The three-day shoot took place all around Los Angeles, from the streets of DTLA, to the top of a helipad, to the remote desert 80 miles away. Simon Brown, The Mill’s Shoot Supervisor and 3D Lead Artist, comments, “It was a grand tour in Los Angeles and its regions. We did the African scene in the desert and built a few huts, and filmed the Thai village setting at Universal Studios. The Tokyo train station in the ad is actually in Anaheim. We added the Japanese wall signage, built a fast-speed CG bullet train, and included a few Tokyo skyscrapers in the background to add to the realism.”

The robot dog, Simon explains, had a fun interaction with Ewan: “The robot dog was fully computer generated. The client gave us some real-life robots to play around with as reference, and we spent about a week sourcing different designs. We had our animator start to experiment with the CG robot dog before shooting. We wanted to explore all kinds of possibilities, and had the robot do running, dancing and all sorts of tricks. We wanted to be fully prepared for anything."