The Day After Tomorrow took me back to Montreal for the second time, and if anything it made me love the city even more. By this point I’d really started to get under the skin of the place. We became friendly with some of the local Montreal crew, built a great social circle and had some fairly memorable weekends enjoying the nightlife.

It was also another opportunity to work with Neil Corbould, alongside Clive Beard — both hugely experienced effects people and always a great team to be around on a production of this scale.

Directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ian Holm, the film was a huge practical-effects undertaking. We were creating extreme weather on an enormous scale — high-pressure wind systems, flooding, submerged sets, shattered windows and huge quantities of snow and ice.

One of the biggest learning curves for me was the ice and frozen dressing. We literally sprayed entire sets with liquid wax using specialist equipment developed by Darcy at Snow Business. It was an incredibly effective technique and taught me a great deal about creating convincing ice and frozen environments practically.

What still amazes me about the film is how much of it was achieved on stage. Apart from the exterior of the weather station in Scotland, virtually everything you see was created inside — streets, vehicles, snow, ice, flooding and all of those huge weather environments. When you look at the finished film, that is quite an achievement.

We froze vehicles, flooded streets, sank sets into water and battered enormous builds with wind, snow and ice effects. Coordinating all of that across such large sets was technically demanding, but it was exactly the sort of effects work I enjoyed — big, physical and happening for real in front of the camera.

Another great effects job, another considerable learning experience, another chance to work with Neil and Clive, and on a personal level another fantastic chapter in my love affair with Montreal.