I'd met Peter before when he was producing the Screen Gems scheme. He was a great supporter of the films and I was really glad of the opportunity he gave me. I can't remember exactly how we got the job but I was tasked with doing the titles for the new series he was both producing and directing. The series had quite a large cast and a setup whereby all of them live in two combined houses in the Welsh valleys (actually Pontypridd). The difficulty was in introducing all of this in a 20 second sequence without it rushing past in a blur. Peter wanted a graphic, animated solution so we came up with this 2D comic art style, based somewhat on an HBO web drama about the inhabitants of a New York tower block.

The majority of the series was filmed at a disused factory in the Old Treforest industrial estate, with the two stories of both houses recreated in full. I spent a day at the set while the rest of the cast and crew were rehearsing taking a large number of high dynamic range photos of each of the rooms, specific props and wall textures. Not sure whether I needed to make them HDR images but it was better to err on the side of caution. Jonathan Edwards, our new Production Manager at the time, reworked the images to create flats of each room and warped the various props so that they created a stylised version of the set. He also drew outlines around everything so that it maintained the comic look. I built the entire house in After Effects as one large composition so that it would all work together a single camera move. The new After Effects CS3 also allowed me to do higher quality motion blur in 32bit, which would have greatly benefitted some of my earlier work had it been available!

The bluescreen shoot took place at ITV Wales in the news studio on the screen that was actually used to do the weather report! It had to be the smallest and worst screen I've ever worked with and had dirt, scratches and colour changes all over it. I'd carefully prepared all the movements and tried to get everyone to do their actions at an increased speed, although I wished I'd pushed even further as the edit removed so much of the detail. In the end, the keying is okay but not great and I would have liked to had more time (and experience) on it. I treated all the live action as elements and edited it directly in After Effects, retiming the camera moves to give more time to some set pieces over others. Each section was placed into the house and recoloured to match the comic-book style of the background.

A final touch was to add the dropping of the title onto the house and its collapse into the ground. The trouble with After Effects is that making last minute changes is very difficult unless you've planned all the compositions and sub-compositions in every detail. Sadly, I hadn't done this so creating this house collapse meant quite a bit of retooling, although I don't think using a node-based compositing programme would have made it any easier as After Effects is best suited to this kind of motion graphics work. The final touch for the house collapse was the goat I put on the top of the titles (which were themselves more than inspired by Monty Python!) to reference the goat that appears in the series. I'd been searching for somewhere to put the goat and came up with this last minute placement that I was happy to see continued into the series branding. The goat is not actually the one from the series; it's actually cut out of a photo I found on Google Image Search.

I'm really happy with these titles given the time I worked on it. It's the only one I wish I could go back to and rework with new effects and tools to get it better!