THE SEVEN WORLDS

Bronze eurobest Award

Demo Film

Film

TitleTHE SEVEN WORLDS
BrandHENNESSY
Product/ServiceHENNESSY XO
Category A11. Visual Effects
Entrant MPC LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation RSA FILMS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation 2 DDB PARIS, FRANCE
Production MPC LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Production 2 RSA FILMS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Additional Company 75 PARIS, FRANCE
Additional Company 2 STILLKING FILMS Prague, CZECH REPUBLIC
Credits
Name Company Position
Ridley Scott RSA Films /
Debbie Garvey RSA Films /
Carsten Keller MPC Head of 3D
Ryan Jefferson Hays MPC Creative Director
Kai-Lu Hsiung RSA Films /
Darius Wolski RSA Films /
Raymond Kirk RSA Films /
Marc Homes RSA Films /
Charlotte Law RSA Films /
Jim Weedon RSA Films /
Alexander Kalchev DDB Paris /
Pierre Mathonat DDB Paris /
Alex Benbehe DDB Paris /
Quentin Moenne Loccoz DDB Paris /
Xavier Mendiola DDB Paris /
Boyo Frederix MPC VFX Supervisor
Rod Norman MPC VFX Supervisor
Selcuk Ergen MPC Head of FX
Tomek Zietkiewicz MPC VFX Producer
Georgia Cook MPC /
Sandra Eklund MPC /
Alexander Kulikov MPC /
Christian Bohm MPC /
Dominic Alderson MPC /
Guillaume Weiss MPC /
Kiril Mirkov MPC /
Martino Maddeu MPC /
Pedrom Dadgostar MPC /
William Laban MPC /
Andrew Roberts MPC /
Stephen Nakamura Company 3 /
Emmanuel Guiraud 75 Paris /
Annabelle Fournier 75 Paris /
Lida Ordnungiova Stillking Prague /

Write a short summary of what happens in the film

The 'Seven Worlds' are creative interpretations of each tasting note described by Hennessy’s Comité de Dégustation as illustrations of Hennessy X.O’s taste and feel: Sweet Notes, Rising Heat, Spicy Edge, Flowing Flame, Chocolate Lull, Wood Crunches. Culminating in Infinite Echo. The VFX heavy spot creates an epic visual experiment that explores these seven flavour profiles in a surreal, sensorial and immersive narrative.

Cultural / Context information for the jury

The main influence and driver for this project was the Director Ridley Scott, who acted as an artist by drawing all the storyboards himself. In addition to this, work by the artist Moebius and previous film projects from Ridley Scott such as Prometheus, The Martian and the Alien franchise in particular, proved to be fantastic references, especially when it came to creating environments, landscapes and color palettes.

Tell the jury about the visual effects and summarise any relevant challenges or techniques.

The main challenge on this advert was to create 7 highly unique and fantastical worlds within a 4 min edit across 100 shots. Each world was very bespoke and had almost no real-world references to lean on, so therefore a lot of art direction and concepting was necessary in the first place to string a visual narrative together. An extensive amount of in-house R&D and software development was necessary to overcome the creative and technical challenges on this project as most of the ideas couldn’t be realized with standard out of the box software packages. The bulk of the work went into the making of the mystical woodland creature, the billowing clouds on fire and the forming of the artificial human made out of streams of powder.