The director, Rhys Evans wanted the camera movements to never break and create an almost seamless move through the various TV screens. Like the directors for Con Passionate and Cymru am Byth, he was also unfamiliar with digital effects and so wanted to do a lot of the production live. In hindsight, we both agreed that it would have been easier to do some of it on greenscreen, especially the TV shop at the beginning which was way too small but was all that could be arranged at such short notice.

I was present for the whole of the shoot and got to walk around the Millennium Stadium just as they were finishing the turf for the FA Cup Final. It was really great being on set and there was a photographer present who was able to take loads of hi-res reference photos for me which I used for a lot of the virtual camera moves.

The big money shot was the pull out from the stadium to a map of Wales, which was accomplished by building a full representation of the country out of various maps I found online. The map of Cardiff fits exactly onto the map of Wales and the CG stadium fits exactly onto the position of the stadium on the map of Cardiff. Therefore, the whole shot is a true powers of ten move with the actress being exactly the size she should be if she were standing beside the stadium entrance. If scrub through frame by frame, you can see the joins, but when it's moving it's pretty seamless. Again, motion blur hides a multitude of sins! Originally, the move was to have been much slower but there was so much dialogue to get through it had to be accomplished within one second rather than four or five.

The pull out of the eye at the beginning was my chance to improve on a similar move I'd done for the first novel fantasy in Con Passionate. This time, rather than try to motion track the footage into the eye, I simply stabilised the live action plate by the eye and kept everything stationary. I only dropped the stabilisation when she blinked, which also gave me an excellent way of wiping the lightbulb out of the composite. To get high resolution detail, I took the original digibeta footage, deinterlaced it and resized it to HD using a smart resizing plugin in After Effects. This increased the pixel count without producing too many jagged edges. The iris was enhanced with a high resolution closeup photo that was recoloured in After Effects to match the plate footage. The final footage has a kind of painterly quality to it thanks to the resizing plugin.

The end bit of the advert with the constellation of TVs was cobbled together at the last minute when I realised the storyboarded shot wasn't going to work. I quickly called the director and asked his permission, which he thankfully gave! All in all, I spent two very fraught days doing four different versions of advert (two in Welsh, two in English) which didn't require any corrections. Hurrah!

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