Forget 80 days. The El Al airlines whistle-stop spot "Around the World" (McCann Erickson, Israel) crams the global experience into 60 seconds, embracing Arctic snow and penguins, buses and an airport, a safari on the savannah and a vibrant Chinese festival along the way.

Remarkable when you find that the whole thing was shot in just three days - and a night - without straying more than three and a half hours from Johannesburg.

If it scores highly in the savannah stakes, South Africa doesn't sound like an obvious choice for knee-deep snow. But after scouring the earth for a country that could create these diverse locations - Argentina and Hungary were contenders - and provide a suitably international cast, agency producer Tammy Katz Zara says that in the end it was "just the best place."

The agency had worked with Cape Town production house Velocity Films on previous shoots. When Velocity producer Carmen Amos saw the boards, she knew they could cover everything. "Nowhere else could give you the savannah, snow and an airport all at once," she says.

Zara led a pre-shoot scout to check out the locations, do some casting and rehearse with the dragons, "then we let Velocity get on with it and tried not to interrupt."

Velocity's production crew flew in from Cape Town. The schedule was intense, says Amos. "It was essentially three days, but the Sunday extended to 24 hours. We were constantly moving but it was a great shoot and we all learned a lot, particularly about penguins and Chinese customs."

The three penguins - cast on looks, according to Amos - were flown in from a park in Cape Town with their handler, a sheaf of animal welfare permits and constraints, housed in their own lodge and kept happy on their own sushi. "I won't forget the day we asked the PA to go and buy up several kilos of fish and deliver them to the lodge," Amos says.

Zara says working with the birds, which were expected to follow a backpacker down a street and onto a bus, was OK. "To begin with they didn't go where we wanted and I was worried about how we'd get them to climb on the bus. But that was actually the easiest part. We just had one of the crew at the top of the steps with a fish."

With the savannah and airport scenes in the can, the timetable peaked on the final shoot day with two full crews and sets of equipment operating simultaneously on the Chinatown and snow shots.

It was a hot day, recalls Amos. The snow scenes were shot in a "serious one-horse town" outside Johannesburg and required several types of man-made snow to withstand the heat and protect the penguins' delicate skin.

"We'd pre-rigged the roofs the day before because they were so sloped," she says. "Then we created the actual snow prior to shooting because we didn't want it to get mushy, using a variety of materials according to the shot: friendlier stuff for the penguins, firmer stuff so we didn't have buses skidding and realistic flakes for the falling snow." Amos says it was easy to source the snow. "There's a special effects company that we brief and everything is sourced, manufactured and rigged locally."