"I know that William Bartlett and Framestore CFC will rise to any challenge I throw at them. With noitulovE they have - once again - surpassed themselves."
Daniel Kleinman, Director, noitulovE

VFX Supervisor William Bartlett was responsible for leading Framestore CFC's team through noitulovE’s demanding 3 ½ month schedule, from planning, through the shoots in Iceland and in a London studio, to assemblage and creation of a multitude of elements in the Inferno. He even managed to bake some bread on the way…

"This spot was exceptional – and challenging - in many ways," admits Bartlett, "Not least because so little of it existed when we were planning it. It is very much a product of the post production process." Real elements that were filmable included the bar sequence at the beginning when we meet our heroes, green screen footage of the men with various costumes and layers of ape-man make-up on, some spectacular scenery from Iceland and the mudskippers at the end of the story.

The rest of noitulovE is an extraordinary digital collage, made up from stock footage, custom built CG creatures, CG plant life and rocks, digital stills and VFX from the Inferno's library of tricks.

A great VFX Supervisor is equal parts artist, technician and accountant, and it was the number cruncher in Bartlett that led him to create some of the elements for noitulovE in his own oven. "From the start I'd been very aware that the CG list was already colossal - 15 new creatures, for a start. For several of the shots we needed 'geological' distortion of background rock formations," he recalls, "And I was struck by the way heat affects dough. I made some up at home, experimenting with various materials to get the right sort of looks and textures, and shooting it with time lapse every 10 seconds. For some of the looks I found that a dough/Grape Nuts/Special K combo worked best!"

Andy Boyd headed the 3D team tasked with creating not only creatures, but also trees, grasslands, rivers, waterfalls, a meteorite and millions of year's worth of geological transition.

For the VFX elements – plant life and geology – a key to the success of producing so many 3D effects in such a little time was to have a system that allowed to create many variants of the effects procedurally. For this reason Boyd chose to use Houdini 3D software, which is ideal for this sort of approach.

The creatures that Boyd's team came up with were also in a constant state of flux – flying squirrels becoming regular squirrels, fins withering away, necks growing. "It was a lot of fun, actually," he confesses, "As we had a bit of freedom to experiment with the design of the prehistoric creatures."

Even with so much of the spot created inside various computers, there was still a need for a small amount of TK work. The 35mm was transferred at HD by Colourist Matthew Turner, who also worked with Kleinman on the mastergrading of the material.

So how does it feel to have squeezed an aeon into an ad break? "Fantastic," laughs Bartlett, "All I need now is a new Le Creuset pan to replace the one I shattered while boiling sugar for some eroding rocks…"