đź“ş Watch the full Encore Session Replay above
Sometimes the most inspiring conversations in our industry happen when the cameras aren’t officially rolling. That’s exactly what happened during our recent live Encore Session with VFX Supervisor and digital-double innovator Marcus LeVere.
We jumped on the call to test audio, and before we knew it, we were deep in a raw, funny, and incredibly insightful chat about LED walls, back injuries, the madness of scanning rigs, and the future of personal digital likeness ownership.
And honestly?
It was one of the most refreshingly candid conversations we’ve had all year.
Marcus joined the session sitting in front of a freshly built LED volume — and looking slightly battle-worn.
He had just spent the night assembling the LED wall by hand.
Heavy panels. Magnet clamps. Pinched fingers.
And yes, a thrown-out back.
“They’ve got these amazing painkillers in Canada called Robax,” he said.
“I don’t know if you have them in the U.S. — but wow.”
From there, we were off to the races. Joking about jazzercise, lighting setups, and how LED panels always require more power than anyone thinks.
Before diving into digital doubles, Marcus told one of the most unbelievable — and incredibly real — origin stories you’ll ever hear in VFX.
In 1999, he bought a one-way ticket from Manchester to LA, grabbed a backpack and a skateboard, and literally knocked on the front doors of every VFX studio he could find.
No internship. No contacts.
Just grit.
It took 60 doors.
But door #60 opened.
He worked for free. Then worked his way up.
And the rest became a wild, global VFX journey:
It’s the kind of journey that only happens when someone refuses to hear the word “no.”
The Rise of Digtial Actors
The heart of the conversation — and the reason we brought Marcus back for our SIGGRAPH Encore series — is the work he’s doing now.
When the SAG-AFTRA strike hit, he saw the writing on the wall:
Actors weren’t just fighting for pay.
They were fighting for control — who owns their digital likeness?
Marcus realized something powerful:
“I’m the one making these digital replicas. Why not give the talent full ownership instead of the studios?”
And so began a two-year journey in his basement, building:
SafePoint — a system for talent to own, license, and protect their digital doubles.
A system built around the “Three C’s” that emerged from the strike:
He built a mobile scanner.
He built a blockchain data fabric to track usage.
He built the business from scratch.
And in perfectly Marcus fashion, his first paying customer wasn’t an actor — it was an Instagram celebrity from Gran Canaria.
She needed a clone because she didn’t want to record videos after having a baby.
Her agent flew Marcus to Barcelona.
Customs assumed his scanning rig was a weapon.
But the scan happened — and her digital double now does the posting for her.
Comedy. Chaos. Innovation.
Classic Marcus.
Marcus also shared insights from testing CenterGrid cloud, which has transformed how he approaches scaling digital double workflows.
“Working with the CenterGrid cloud gave me the freedom to process scans and AI workflows without worrying about local hardware limits. It’s fast, reliable, and honestly, it lets me focus on creativity instead of tech headaches.”
He explained how previously, processing high-resolution scans and running AI-based facial and body reconstruction models was limited by his local workstation power. Even with a high-end machine, certain tasks could take hours — or even crash the system.
“With CenterGrid, I can run multiple scans in parallel, push through machine learning models, and iterate faster than ever. The cloud handles the heavy lifting, so I can focus on lighting, textures, and performance tweaks instead of staring at spinning wheels.”
Marcus also highlighted the ease of collaboration:
“Being able to share cloud workflows with my team, wherever they are in the world, is a game-changer. We’re talking instant access, real-time feedback, and no one’s bogged down by hardware compatibility. It’s exactly what we needed for SafePoint and for future digital double projects.”
By combining CenterGrid cloud with his mobile scanning rigs, Marcus is not only creating digital doubles faster — he’s also making them more accessible for actors and creators who want control of their digital likenesses.
Digital doubles aren’t sci-fi anymore.
We’re entering an era where:
And Marcus is building the tools from the ground up.
This is why we brought him into our SIGGRAPH “Pixels to Possibility” series — because he represents the exact blend of practical VFX experience, AI innovation, and fearless experimentation that this new era demands.
This wasn’t a rehearsed keynote.
No slides hiding behind corporate speak.
Just two people talking openly about:
It was honest.
It was raw.
It was funny.
And it was exactly the type of conversation we need more of in this industry.
If you’re an artist, actor, creator, studio, or technologist…
you’re going to want to see where this is headed.
Because digital doubles aren’t just the future of production —
they’re the future of personal creative freedom.
