Our second music video for S4C's series Bandit. Primarily directed by Llyr Williams, we decided to continue our focus on VFX-lead videos but go for something more urban and less fantastical than our previous greenscreen work. Shot at the Bandit studios, the band were filmed against alternate white and black backgrounds and then comped onto footage of Cardiff's miriad billboards. Additional photography of the extensive building work taking place in Cardiff city centre were augmented with flocks of crows.

This was a remarkably straight-forward production and another pleasurable music video experience. We were again given plenty of latitude by the Bandit production team, provided we delivered it by the air date, so we gave ourselves the same two week limit to get the video completed.

Our first task was to go out on two rainy days and get HDV photography of the construction sites around Cardiff. At the time, the St. David's Shopping Centre building project was in full swing and there were great towers of concrete sprouting out of the steel framework. We had plenty of interesting architecture to choose from so we were able to walk round and grab these great sweeping vistas across the Cardiff skyline. It's seems strange that, eighteen months later, all of that building work has been finished and even some of the places where we stood the camera have been knocked down. We filmed it all at HDV so that we could reframe where we needed to and get the best resolution for tracking.

Llyr put the edit together and I then took it to break it down into its constituent shots. While Llyr was building CG concrete blocks to add to the live ones, I began setting up all the projects and establishing a grade for every shot. We wanted a very gritty black and white style with blown out skies and glowing highlights. I also tracked all the moving shots so that Llyr could add the blocks and flocks of crows where needed. Luckily, there weren't that many edits in the video so there wasn't an overwhelming number of setups to wade through.

The band shoot took place at the Bandit studios over the course of a four-hour session. We filmed the band individually against white and black backgrounds so that they could be repositioned and reframed into the various billboards throughout the video. In hindsight, we should have probably just filmed what we needed of them as we had loads of footage that we didn't need, but the tight production and lack of an animatic meant we had to edit what we could after the fact. I would have liked to have seen more of the band and, if we'd have had more time, we would have added CG billboards to place them into the construction footage. While Llyr was rendering all the CG, I organised all the band footage and corner-pinned it into the billboards, as well as rotoscoping and painting out any people and cars from the shots. The only moving elements of the video were to be the crows and the band so it was necessary to do quite a bit of reworking to get a clean plate.

The final compositing made use of a large amount of glows and god rays so create the ethereal atmosphere of the piece. I'm really pleased with the way it looks, although I don't think I filmed the scenery correctly to get the shadow information. In hindsight, I should have over exposed the footage a bit to get more details in the darker portions of the screen as the highlights were clipped anyway. Nevertheless, it proved a good experiment. I should have also reduced the framerate of the band so that they looked more like stop motion animation or as if they were really printed out onto paper and pasted onto the billboards frame by frame. However, it was a relief to produce the video in 2.35:1 instead of 16:9, something I wish I'd done on the earlier Bandit video Missus Glaw.