The Midnight Sky is probably the film that brought me the most recognition in terms of awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects, a BAFTA nomination for Special Visual Effects, and winning the VES Award for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature. It was a tremendous achievement for everyone involved and something I remain immensely proud of.

It was also my first opportunity to work with George Clooney, both as director and performer, and he was an absolute pleasure to work with. Calm, collaborative and incredibly experienced, he created a very good atmosphere around what was, at times, an extremely demanding shoot.

The Iceland location work was spectacular. It is an extraordinarily beautiful country, but the conditions could be brutal — remote locations, bitter cold and some incredibly intense wind. We worked closely with Eggert Ketilsson and his Icelandic Special Effects crew, who were excellent throughout and a huge help in dealing with the practical realities of working in that environment.

A major part of our job was then reproducing those conditions back on the stages at Shepperton Studios. The snow and ice dressing, headed up by Oliver Guy-Watkins alongside Snow Business, was exceptional. The interiors matched the Iceland exteriors incredibly well, and when you added the heavy wind effects, snow and atmosphere, the transition between location and stage became remarkably convincing.

One of the largest practical sequences involved the ice shelf. Considerable development and engineering went into creating the cracking and breaking ice around George’s character, culminating in the cabin and surrounding ice giving way and sinking into the water.

The entire sequence was created practically on stage at Shepperton. We built a large sinking set, together with mechanical sections of ice that could crack, separate, move and collapse in a controlled way around the performers. It was a substantial piece of engineering, combining water, hydraulics, breakaway elements and large-scale ice dressing to create something that needed to feel completely unpredictable on screen while being precisely controlled behind the scenes.

That sequence probably sums up what I enjoyed most about The Midnight Sky: taking something that appears enormous and completely natural in the finished film and finding a way to create as much of it as possible physically in front of the camera.

Between the extreme Iceland locations, the stage work at Shepperton, the wind, snow, ice and mechanical effects, it was a demanding production but an enormously satisfying one. The fact that the work went on to receive an Academy Award nomination made it all the more special.