Exploring the Craft: Nick Morris breaks down key scenes from Sweetpea

Hey, fam! Today, we are excited to present an exclusive series of breakdowns from the hit show Sweetpea, from our friend and long-time contributor, the Director of Photography Nick Morris.

Having collaborated with Nick on the Allianz campaign in the past, we’re thrilled to continue working with him. He is a valued member of the Filmmakersworld community.

Below, Nick walks us through five key scenes from the show, with the lighting plots, the gear and the thinking behind each one.

SWEETPEA – AMBULANCE SCENE 🎬

📝 DOP notes and breakdown 👇

The script called for Rhiannon to be leaving the hospital in a trance. People don’t notice her and her father has just died. She steps out in front of the hospital and an ambulance crosses just in front of her, nearly hitting her. To achieve this we shot two quite simple plates.

The main action with Ella was shot on Steadicam. The team guided James, the Steadicam operator, onto a specific mark, and they measured the lens height at the end of every take. We made a lighting gag with a mixture of Astera Titans and Aputure MCs rigged to a rickshaw. They pulled this through the frame at speed.

A fan hit Ella with a gust of wind simultaneously, all underneath pouring rain from our rain machines. Then we shot a second pass with the camera on a tripod in the same position. We set it at the same lens height as in the previous take. The Ambulance drove through, and the post wizards put the two passes together!

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SWEETPEA – BUS SCENE 🎬

📝 DOP notes and breakdown 👇

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, and spend at least 45 minutes rigging cameras firmly to ensure they’re safe in the event of a crash. Then you head off for one take. More often than not, you hit a red light mid-scene. Additionally, the weather changes, or a bus covered in advertising turns up in the back of the shot. 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, with scenes in the day, dusk, and night. Thus, we needed a more efficient solution. We looked into green screen or LED volume shooting. After some tests, the volume gave such amazing interactive lighting results. It provided all the options to play with reflections and have dirt in the bus windows. There were no 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. You can shoot all of the bus scenes for a whole show in a day. This 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. This made 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 that we had to find a way to lift the bus. This helped 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. This lifted everything by just over a meter. 
Our plates were shot in an array of 8 Red Komodo’s by Driving Plates UK. We used MARS Volume, who were very helpful in squeezing our giant bus-on-a-truck contraption into the stage.

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CANAL NIGHT SCENE 🎬

📝 DOP notes and breakdown 👇

There were 2 key challenges with the canal scene. Firstly, we needed a dark environment that felt like a justified location for the murder happening shortly after this clip (probably too graphic for Insta). But we also wanted to be able to see all of the performances. We decided to go for a moonlight-based look with hints of streetlight.

For that, we used 2 Arri Skypanel 360s, a Creamsource Vortex 8, and a Robe moving head, all mounted on a large Manitou crane. These were hung over the river. One 360 provided a moonlight-inspired backlight, and the other lifted the deep background. They focused the moving light on different spots depending on the shot. It mainly gave us ripples bouncing off the water. We used Astera Titans with Caligri airtubes for a waterproof key light on Ella’s face.

The second Challenge

The second challenge was how to get the camera where we wanted when shooting on the canal. The pathway was so narrow and under a very low bridge, it gave very limited options for camera angles. We definitely needed to be able to get the camera over the water. The path was also too small for a crane or jib arm, so we built a floating pontoon and strapped a Scorpio 23 Lite to it. This meant we could float the base anywhere on the canal, and the arm could reach any camera position. 

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MORNING LIVING ROOM SCENE 🎬

📝 Dop notes and breakdown 👇

One of my favorite lighting setups from Sweetpea S1 – Rhiannon wakes up alone in her dad’s chair the morning after his funeral. The scenes leading up to this had all been dark, cool, and fluorescent. I wanted to punctuate the scene with warm sunshine. It felt like the world carries on regardless, despite all of Rhiannon’s losses.

We used a 12k tungsten Fresnel as the main push through the small kitchen window. We used smaller 5k and 2k units to pick out the back of her chair and bounce warmth into the corridor.

Cool morning sky light came from the windows behind the camera via a Skypanel 360 and various Nanlux 1200s with diffusion frames.
We shot the scenes with 2 cameras, and we tried to keep the floor largely clear of lighting kit.

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GARAGE NIGHT + GARAGE SUNSET SCENES 🎬

📝 Dop notes and breakdown 👇

GARAGE NIGHT:

Garage night: A simple setup with pleasing results. We shot a lot of scenes in this garage, and we wanted to bring something with more connection between the characters for this one. We had Ella bring a practical in. This ensured narratively they had more light to see by. It also gave us a new source of warmth for the scene.

We had the existing ceiling practicals fitted with custom-built bicolor LED tubes. We added an Astera Titan in a softbox to supplement these on faces. In the two-shot, the practical provided the warmth. However, for close-ups, we added a 500W gem ball and dimmed it down for added warmth. This added more of an eye light and wrapped the warm light more pleasingly.

GARAGE SUNSET:

For the sunset scene, we used a dimmed 10k Fresnel bounced into a mirror. This came through the small window for the evening sunshine. It was complemented by a series of Chroma Q Space Forces bounced into a big ultra bounce. This served as the sky.

This cooler light came through the clear plastic in the roof, serving as most of the key light on the cast. Close-ups were supplemented with an Astera Titan and a softbox.

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Read our full interview with Nick on the visual language of Sweetpea, the green lighting and the two-camera setup behind the series.