Stella Artois 'Cannes Journey'.

Thomas Napper's glorious ode to the glamour of Cannes for Stella Artois, which was created by Mother and produced by HSI London, has been posted at Prime Focus. 'Cannes Journey' promotes the prize of a VIP trip to the Cannes Film Festival, courtesy of Stella Artois, an official partner of the event.

The commercial visualises the winners experience, as they travel in style on a plane, then head down Cannes' famous Boulevard de la Croisette, arriving at a hotel to have lunch, and of course a glass of Stella Artois overlooking the beach. Then as the evening arrives, it's into the limousine and onto the red carpet before taking the best seats in the house for the screening. The commercial is aided by a French voice over commentary duet from a man and woman that lists all the things that you are seeing.

Prime Focus was supplied with 4 tracking shots and the idea was to take a vertical in one of the shots and stitch it into the next shot, so there was a seamless connection between all the separate shots.

Colourist Duncan Russell was responsible for the grade that evoked that era of the golden age of French cinema as well as complementing other Stella television adverts. "The challenge was that the ad only had four shots. You think it won’t take long but actually it does; you just spend longer grading each shot. We had 20 different versions of each shot and because we could, we had lots of different passes as well."

Duncan added "Thomas Napper is very well versed in the way these kinds of things look so we didn't we didn’t have to fake much; like the sun hitting the pavement or the way the metal glints. He was very good at just getting the right feeling. We ended up working pretty hard to get what looks effortless, which I guess is the whole point of grading. It was a great job to work on and well worth coming off paternity leave for!!!"

The spot was graded on Baselight and the multiple passes were then stitched together in Flame.

James Lethem, the Producer at Mother commented "This was my first visit to Prime Focus, I shall certainly be returning again soon. "There is a great collection of people who couldn't have been more helpful."