This was our first video for Bandit and came with a very simple and open brief: here's your budget and here the delivery date - it's up to you how you deal with it. Rather pleased with this situation, Llyr and I set about planning for this and the Beth Williams video so that each of us would have one to look after but share the workload. Llyr art directed this video and created the CG backgrounds, I supervised the greenscreen and did the compositing in After Effects. Romano animated the CG rat that appears at the start of the video and gets run over by the truck. The rat from from a previous series pitch that we'd done but have never gone any further so it seemed like a good opportunity to make use of the character. In contrast to the Beth Williams piece, we wanted this video to be a lot less 'digital' and more gritty and dirty. The landscape was a desert and so needed to look hot and dangerous so the whole movie was treated to look like old film with heavy grain and a surrounding vignette.

The shoot went fairly easily and we decided right from the start to only shoot three camera angles and cut between them to keep up the pace. That meant I could edit it very quickly but also allow Llyr to just set up three renders from each position and be outputted efficiently. The background was also rendered in multiple passes so I was very quickly able to update the edit with a new render and we could see how it all fitted together. In fact, this 'live' edit was to become a template for how I would work on some of the other shows. Provided I just referenced the final render and laid that over the top of the original footage in Premiere, it would automatically update itself over night and be ready to review in the morning. Much easier than having to import everything into an Avid every time I wanted to see what was going on.

The video was shot using a Sony HDV camera but in DV mode. I'd found that HDV was so heavily compressed that keying it was a nightmare so I just turned off all the sharpening settings on the camera and shot it in DV mode instead. Keying it was a dream, despite the extra blurriness of the images, and it was almost a one step key using Keylight all the way through. Also, since their feet weren't visible in the back of the truck, I didn't have to do any rotoscoping. the only problem was the drum which had chrome edging but I just used a harder key for that section and made sure it was more blurred than the rest to avoid noise.

The background was all created in 3DS Max by Llyr and he made a long strip of road that the truck rolled down for the length of the song. We then used the edit to tell us which sections of each camera angle needed to be rendered out and just rendered what was necessary. That way, we could always make a change in the edit and it wouldn't require any reanimation. He also animated the colour of the background throughout the sequence so that it went from searing sunlight to overcast blue. I made the gigantic sun in After Effects using a tutorial I found online.

My task, again, was the compositing and everything was done in After Effects. Because the camera shake had been added in 3DS Max, I decided to export the whole animation and camera movements in 3D from Max to AE using a plugin I'd first encountered doing Con Passionate. By moving the camera from one application to the other, I was able to centre everything accurately, put the band in the back of the truck even with the camera shake, add particle effects like the rain and the dust from the truck and do accurate motion blur. It proved a very simple video to set up and once everything was in place, a rerender meant simply changing one element which would automatically import into the other program. Lastly, I added the film grain, vignette and old film effects to give it that final grungy style.

My only regret about the whole thing was in not realising that Bandit were willing to show music videos in a 2.35:1 ratio. We'd done it all in 16:9, assuming that the program demanded broadcast standard. If I'd known that and had a little more computer power, I'd have composited it in HD instead of SD. Live and learn. This video was great fun to do, barely had any problems, rendered without fuss and the client (what little contact we had with them!) was pleased. If only they all went as smoothly as that...