Shot at Shepperton Studios, Jonathan Wood, our Lead 3D artist and shoot supervisor alongside Lead 2D Barnsley, explains his work on the spot: "I got involved a good few weeks before the shoot in order to pre-visualise the whole ad. This allowed us to work out the animation and timings for the preliminary edit, and also allowed us to figure out the technicalities of how some of the shots were going to be achieved on the live action shoot itself.

"The shot of the girl in the porthole was tracked and a CG extension of the spaceship was added. This then transitions into a fully CG shot of the SS2 Virgin Spaceship floating above the planet. Director Duncan Jones was particularly keen to incorporate model miniatures, so the planet itself was a matte painting and the next close up shot of the SS2 re-entering the Earth's atmosphere uses a scale model made by Asylum, which then had extensive Flame work done to it by Barnsley and his team.  The following shots of the SS2 skimming the clouds and transitioning into the 747 are fully CG, using stock footage of sky backgrounds."

He continues: "The shots of the balloon basket hitting the water are another example of when being involved in the planning stages weeks before the shoot proved very useful. It was quite complicated to work out all the shooting angles of the basket breaking the water, so we were able to look at this in 3D and calculate the size of the model plane that would be required and its relative position to the basket.

"All the shots from then on in are live action, with a lot of work in Flame, right up to the pound coin after the tunnel. We then added the moving items such as the train and balloon into this footage. The coin itself required some very high detail sculpting and careful lighting to make it look like the real thing."