To bring the Art of Patrón to life, Firstborn crafted a love story that could only be told through a first-of-its-kind VR experience. With Patrón’s signature bee as the guide (narrated by John Ventimiglia, the infamous Artie Buco of The Sopranos), fans watch from the bee’s point-of-view as it chases an agave plant being harvested and transformed into tequila.

To deliver on our creative vision, Firstborn pioneered a new form of VR development: pairing live action footage with cinematic CGI animation. Along with director Mark Kudsi from aWHITELABELproduct, we partnered with Legend3D, who developed new systems for the project that allowed us to track the CG within 360° live-action footage. To create the unique bee’s-eye point of view, we turned to Aerial MOB, the only drone operator certified by the FAA, to help us create a custom drone for the film.

The Art of Patrón VR experience debuted around one of Mexico’s most pride-filled days—Cinco de Mayo. Fans across the country can experience how their favorite tequila came to be using VR headsets at in-store events. For those at home, Firstborn created a custom interactive player that can be controlled via computer mouse or an iPad’s gyroscope.

Salud!

360 - video player and Patron Website  

At firstborn we are not just the Agency, but we do all our Production/Post aswell, my task since being at Firstborn was to grow the studio into handling these larger scale jobs, this project is an example of the success of this.

Overall 30 Artist worked on this job over 3 months, 20TB of data was used and transferred between coasts and just over 10 thousand frames were outputted at 4kX4k. 

I was responsible for the execution of the project, along side me sat some key individuals that made this incredibly challenging project a success.

 

We were the first company to release a project of this scale with CG integrated into 360 degrees of footage, this couldn't of happened without Justin Denton from Legend 3D pioneering the capturing of the video, they also stitched and tracked the footage for the project ,that was a monumental task.
 

The camera moves through all the of the environments seamlessly, this added to the complication of the Pre-Production, Production and Post. 

 

The real Art was putting all of these incredible technical breakthroughs together, the team of Compositors lead by Jake Slutsky comped everything, with new challenges on a daily basis and tools that hadn't been developed for VR work,they overcame it all by coming up with clever solutions that break the mould of traditional compsoting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Really great Article from Campaign

http://www.campaignlive.com/article/patrons-cmo-learned-taking-chance-virtual-reality/1391374?DCMP=EMC-CONTheCampaignFix&bulletin=the-campaign-fix&utm_medium=EMAIL&utm_campaign=eNews%20Bulletin&utm_source=20160420&utm_content=www_campaignlive_com_article_1

Screenwork Credits

Agency: Firstborn

SVP, Executive Director: Crystinue Cho
VP, Content Development: Seth Tabor
Senior Producer: Laura Rosenblatt
Producer: Steve Cozzarelli
Post Producer: Erik Gullstrand
Producer: Jillian Likens
Creative Directors: Jonathan Kim & Cameron Templeton

CG/VFX Supervisor: Jay Harwood
Technical Director:Jordan Harvey
CG Artists: Ron White, Mike Bourbeau, Yun Chen, Michael Kuzmich, Kyle Anderson, Fausto Tejada, Jordan Blit, JC Cuadra, Isaiah Palmer, Anthony Patti
Lead Compositor: Jacob Slutsky
Compositors: Bruno Ferrari, Aaron Baker, Fred Kim, Jose Lopez, Greg Silverman, Aaron Kemnitzer
Senior Editor: Emily Sheskin

 

Production: a White Label S/R product
Director: Mark Kudsi
Executive Producer: Annique De Caestecker
HOP: Mari Geraci
Producer: Anna Joseph

 

Stereo Conversion: Legend 3D
Matt Ackey
Justin Denton

Music & Sound: Ant Food
Composer/Creative Director: Wilson Brown
Engineer/Composer:  Charlie Van Kirk