It took three and a half months in post-production and more than 18 people from Framestore CFC to create Guinness’s “NoitulovE,” a spectacular 50-second special-effects epic featuring three men morphing through time from a present-day London drinking hole to a primeval mudhole.

Guinness, in cahoots with UK ad agency AMVBBDO, has a long history of innovative special effectss in its annual TV and cinema ad extravaganzas. And “NoitulovE,” which is currently running on TV and in cinemas in the UK, is no exception. Guinness returned to the company that had created its 1999 “Surfer” spot, which featured digitally engineered giant white horses galloping through the surf and went on to become one of the best-loved commercials ever made.

“NoitulovE” journeys back through the history of life on earth and begins in a pub with three Guinness drinkers, who morph backwards to end up in a prehistoric pond. The aim was to show that man’s evolution was all about the pursuit of a pint of the dark brown nectar. It was, says Framestore VFX supervisor William Bartlett, the most challenging job he’s ever worked on because of the large number of problems involved. There were also very few scenes to shoot, other than the opening one in the bar. “So many shots came from different sources, and there were so many different techniques involved that the hardest thing was trying to get a consistent look,” he says. “With so many individual problems, it felt like we were doing more than just one commercial.”

It helped that Framestore happened to have over 20 years of experience of doing just such things, including work on challenging features like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Troy and commercials such as Levi’s “Odyssey” and Xbox’s “Mosquito.” One of the first things Bartlett did was sit down and pool everyone’s collective knowledge on how best to proceed.

In the end, Bartlett and crew created an extraordinary digital collage made up of stock footage, some 15 custom-built CG creatures, CG plant life and rocks, digital stills and VFX from the Inferno's box of tricks. Bartlett also added several personal touches from his own personal repertoire. Some shots, for example, needed geological distortion of background rock formations. He thought of the way heat affects dough and created a batch at home, shooting time-lapse footage by taking a frame every 10 seconds. For some of the looks he discovered that a dough/Grape Nuts/Special K combination worked best. Other low-tech effects involved using a blowtorch on some plants and then reversing the effect on film. “Some of the things we did were very Blue Peter-ish," he says, referring to the famous UK children’s television program. “But they blended in quite well with the more sophisticated efforts.”

One of the big differences, says Bartlett, between making films and commercials is that “with films you have much more time to prepare it all. With commercials, you have to try and achieve a feature-film effect, but without the budget or the time.” Ultimately, he says, rather than one breakthrough idea, it all came down to a series of small steps and a combination of different approaches that made “NoitulovE” work so well.