In Jonathan Irwin's exquisitely-crafted video for Kodaline, a robot-pet is cast out into a cruel world when its old master dies.

Irwin adds to the considerable canon of heart-rending narrative videos from the Irish band with this emotional story of the loveable mini-robot's misadventures, and eventual salvation. And the execution is so immaculate, it actually takes a while to realise that the whole thing was created in CGI.

As he explains, this is a project that has been on the drawing board for a long time - and it was not always going to be full animation. 

"This video was originally pitched as a live-action piece way back, and was on-track to be made but eventually fell apart due to the fact that it would be too expensive to produce for a non-single track," reveals Irwin. "So the storyboards languished in development hell until the pandemic, where I got more and more involved in full-CG productions. 

"I created a string of CG animated projects, creating solid workflows and rendering pipeline, after which I had a lightbulb moment - wait, I think I can do that Kodaline video inexpensively as a pure animated piece.

"With the band's approval, I set about recreating my storyboards in CG. As it turns out, it seems like we were waiting for the technology to catch up the vision and now I can't imagine having done it any other way.

"Also, given that it was written with live-action in mind, it involved lots of tricky simulation work that I'd normally be keen to avoid - lots of water simulations and human characters - which pushed me technically to meet the vision."

Thankfully it has finally seen the light of day, and what a wonderful result.