When the lovely chaps and chapesses at Play asked us to show 5 years of quay-side restoration in 20 seconds, we were afraid we were going to have to hire some physicists to bend spacetime for us. Thankfully all we actually needed to do was create some beautiful time-lapse CG. Having a very short time scale to work in this became very much a project of hacks and tricks to make it happen. We back engineered two matte paintings (the start and the end), using a huge crossover of post and 3D to fill the elements in between. Points of note: Matte painting, fake 3D within post, post based particle systems and every other trick in the book to make this happen in 10 working days. Photo-real time lapse. Huge asset management. Simulated unique seasons over 5 years.