Sprinting from London to Morocco to Johannesburg and through almost the entire African continent in between was all part of the epic shoot for Saatchi & Saatchi's new spot for Visa's recent World Cup spot. Saatchi and Saatchi's London executive creative director Kate Stanners takes us behind the scenes of an exhausting, breathless but happy shoot.

"Three years ago we developed a communication idea for Visa: 'Life flows better with Visa'. We kicked off the campaign with a TV spot that featured a naked man who had been dumped in the middle of nowhere with nothing except for his Visa card. He then starts running, to what turns out to be his wedding, buying the essentials as he goes. Last year we continued the campaign by featuring an amazing dancer called Bill Shannon, who performed a beautifully choreographed shopping spree on his crutches. So far so good. This year, Visa is the sponsor of the World Cup and wanted to use that in its advertising. We needed to make the football association relevant and as natural as previous executions.

We finally wrote an idea that involved a football fan and his journey to the World Cup finals, powered by Visa. We wanted to tell two stories: the physical transformation from a fan to a footballer, to realise every fan's dream of scoring the winner in the World Cup and the actual journey from living room in Europe to stadium in South Africa. We wanted to show a fan watching football on TV, his team scores, and this acts as a trigger that propels him on a journey. He picks up his Visa card and starts running. He runs to a shop and buys trainers and a tracksuit and he keeps running. Through Europe, across the sea to Morocco and on through Africa, until he reaches Johannesburg and the World Cup Finals, where he scores the winning goal.

We got Chris Palmer on board. His vision was to tell the journey through 30 different location shots, each just a couple of seconds. Our fan would run across frame from left to right at great speed, with the camera tracking him. We cast our actor, Danny Kirrane, for his brilliant humour, speed and size and two others to play the fitter and more football-skilled Danny as his transformation progressed.

Armed with Chris Palmer, three Dannys and a trainer, we set off to Africa. An epic journey ended up being an epic shoot. We went from Morocco, through Africa to Mpumalanga, took in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. We shot in fields, desserts, beaches, bush, townships, villages and cities. In rain and sun, in day and night. We ran with rhinos, giraffe, zebra, elephant, ostriches, and jumped over camels. In fact our actor Danny did so much running that he lost a stone with a 3rd of the shoot left to go, which meant he had to wear a fat suit for some shots.

The final shots involved Ryan our footballer to run into the World Cup stadium, and score a goal. Easy… that is if the stadium had been built. And so we had come all this way only to be thwarted by a building schedule. Back in London Paul at the Quarry and Chris cut together our journey and the post production commenced. Danny's head needed to be put onto Kelvin and Ryan's body in the final shots. Then back to South Africa for our stadium shot.

Finally the music. We knew we needed something fast, but we didn't realize how fast. We put the Pixies' "Isla de Encanta" to it and it worked. Phew. Exhausted, breathless but happy."