Today we made a corporate video

Lights, camera, action. It's been a long day.

Today we filmed a corporate video, complete with a freelance crew - director, camera, sound - a few lights and a cast of amateurs.

It all happened on an open plan floor in London - so nothing was terribly private, and the background noise was constantly getting in the way. I've never normally been so conscious of the level of noise in the office. Colleagues with tuneful mobile ring tones, printers churning out 50 page reports, fire engines and ambulances racing past outside, raised voices at coffee breaks, ...

I'd forgotten how long it takes to film: every 15 seconds of the finished piece takes 15 minutes. And by keeping the cost down by only having one camera, everything had to be reshot from at least two angles.

But it was fun too. We had software designers pretending to be external customers and account managers. I mocked up many of the computer screen shots in Paint Shop Pro since the software we're demonstrating doesn't yet exist. We spent a lot of time lugging pot plants around the floor to create the pretend customer's office, disguiising our own company's branding on the walls. And the actors' colleagues spent the day heckling between shots.

The director had even organised a bike to get the tape off to the edit suite so that it could be loaded up ready for the rough cut tonight. Such effort for an internal video.

Well, now that it's a wrap and the film is in the can, the fun starts with two days of editing before it's launch next week.