As well as Reign of Death, I worked on two other It's My Shout projects last summer and one of these was directed by Ryan Andrews. I'd created a matte painting for his one greenscreen shot of the exterior of his studio location. We got on well and he mentioned he might be working on another project in the new year that would involved lots of VFX so I kept in touch. Suddenly, I found myself a week from a five day London shoot on something I thought was just a five minute promo in Cardiff! Luckily both Louis and Jamie gave me a sofa and bed to sleep on during the course of the shoot otherwise I'd have been staying in a cheap B&B somewhere. I also put together a quick scale reference for James Cordon's character (to be explained later) and hot-footed it on the train.

Beasthunters is a series idea by Louis Waymouth, Jamie Lennox and Justin Gaynor. Louis and Jamie are a writing team and have been writing sketches for Armstrong and Miller, among others. They'd previously made a Batman spoof for Justin's ChannelFlip website (www.channelflip.com) and developed Beasthunters as their follow up project. Jaime Winstone was a friend of theirs and had also been cast in Ryan's film Elfie Hopkins and the Gammons, to be shot later in 2010. She recommended Ryan as director (along with others of his Gammons crew) and he in turn recommended me. What a wonderful world we live in! Actually, it gets even weirder because after talking to Robert Llewellyn on set, I bought his book about playing Kryten in Red Dwarf and realised that the Bethan Jones who applied his prosthetic makeup for the first two series was the same Bethan Jones who works on Grandpa and has done makeup on my own short film! The circle is complete.

The majority of my work on Beasthunters was on James Cordon's character, the blue demon Huggle. Luckily he was a 12cm high creature, the same size as Grandpa, so I already knew the limitations of the process and what to prepare for during the shoot. Everything went really smoothly and I used a cardboard cut-out of James as a size reference during compositing. Based on how well the moving camera shots in Grandpa Series 2 had gone, I allowed them to move the camera more than they thought they could to fit with Ryan's style. Personally, I can't standing watching a TV series and being confronted by a static FX shot amongst lots of handheld or smooth moving closeups. It breaks the spell.

All compositing was done with Adobe After Effects and tracked with Mocha-AE (much better than the internal tracker in AE which I did stupidly use for a couple of shots that, in hindsight, wobble.) I made a great deal of effort to get the greenscreen footage to match the smoky atmosphere of the live action shoot and the noisy nature of the Sony EX3 with a 35mm lens adaptor. The greenscreen shoot itself was really good and James was a natural on the green stage (and so he should after being on the real 'stage' in The History Boys.) There were an embarrassment of riches with his ad libbed lines and it was difficult to choose between them. I treated the greenscreen exactly as I do Grandpa: line up the shots by eye using a live composite, albeit a cruder version. It's faster and more convenient for this kind of work.

Other effects included a makeshift videophone, adding breath and eye blinks to the creature suits and making Jaime's pendant glow in the presence of monsters. The brilliant gun firing sequence was done by Arnold Pistorius at ChannelFlip and I just added a shower of bullet shells from the gun.

I finished the project by doing a complete colour grade with Ryan by matching the lighting across the project and adding vignettes and extra grain where necessary. We completed it just in time to hand over to Justin, Jamie and Louis when they arrived in Cardiff to collect it.

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