For me, Grandpa in my Pocket began about two years before filming began. The producers of Grandpa, Mellie Buse and Jan Page, had met Dinamo in Cannes at one of the festivals and seen our reel of work for O Na! Y Morgans, which featured a CG hamster. They knew that Grandpa would need a lot of VFX work to achieve the interaction they wanted between the titular character and his grandson Jason so a mix of greenscreen and CG stunt double seemed the ideal solution. We were really keen to collaborate and I came on board to not only talk everyone through the post production requirements but also to spec the digital workflow that would be necessary for a production of this scope.

Initally, the plan had been to produce this as a standard tape-based workflow, similar to that of Morgans and also the various productions the producers and director had been involved with. However, I was keen to avoid this due to the problems we'd had getting access to our shots, something that would be multiplied with Grandpa due to the increased workload. Also, I didn't want to use HDCam to record the greenscreen shoot as the quality of the image wasn't good enough to get the quality I wanted. Add to all this the compressed post production schedule and everything pointed toward dropping tape altogether (at least as the primary source) and having everything digitally recorded instead. I'd read about Codex Digital and their hard-drive based solution that would allow us to not only record everything digitally but then export it out in the various formats we'd need to edit and composite with. I settled on the Avid DNxHD codec as our standard file format and Codex added the ability to export Quicktime movies in DNxHD as well as Avid-friendly MXF. This meant that I could store the entire shoot on the Dinamo hard drives in the same format as that of the editors. By simply sending us a low res edit and an edl from the Avid in London, I could reconstruct all the VFX shots by using the footage available on the drives. Data transfer was kept to a minimum and our turnaround on shots went from weeks (on the Morgans) to days, sometimes hours.

Preproduction consisted of meeting with the director, Richard Bradley, and the producers to identify all the VFX shots and make sure they were achieveable within the budget. I was keen to show what Dinamo could do so I was fairly flexible with the shot count. Most of the shots would be locked off to make things simpler and cardboard size references would be added to every shot for us to view later and match Grandpa's size on the greenscreen and for the CG double. We also received all the live action props that Grandpa would have to interact with so that we could make CG versions. The car, plane, seagull and kite (among others) were built to real world scale and textured to match.

The shoot was great fun but very stressful at the start. The digital workflow was untried and tested only on a single preproduction day. There were a couple of hiccups but everything ran smoothly otherwise and the Codex performed admirably. Every day I downloaded all the footage to the Avid editing machine and also to a set of portable hard drives for delivery to my greenscreen computer elsewhere in the studio and to Dinamo. There were a lot of long hours making sure everything was transfered and nothing was missing.

Working with all the cast and crew was great and there was a real family atmosphere. Considering the complexity of the show and the large number of sets, costumes and VFX shots needed to create Grandpa's adventures in Sunnysands, everyone pulled together and their enthusiasm can be seen clearly on the screen. I think James was initially a little wary of the greenscreen section but took to it like a duck to water and it was really impressive seeing him act to a mark on the wall and just the audio of Jason's lines. Because I'd stored the entire shoot on my computer's hard drive in the studio, I was able to take a live key from the camera and mix it with an HD playout of the plate shot, thereby allowing us all to block everything out visually and turn around about sixty setups a day. Although not particularly accurate, it proved to be one of the smoothest systems on the shoot.

Even before filming finished, work began on the CG and compositing, although in hindsight that would prove to be somewhat premature. Since the editor, Lindsey Dillon, was on set as well, she was able to start handing over episodes to Dinamo before going back to London, thus providing us a headstart on the large volume of work required. However, that meant I was split between sites and couldn't take time away from the crucial greenscreen shoots to go through the shots with everyone back at base. It took a few weeks after filming was finished before we entered into a decent pattern of production and were getting everything delivered on time. Always the way with a first series! We had a good team working at Dinamo, including Llyr Williams, Romano Marenghi , Richard Hopkins and Mathew Rees doing the CG stunt double and Cale Pugh, Eranga Kangara and Gina Carpenter doing compositing. There was also valuable support from Sam Lewis on set and afterwards co-ordinating the production.

in all, we completed about 850 shots in three months, with about a 20/80% split between CG and greenscreen.