Production Context
This Is Not Sweden (Això no és Suècia) is an 8-episode comedy-drama series produced by Nanouk Films and Funicular Films for 3Cat, in collaboration with RTVE and Sveriges Television. Created by Sergi Cameron, Aina Clotet, Daniel González and Valentina Viso, and directed by Mar Coll, Sara Fantova, Celia Giraldo and Aina Clotet, the series explores contemporary parenthood through the story of Mariana and Samuel — a couple who move to Vallvidrera seeking a more authentic life.
The series received significant recognition: Prix Europa 2023 for Best European Television Fiction, Canneseries 2024 Best Performance (Aina Clotet) and Best Series nomination, and Premios Ondas 2024 for Best Comedy Series, among others.
The dramatic irony runs through every screen: a couple who leave the city in search of something real, yet use digital devices to perform, conceal, and mediate their private realities. In this production, screens are not suspense devices. They are emotional mirrors.
Two Digital Grammars
The central design challenge was not to build one consistent digital aesthetic across the series, but to develop two distinct languages that coexist within the same narrative — each carrying different dramatic weight.
Graphic overlays represent the public layer of life: social media presence, family logistics, shared appearances. They typically appear composited over wider shots — the character visible alongside what they are doing or receiving — where rhythm and legibility take precedence over interface detail. These are screens that belong to the exterior world: banal, practical, performed.
Practical interactive screens belong to the private sphere: intimate messages, conflict, secrecy, emotional reaction. These rely on a device–reaction editing pattern — a close shot of the phone, then a cut to the character’s face absorbing what they’ve just read or seen. The dramatic weight is carried entirely by performance. These are the screens characters hide.
When the narrative demanded it, both grammars could coexist within the same scene — a character publicly engaged while simultaneously receiving something private, the two layers colliding in a single frame.
Designing for Realism: The Overlays
For the graphic overlays, we developed two parallel proposals: a minimal, stylised aesthetic and a realistic approach grounded in familiar interface conventions. The production chose realism — and it was the right call.
The goal was recognition without distraction: overlays that feel immediately legible to audiences, then disappear into the scene. An over-designed overlay pulls focus from the actor. A realistic one extends the world naturally.
Beyond the overlays, the social media platforms that appear throughout the series were built with significant content density. Profiles, comment sections, post histories — all populated with the volume and texture that makes a feed feel lived-in. Contemporary audiences are highly sensitive to digital inaccuracy: if a platform feels thin or inconsistent, immersion breaks immediately. The work here was less about visual design and more about behavioural and contextual credibility.
Public Persona vs Private Reality
The series consistently uses screens to stage the tension between performed identity and private truth. Two threads illustrate how design decisions carry dramatic consequence.
The fractured livestream
A key scene occurs when Mariana livestreams while simultaneously receiving a private message from her therapist cancelling a session. The two grammars collide in a single frame: the public performance of the livestream, and the private disruption of the notification arriving mid-performance. The interface design makes both visible simultaneously — and the actress’s reaction to the private message, while still performing for her audience, carries the scene’s full dramatic weight.
The screen as concealment
Another thread follows Samuel navigating private social media messages while hiding aspects of his professional life from Mariana. Here, screens become concealment devices — they mediate secrecy. The interface is identical to any other messaging app, but dramatically it is a wall built between two people sharing the same room.
The comedy-drama rhythm allows these moments to oscillate between lightness and weight. At one point, Mariana misreads what Samuel is looking at — assuming he is watching pornography when he is actually working. The digital grammar generates the misunderstanding. The characters are almost incidental.
To serve this kind of performance, notifications on the interactive screens were fictionalised but fully functional: the director could trigger them to fire at any moment during a take, creating genuine on-screen reactions from the actors without advance warning. The system put a dramatic tool in the director’s hands.
When Both Grammars Collide
Some scenes required both languages simultaneously — not as a design choice but as a narrative necessity. The public overlay and the interactive private screen coexist, each carrying a different layer of the story. These moments are structurally more complex: the actor must perform two simultaneous digital realities, and the frame must hold both legibly.
Magnus’s Phone: Digital Archaeology
One of the most unusual design challenges in the series was building the phone of a character who is already dead.
Magnus, a Swedish teenager, has died before the series begins. At a critical point in the story, Mariana finds his phone and navigates through it alone — searching for some trace of the reasons behind his suicide, while his mother has momentarily left the room. The sequence runs for over a minute in the script. In the final cut, editing has compressed it — but the full navigable system had to be built for shooting.
The design challenge was retroactive: to build a digital life that had already ended. Every app, every conversation thread, every saved image had to feel like the accumulated trace of a real adolescent — not constructed for the camera, but discovered by it. The phone had to carry the weight of a person.
To give the actress the freedom to perform the scene truthfully, the entire phone was made fully navigable. She could move through any screen, open any sub-section, follow any thread — improvising her path through the device just as the character would in reality. The final destination was fixed: a video that introduces Magnus as a living person. But the route to get there was open.
Shooting in Vallvidrera
Large portions of the series were shot in Vallvidrera — a forested hillside neighbourhood above Barcelona where mobile coverage is unreliable. Since interactive screens needed to be reviewed and approved by the creative team before each shoot day, connectivity became a genuine production constraint.
Our response was to work significantly ahead of the shooting schedule: screens were prepared, reviewed, and approved days in advance. When needed, we identified locations with sufficient signal to pre-download and cache content before moving to areas without coverage. Once loaded, everything ran reliably on set regardless of network conditions.
This meant the creative team always had full control over what appeared on screen — but that control had to be exercised in advance, not in real time. The discipline this imposed on the workflow ultimately made the on-set execution more reliable.
Designing in Two Phases
The project was structured across two distinct production stages, each with its own workflow and deliverables.
The first phase delivered 33 interactive screens for on-set shooting during principal photography. Each was built to respond to actor performance, with the actor physically navigating the device as part of the scene. The second phase delivered 18 motion graphic overlays in post-production, designed after the edit was locked to allow precise adaptation to editorial timing and narrative emphasis.
This dual-phase approach eliminated the friction between on-set practicality and post-production precision. On set, the priority is reliability and actor confidence. In post, the priority is editorial fit. Keeping the phases distinct meant neither compromised the other.
Screens as Fractures
In contemporary drama, screens are not interruptions in the narrative. They are the narrative. They are the place where the gap between who we perform and who we are becomes visible — sometimes accidentally, sometimes by design.
In This Is Not Sweden, digital design became part of the emotional architecture of the story. The choice between overlay and interactive, between public grammar and private grammar — each was a dramatic decision first, and a design decision second.
When a screen can hold both a livestream and a therapist’s cancellation at the same time, it stops being a prop. It becomes a fracture. And when a phone belongs to someone who is no longer alive, every screen inside it is a ghost.