I quickly edited the shots together in Premiere, choosing the best takes for each section. Since each section had been planned out in advance, it was very easy to put everything together. I then imported the edit into After Effects and began separating it into the various 'zones'. The paper background was built out of a large number of repeating textures to get around After Effects' particular memory issues. The landscape elements were built by Llyr in 3D Studio Max and I imported them to be placed together in a shallow 3D space. Although we wanted to emulate the Japanese watercolour style, we also wanted the environments to have volume and space so that they didn't seem too static.

One evening, Llyr and I staged an ink tank shoot, taking a small rectangular fishbowl, lining the back with white card and shining a couple of bright lamps behind it so that the ink became a silhouette on camera. We shot about thirty minutes of various ink drops, some heavy, some diluted to try and get the ideal mushroom cloud I needed to cover over each element. The footage was edited to choose the best pieces, resized, slowed down so that it was a sixth of the speed and given an aggressive levels adjustment so that the background became white and the ink completely black with enough in between so that the edges were semi-transparent and not too harsh.

Once all the background and video layers were in place, I added the ink tank footage to time the wipe so that it revealed each one in turn, sometimes with several clouds on top of each other. It was at this point I wished I'd started the project in a node-based compositor rather than After Effects. Although easy to set up, After Effects quickly becomes bogged down when you try to change things and play with subcompositions that haven't been completely thoughtout in advance. Adding the cloud wipes quickly made things complicated, especially as After Effects can only really handle one level of alphas on top of each other. There are workarounds but these require even more subcompositions! The final task was to use a repeat of the elements as its own alpha so that the light areas became transparent, revealing the paper beneath like a normal watercolour.

I'm really pleased with video as it has a very definite visual style and polished look, despite the very tight deadlines and budget. The animation and background make for a really interesting counterpoint to the lyrics and it's great that each environment follows the same style yet manages to look unique. My only regret is that the final camera movement is too fast and lasts for too long tracking across the meadow. On a small screen, it looks fine but when shown on a big TV, it's very distracting.