"As soon as Aardman were onboard with adam&eveDDB's script we started talking with them about the project" says Mill Executive VFX Producer Luke Colson. "To be part of a project that involved such iconic characters was a real honour. This is also the kind of tricky project that our Mill Studio team is perfectly set up to deal with."

The Mill was brought in to create the 'Hangout' user interface and bring all these much loved Aardman characters together with seamless continuity. "Essentially we had six streams of content over approximately 60 seconds each" explains The Mill VFX Producer Carl Phillips. "This is actually a lot of animation, so any edit change had to be watched for continuity very closely. As animations were done, even if rough, we would drop these into the corresponding place in the edit, and we literally continued this process for days, making tweaks to framing, UI and edit as and when the animations went in. Then, when we had all the completed animations in place we graded the final individual animations. This is where the consistency was fully achieved."

The result is 60 seconds of an Aardman character meeting (online) for the very first time. Take a look and see how well they get on which other. And what they all get for Christmas!

Meet Wallace and Gromit's Creative Director in our interview with Merlin Crossingham.