Proud to have led VFX on this hit coming-of-age comedy.
Overview
As lead VFX vendor across three seasons of the critically acclaimed TV series Sex Education, we worked in close collaboration with the director and production team to realise their vision for each episode.
From pre-vis and virtual production, full CG environments and set extensions to complex clean ups, keying and rotoscoping, invisible effects and graphics, we delivered over 600 seamlessly crafted shots.
Project highlights include a complex coach sequence for which we were asked to add moving backgrounds to a series of scenes featuring the ensemble cast. Dupe provided planning and pre-viz using Virtual Production and AR techniques, on-set supervision for meticulous technical comp, keying and rotoscoping to make each shot come alive.
The challenge
Because the camera team needed complete freedom of movement within the coach, shooting individual plates for each set up proved impossible. Instead, we decided to capture a 360° background at high resolution with Brownian Motion using a 9 camera array and Stitchbox technology to capture the plates. And, to create realistic light movement on the greenscreen shoot we worked with VSS to play back our background plates on large LED panels, which we would layer sync in the final composite.
Pre-viz & Virtual Production
In prepping for the shoot we needed to ensure that we captured the right movement for the background plates to match the greenscreen photography. To plan this accurately and assess the coverage of the Brownian motion camera rig, we used Virtual Production to recreate the coach and its passengers, allowing the cameramen to use a virtual camera to plan their moves and create an edit of the scene before the stage was even built.
On-set Supervision
On set, we worked quickly with VSS to swap out the different backgrounds on the LED panels to match the scenes and supervise the shots. We produced test comps on set to check that everything was working as it should with our 360° plate solution. We also used our bespoke Dupe AR app which allowed us to pull a realtime key on the coach and track in the background, matching the lenses being used on the Sony Venice camera.
Production Test Comps
Once the shoot was finished we took on the editorial task of adding the background plates and created temp comps of the entire episode. One of the comps that we were keen to test early has the camera travelling the length of the coach on a Technocrane, plus panning and tilting. For this we created a Matchmove of the shot, allowing us to perfectly line up our 360° background. This worked extremely well and the first comp we presented gave everyone involved great confidence that we had chosen the best solution.
