Project Background

Sweetpea is a British dark comedy-drama television series created by Kirstie Swain for Sky Atlantic. The show premiered in October 2024 and stars Ella Purnell in the lead role.The series is an adaptation of the book by CJ Skuse. After a childhood of bullying, Rhiannon (Purnell) is leading a quiet life as an admin assistant at a local newspaper, living with her father and dog. However, her father’s death leads to a chance encounter with a stranger that changes everything.

What We Did

Working closely with the team at See Saw, our VP team worked with production to accurately visualise the scenes the team wanted to shoot in the volume, which included shooting in a full size British bus. Using the MARS pre-visualiser, the team could import an OBJ of the set piece to ensure that the creative intent of each shot could be achieved. Shooting these scenes in the volume allowed for complete control over the environment. Once the scenes were pre-visualised and the feasibility confirmed, we set about supporting the team with our virtual production team and specialist technology to successfully carry out multiple driving sequences using the bus.

The Results

See Saw were able to successfully capture many simulated travel scenes at MARS in a completely controlled environment. Utilising the MARS Pre-visualiser, the team had been able to accurately assess the feasibility of each shot to ensure it worked creatively and practically, that the bus would even fit into the studio. Without this tool the risk would have been too great to commission scenes to be shot in virtual production with a full size British bus. The team were thrilled with the outcome – with the director commissioning a BTS piece specifically to tell the technology & innovation story behind the shooting of these scenes.

DOP Nick Morris had this to say about the experience:

“Sweetpea features many scenes on buses, and from the beginning of production, everyone was keen to avoid shooting them on real roads. Shooting these scenes for real is incredibly time-consuming, you plot a 15-minute loop for the vehicle, spend at least 45 minutes rigging cameras in place really firmly to make sure they’re safe in the event of a crash, and then head off for one take. More often than not, you hit a red light mid-scene, or the weather changes or a bus covered in advertising turns up in the back of the shot, and you have to do it all again. Then by the time you’ve re-rigged the cameras in a new position, it’s often an hour before you can shoot another shot. It’s a scheduling nightmare.

We had a lot to shoot and not much time, and scenes in the day, dusk, and night, so we needed a more efficient solution. We looked into green screen or LED volume shooting and after some tests the volume gave such amazing interactive lighting results, and all the options to play with reflections and have dirt in the bus windows without complications with keying later. There are some drawbacks for sure. The motion doesn’t always look perfect, and a flat LED wall backdrop has subtly different bokeh compared to the real thing.

But when the director and actors get maybe 80% more time together, they can react to things they see outside of the windows, and you can shoot all of the bus scenes for a whole show in a day … it beats sitting in traffic on the streets every time. Plus it allowed us to do this transition shot, which normally might need a U-crane arm driving parallel to the bus on a closed road. Instead, we just moved the dolly past the bus inside the volume to make it feel like the bus was overtaking the camera.

Doing car scenes like this is relatively commonplace now, but a bus makes things a bit more complicated. The windows are so big and the bus is so long, we had to find a way to lift the bus up to avoid seeing the studio floor out of the windows. The answer was to get the bus onto the stage on a giant flatbed lorry that lifted everything up by just over a meter.”

“MARS Volume were very helpful in squeezing our giant bus on-a-truck contraption into the stage.”