The mountain seems to be everywhere: towering over the old city, reflected off the side of a car, even sandwiched between two buildings. Except this is downtown Montreal and that is the legendary Matterhorn not Mount Royal.

So how did the mass of rock – the trademark of Ricola Herbal Health Supplements – find its way into the Montreal skyline? The answer, to commandeer the old one-liner, is very carefully.

Through the exacting work of Inferno artists at Toronto-based TOPIX/Mad Dog, the Matterhorn was composited into scenes for a 30-second Ricola spot titled ‘Reflections.’

‘Part of our involvement was very technical,’ says executive producer Sylvain Taillon. ‘The idea was to bring the Matterhorn into all kinds of environments where it [normally] wouldn’t be seen.’

The spot, shot on location in Montreal and directed by Jean-Marc Piche of New York’s Conspiracy Pictures, involved a series of moving reflections of the great mountain. Piche also works out of Toronto for Avion Films.

‘Reflections’ is meant to ‘suggest the strength and importance of Ricola Herbal Health Supplements,’ says producer Diana D’Amelio, ‘through a series of atmospheric scenes of men and women in everyday situations integrated with the famous Matterhorn.’

Senior Inferno artist James Cooper undertook a great deal of tracking, rotoscoping and layering of effects to place the mountain in each scene reflected in windows, soap bubbles, sunglasses and off the side of an old farmhouse.

Cooper also replaced cloudy skies with blue, which saved the live-action crew hours of downtime waiting for the skies to clear, Taillon says.

Shooting the farm house in the country was particularly challenging because the actual house in the scene stands in Old Montreal surrounded by other buildings. To create a rural setting, Cooper had to remove the surrounding buildings and insert a wheat field and create a sky.

‘That’s where special effects sometimes can make a lot of sense,’ Taillon says.

‘Even though it’s not necessarily things exploding in space… those things make absolute sense when you think of moving a whole crew all the way to the country for one single shot where we know we can rely on building it with bits and pieces that we have at our disposal.’

Ricola, a global leader in the production of herbal remedies, has been in the business of marketing herbal cough and throat drops for 60 years.

The spot, developed by DKB and Partners out of Morristown, nj, will air nationally in the u.s. early this year, Taillon says.