animals

When we originally came up with these scripts, we loved the fact that there could be a link from the pay monthly films with the big balloons in the desert but that the balloons would have a fresh look and feel.

This time around, they are smaller and there are thousands of them! Pre-production was particularly interesting. You would be surprised to know how many ways our producer Peter looked into making balloons! In the end, they were PVC and we had 6000 of them made and shipped to the shoot. Visual effects people spent hours blowing up balloons and engineering them to move in ways we wanted them to (and trying to keep them away from kids that wanted to nick them off the set).

Finding the location was a bit of luck. We needed somewhere with high probability of sunshine BUT needed it to look like the UK. Turns out the train stations in Buenos Aires look a lot like Paddington or Brighton station.

Balloons generally put a smile on people's faces and seeing thousands released from a train - representing these rewards being made available to everyone - completely achieves this.

All went well on the shoot. Aside from our cat who was meant to have a cameo roll but ended up not being able to act. And the riot that almost started in the station as we were trying to finish our last shot (the station workers went on strike).