It has to be a first that a strange man fiddling on a train could be popular with his fellow passengers. Thankfully, in this brand new ad from BBH for Vodafone, this chap is the musical type.

We open on an 'olde worlde' steam train slowly chugging along its track across the horizon. Bored, listless passengers gaze out of the windows or stare into space. We're not surprised to hear from the voiceover that this train is so slow, people can walk to their destination quicker. In fact, we notice many doing just that.

Sitting amongst the passengers is a solitary young man. As he subconsciously plucks at a string on a violin in his lap the train lurches forward. He tries again. Once more the train jerks, upsetting beverages and belongings. He launches into playing a full jig, inspiring the other travellers to jump up and dance. As the music and dancing get faster, so does the train. The amount of steam created goes off the gauge and the mass of steel eventually leaves the tracks, takes off and makes the rest of its journey in the sky.

Alastair, James, Ruediger and Chris at Glassworks had to build a photorealistic 3D steam train and carriages. It would have been a very long and complex build to have created the train from scratch in every detail so a technique called camera mapping was used to help matters along. The train was still built to quite a degree of complexity but a lot of the detail came from hundreds of digital photographs of the real train, which were painstakingly mapped onto the computer models. Further computer simulated lighting and radiosity (a technique used to recreate the natural bouncing of light) was used to create the final photoreal look. This train was then composited in for the taking off and flying sections by Duncan Horn in Flame. The interior of the carriage was shot with green screen outside and the backgrounds also added by Duncan.