I feel guilty now because I've mistakenly given the impression that this was done with samples (obviously I can see you'd think that, being a VSL forum!), whereas in fact this is 3 players (2 violins and 1 cello) from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, multi-tracked 12 times on the second part, to get the sound of 36 players.
I have to admit that I pretty much always only use VSL on my projects to get the draft version while scoring, then replace it with real players. Partly this is just the obvious fact that real still (usually) sounds better than sampled, but part of it is that my in-depth knowledge of the VSL articulations and programming tricks is pretty weak compared to some of the demos and examples on this site and forum. I'm sure some of you guys could get this nearly as real with VSL, but it would sound like a honking Casio keyboard from 1982 if I did it that way.
You could *almost* argue that using real players is a form of laziness, where the great sound and great playing can pretty much cover up your arrangement sins :)
Another thought while I'm here: this and a lot of other very detailed bits of string writing I've done for this project will eventually be somewhat hidden under a layer of 60s sounding female pop, but it's nice to show that there's a bit of craft going on under the hood :)