I was brought onto the project by John Giwa-Amu of Red and Black Films who was producing the It's My Shout short film scheme. I'd worked with John and Caradog in the past on their feature projects Little White Lies and Blonde so it was great to be asked to help out again. Students from Swansea University were already involved in the project and John approached me to supervise the shoot and then oversee the post production so that it ran smoothly. The remit of the scheme is to provide real-world training for newcomers to the industry but the scale of the production would require an experienced hand. Reign was not technically one of the It's My Shout films but had been attached to the scheme because Matt, the director, had made one of the previous year's film and also Noel Clarke was committed to starring in the short.

Matt's preparation for the film was excellent and he had a full storyboard and tons of reference images and films to work from. He's a concept artist and set designer by trade and had previously worked on Doctor Who, The Dark Knight, Wolfman and Prince of Persia. He'd had the idea for the film a number of years ago but had been unable to put it into production until now. It was designed as a film that would work both on its own and also as a mood piece for a potential feature film so Matt was keen to make it as professional and energetic as possible. In order to get the film made now, he'd made the concession that it would be filmed in daylight and then graded for nighttime and that would present it's own challenges in the end. Luckily, John had pushed to use the RED camera on the It's My Shout films so it gave us the benefit of having a 35mm 4k high-latitude image to work from. We were all nervous about using the RED footage for the first time without a great deal of technical support but in the end it proved a very straightforward workflow.

The shoot took place in one day at a location called The Maltings in Splott. Doctor Who had used it a number of times so Matt and the set design crew who were helping him were already familiar with it. I took the opportunity to take plenty of textures and references images of the location so that we could use them later if we had to paint out a particular piece of detail. The shoot progressed according to Matt's storyboards, although a few setups were simplified for the benefit of the schedule. For CG animation reference, we had an actor perform reference plates with Noel and then a clean version was shot, although oftentimes we just removed the actor from the reference plate and used that performance instead because the energy and the camera movements seemed to be better. We decided against using any greenscreen as there were very few cases where the CG crossed the live action and it would have been more work to light the greenscreen and then deal with it in compositing that simply rotoscoping.

At the end of the shoot, I received all the RED raw footage so that I could reassemble the edit once it was complete. Although I could have received a Quicktime DNxHD cut of the edit to work from, I was keen to find a solution that would allow me to work with the original raw files and make the most of the enhanced resolution and latitude. There was an initial edit conducted at BBC Wales but the limited time and the amount of empty vfx plates meant that it was very difficult to judge the correct timing. Matt and I decided to continue the edit on our own so that I could update the shots each time a new preview from the animators was outputted. I converted all the RED movies into avi's so that I could edit in Premiere easily and I used that to create the VFX breakdown for the artists. Although Premiere could have dealt with the RED footage natively, it didn't seem particularly stable and my machine didn't really have the power to handle it.

The animation work was handled by students from Swansea Metropolitan University, headed up by Linus Hofmann with whom I also shared compositing duties. Linus was the lighting and rendering technician while five other student collaborated on the animation, often working directly from the onset reference we filmed. I worked on the grading, which was then passed to Linus so that he could match it with the robot shots. There were many layers of additional shadows, vignettes, texture replacements and, in a few places, completely rotoscoped skylines to add a night sky instead of blue daylight. The edit built up bit by bit until Linus and I did a marathon overnight session getting all the final shots rendered and delivered to the BBC for grading.

This production was a really tough one because it took place slap bang in the middle of my work on Grandpa in my Pocket Series 2. We shot the short on the first weekend that Grandpa started filming and we didn't finish until we were well into the post production. I therefore had to work ten to twelve hours on Grandpa during the day and then switch to Reign in the evenings! After swearing that I'd never do that again when I'd finished O Na! Y Morgans, I end up doing exactly that but even worse! The film was certainly worth it, however, and it really gave me a chance to experiment with all the techniques I'd learned over the last few years.