Kittiwake Digital

Aerial and terrestrial spatial data · UK-based · worldwide

The real world, captured to the millimetre.

Kittiwake Digital measures places, people and objects so you can rebuild them: for a film, a court, a conservation record or a set of drawings.

See the work Scope a project

Proof

100+ years of combined experience across scanning, VFX, heritage and forensics
17,732 images and 435 scans to capture one Welsh village and one studio set
16 yrs on set scanning the Compare The Market meerkats
Hours not weeks. Mobilised same-day for crime scenes and short-notice shoots
Trusted by
  • Netflix
  • Sky
  • Milk VFX
  • Adidas
  • Puma
  • PlayStation
  • Virgin Media
  • NFTS
  • National Geographic
  • Compare The Market
  • Alexander McQueen

Three ways in.

The same instruments, different questions. A VFX supervisor needs a clean mesh by Friday; a conservation officer needs a record that will still be accurate in fifty years; an investigator needs evidence a court will accept. We start from yours.

Fairbourne from the air, half clay model and half textured, from the Under Salt Marsh capture

Film, TV & VFX

Scan the set. Scan the town. Flood it later.

Environments, props, digi-doubles and LED-wall backgrounds, delivered in the formats your pipeline already uses.
Charleville Castle spiral staircase and gothic window, reconstructed from scan data

Heritage & Archaeology

A record that outlasts the building.

Millimetre-accurate surveys of listed structures, sites and objects for conservation, planning and the archive.
LiDAR point cloud of an industrial structure with the scanning team in frame

Forensic & Engineering

Measured once. Argued about never.

Scene documentation, collision reconstruction and as-built engineering data with a chain of custody.

All sectors ConservationArchitectureSports ScienceConstructionArt & FashionEducation

Selected work.

Every project on this site has numbers, a toolbox and a model you can turn round with your own hands. If we can't show you the data, we didn't do the job.

Film, TV & Commercials · Sky Atlantic · Milk VFX

Under Salt Marsh

Milk VFX needed to drown a real village. Under Salt Marsh, Sky Atlantic's six-part crime thriller, turns Fairbourne into the fictional Morfa Halen, cut off by a storm and going under. The live action had to carry invisible CGI seascapes, so Milk needed the whole village as a measured, textured model. They also needed the set at Dragon Studios in Cardiff, built on a concrete pad so the SFX team could flood it for real, then extended in CG. Two captures, one pipeline.

435Terrestrial scans
17,732Images, ground and air
2Sites, captured in step
OBJ + UDIMDelivered
Open the case study

Art & Fashion · Sølve Sundsbø

Sølve Sundsbø

Sølve Sundsbø wanted the body as data, so that distortion in his images and films would read as intended rather than digital. That needed a workflow joining 3D scans to his 2D photography and 4D film.

Artechandheld structured light
2D + 3D + 4Done workflow
TODOyears of collaboration
TODOsurface resolution
Open the case study

How a scan happens.

No single instrument does it. The method is choosing the right mix for the accuracy, budget and timescale in front of us, then processing it into something you can actually use.

  1. 01 · Brief 1 call

    Understand the question

    What are you rebuilding, for whom, and to what tolerance? That decides everything downstream.

  2. 02 · Capture Hours

    Laser, camera, drone

    Terrestrial LiDAR for geometry, photogrammetry for texture, UAV for scale, handheld structured light for the small and the strange. Often all four in a day.

  3. 03 · Process Days

    Register and reconstruct

    Point clouds aligned, imagery solved, everything merged into one dataset with a known accuracy.

  4. 04 · Deliver Your format

    CAD to Gaussian splat

    2D drawings, BIM, textured mesh, digi-doubles, LED-wall environments, 3DGS. You own the right to use it; we keep it safe.

Three directors. One van. Most of the planet.

Duncan Lees has been scanning for longer than the word LiDAR has been in common use, and turns up on National Geographic when he isn't in court explaining a point cloud. Jandira Guasque trained as an architect, flies the drones and teaches the next generation how to do this. David Holden has run aviation businesses in 125 countries and keeps the aerial side ahead of the regulator. Based near Stansted; working wherever the work is.

Meet the team

Partners

  • In Color · Film and commercials production
  • EXT. · Location recces, scanned

Licensed pilots and scanning specialists across the UK and Europe. The network map follows in Phase 2.

Scope a project.

Tell us what needs capturing and where. We reply within one working day with a method and a price, or a phone call if it's quicker.

hello@kittiwakedigital.com · Stansted, Essex · worldwide

Start the scoping form

Sector, what needs capturing, where and when, and what you need at the end. Phase 2 wires the form itself.