When one Olly Murs just isn’t enough, Vaughan Arnell unleashes a whole battalion of them in this simple but brilliant promo for Army Of Two.

Following 3 videos for the global monster that is One Direction, Vaughan confirms he’s very much back in pop promo land. He places Mr Murs in an empty car park and with some cool post-production trickery, messes with your mind as the chart-topper begins to multiply all the while marching and dancing towards the camera.

Here producer Astrid Edwards explains the process behind the lengthy and complex production:

“We shot Army of Two in the underground car park at the Excel Centre, Docklands. We chose this particular location as it is the longest underground car park in Europe! We actually found it by fluke on the way out of viewing a different location. We also had to drill in extra power to accommodate our endless line of lights required to light the length of ‘the set’. A Producer’s nightmare.

“The core VFX team from Framestore, London were involved from the outset which was invaluable as it took a good three weeks of full-on advanced maths collaboration between us, camera, grips and post production prior to shooting to time out each sequence to the last frame, last bar, last note. It was immensely complicated and extremely time consuming but necessary for the idea to work at all.

“We pretty much shot it for real – we laid 600′ of continual track and customised a baby motorised dolly rig housing 2 cameras off-set left and right to save time as we only had a day to shoot. We shot Olly tracking back around 180-200 times at 130′ intervals, we then rotoscoped/soft masked and composited around 80 Ollys at 3K resolution.

“To achieve the camera moves we didn’t ‘pan and scan’ but panned the Flame camera around the 3K image, which produces a more realistic result. Along with that we countered the lens distortion before and re-distorted after to reflect the zoom lens changing its field of view. In short, once we had shot it, we re-shot it again in post.

“We basically mobilised the entire workforce of Framestore. London 24hrs a day for 6 weeks – it should have taken 5 months so of course, we are very happy with the results and eternally grateful!”

Olly Murs
Army of Two (Sony Music)
Director: Vaughan Arnell
Production Company: Rokkit
Producer: Astrid Edwards
Directors Agent: Marisa Garner @ Marisa Garner Associates
DOP: Tat Radcliff
1st AD: Iain Patrick
Production Manager: Dulcie Kellet
Art Director: Billy Edwards
Stylist: Lee Holden
Editor: Leo King @ Stitch
Post Production: Framestore
Commissioner: Mike O’Keefe
Watch: here