The Left Behinds is a brand advert for Freeview, the free-to-air television service.

The commercial is set at a jumble sale where all the unsold items come to life and sing I Want To Know What Love Is, by Foreigner. The incredible show is witnessed by a gob-smacked caretaker, demonstrating our message: 'Entertainment, it's even better when it's free'.

Our challenge was to bring to life over 40 characters, and make them look authentic and move realistically. (It turns out it's quite tricky to figure out how stiff a taxidermied marmot should be.)

We spent a lot of time discussing each one: their movement, their personalities and emotion, and how they were originally manufactured. It was imperative that their look, movement and behaviour was spot on.

In order to achieve this we used a mixture of real, puppeteered objects and full CG doubles. The sheer volume of characters we had to create was a big challenge, especially as different methods were needed for each one.

Each object was 3D scanned, retopologised, textured and then rigged to create a fully animatable digital puppet. Our animators worked to make these puppets come alive and then we needed to perfectly match the lighting and environment of the original plates.

Finally, in the compositing process, we replaced the real ‘shot’ objects with our all-singing, all-dancing CG characters.