The wide shot of Attenborough had meerkats climbing all over him and thrashing around the frame.

I had to digitally replace them by masking and painting various layers and then overlay the snake footage.

The snake was animated by aligning the path to a spline and changing the offset.

The BBC were asking for the snake to interact with the sand which scared me a little because then it would require some kind of particle dynamics and for how tight the deadline was, wouldn’t be feasible.

A work around I came up with was to have a cylinder (with the same sand texture) placed below the snake following the same spline and then animating the points of the spline to act like sand being displaced side to side.