It's been one of the success stories of the year. The Jake Erland-directed videos for Olivia Dean have helped propel the singer to new heights. Now we can find out how VFX work at post house Anchous assisted the in-camera ingenuity in three videos, and contributed to their impact - courtesy of Before & After comparison reels. 

London-based Anchous worked with Jake Erland on three of his videos for Olivia Dean this year - Lady Lady, the smash hit Man I Need and So Easy (To Fall In Love) - and the idea in each one was to make the ambitious 'one-shot'-style structure as seamless and natural as possible.

So that Olivia appeared to wander effortlessly through choreographed scenes of backstage activity or rehearsals in a theatrical performance, or a Hollywood musical, the VFX work had to be invisible.

"Overall, the biggest challenge was maintaining the organic, non-artificial feeling of a true one-shot music video - keeping the illusion that everything was captured fully in-camera," says Arsenii Pronkin, Anchous founder, EP and senior editor. He also reveals that the essential method was to work with two different takes of the same tracking shot to craft the 'perfect' combination of both. 

"Matching motion between the two takes was tricky, and in the moments where that wasn’t possible, we had to stitch together transitions from five or six different shots while still making the final piece feel completely seamless. But thankfully Jake and Rowan [Mackintosh King, the producer] did their best with the shots and pre-planning the transitions. So it was a very smooth process."

Matching motion between the two takes was tricky.... where that wasn’t possible, we had to stitch together transitions from five or six different shots.

In fact, you can find out how good the clean-up work has been in the three videos by viewing the Before & After comparison reels here - accompanied by Arsenii Pronkin's words on the specific challenges posed by each video.

Lady Lady

"The toughest part was definitely the floor transition. We didn’t want to rely on a fade-in/fade-out, so we used multiple takes to capture as much of the different floor positions and reflections to make the transition feel natural."

Man I Need

"Here it was all about the masked transitions, which were quite complex. They weren’t the typical “hide it behind someone’s back” or “person passes in front of camera” type of tricks - these ones required much more precise planning and execution with the matching position."

So Easy (To Fall In Love)

"The challenge was the final shot, where we had to replace almost every lightning flare with a larger one. The actual replacement isn’t hard, but doing it across a continuous 40-second shot - tracking every light stomp and making sure all the flares stay consistent in size."

Pronkin points out that a different skill set is required for using VFX to clean up live action shots, rather than creating 'visible' VFX.

"Some of the tools are the same," he says. "But you just need to be a lot more efficient with being able to make two or three options with the very slight touches of changes in the transition.

"No doubt that the cleanup is easier than full CG. But tracking a 40–50 second shot and then blending it into another 30-40 second shot is still no joke, ha ha."

But Pronkin adds that Anchous have also worked with Jake Erland on another project which did require decidely more visible VFX work: the Joy Crookes' video for I Know You'd Kill.

"We had some very fun blood and gunshot VFX moments - that was super cool to work on."

• More about Anchous here