the day? Scarlett Johansson is among one of the more recent stars to speak out after OpenAI launched a chatbot with an 'eerily similar' voice to her own. She had previously turned down an approach by the company to voice the digital bot. 'When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief,' she said. OpenAI maintain it was not meant to be an imitation of the actress.
'Since the strikes, actors have certainly become far more aware of scanning and digitizing themselves and the rights and legalities behind that,' says Ridley. 'And I think that's a really good thing. Education is a good thing. I don't think studios were capturing data and using it in a negative way [before], or using it in the way that is often broadcast in the media.'
'When we've captured data for the big studios, that data has always been used only in that production, only on that film. We've been doing this for 10 years,' he continues. 'And I personally don't know where this idea — that we'd scan an extra on one show and that data would be used on other shows — has come from. That doesn't happen. That's not a thing.'
Ridley's team is 'particularly studious' when it comes to data security. 'We follow security protocols for the big studios that will have very stringent protocols. And all the data is offline. There's no way you can get to it. [That's] a huge focus and emphasis within Clear Angle and other vendors within film — we really take care of the data. It's paramount for us. It's our lifeline.'
Clear Angle, at the company's Pinewood base, have scanned a record 300 people in one day. It's an intricate system with a lot of moving parts in a location — a quick cab ride from London — that allows an enormous wealth of talent to come in and out, undetected and in a flash. The business scans for games, too, helping to create accurate, photo-realistic avatars of, for example, your favorite athletes. They also use drone and helicopter technology to capture entire landscapes. The gaming world is one that Ridley would like to explore further.
Of course, there have been finance-related speed bumps along the way. Cameras, PCs and servers aren't cheap — Ridley says he and Friend invested a lot of their own money when Clear Angle was in its infancy, even putting a house on the line as collateral before the business took off. The instability of the industry has also proved tricky, he adds, but since 2016, with an ever-expanding employee directory including finance boss Michael Pedersen, the company has generally gone from strength to strength.
And the demand in London, especially, won't let up. 'The biggest sadness that I tend to have [now] is when somebody calls me up and they say, 'Hey, great working with you — we're shooting XYZ in a couple of months,' and I have to say, 'Oh, really sorry, we're fully booked,'' Ridley says. 'I just hate letting people down like that. But it's still better to let them down that way than it is to do a poor job because you're stretched too far.'
A tour of the set-up at Clear Angle's Pinewood hub feels like stepping into the future, or some top-secret lab where highly-skilled crew are toiling away in the underbelly of the film industry beast. What sets Clear Angle apart is the people, Ridley adds. 'When we work on a Marvel show, they're hiring us because the data is good, but also because they actually want to work with these people for a six-month, five-month period.'
He adds: 'That's what motivates me. I'm not interested in a whole host of things — I am more interested in the tech, the facilitation and the logistics, and the people that get to be a part of the process. Those are my memories.'
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