Aleksandr Orlov is founder of Comparethemeerkat.com. He’s constantly trying to stop people visiting his website looking for cheap car insurance from Comparethemarket.com.

And he sponsors Coronation Street, to make sure people know the difference.

To celebrate one year of sponsorship, he invited another national favourite, Gary Barlow of Take That and X-Factor fame, to be special guest and play his new single at a one-off street party on the eve of the release of his new solo album.

First we filmed a stationary carriage. We flickered lights, we wobbled cameras. We created effects, both real and CG and combined them. Every shot has a number of VFX and CG animation techniques, most combine 2 or 3 different live action elements, pieced together using Nuke. We added in the CG animated characters in stages to these plate shots. The CG character lighting has to match seamlessly with the live action plates, the fur movement has to match the wind and motion.

For the exterior shots of the train powering through the countryside we used stock footage, replacing the backgrounds with matte painted environments to make it feel like the Ural Mountains.

We even added signage to the Meerkovo Express (freeze frame the opening shot and you can just see the markings). As a final pass, we added in CG effects, such as train smoke, atmosphere and a final grade to give it an authentic, slightly retro feel.

Every detail was considered and refined. We needed people to truly believe our meerkats were on a fast moving train, even if they weren’t and the train never actually moved a centimetre.

After the launch of Baby Oleg, people claiming a toy jumped from 42% to 62% of customers. Baby Oleg is the most claimed toy out of all the meerkats with 70% of all toy claims requesting an Oleg. Roughly 20k Oleg toys are dispatched to new homes every week and approximately 250k Olegs have found new homes to date.