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When the agency Space needed an innovative solution to bring to life their creative idea and concept for their client, Happy Finish stepped up to the bar with our selected Danny Vaia from Punq to direct and creatively produce a 360° virtual reality (VR) distillery tour with a twist for Glenfiddich’s campaign “Journey into the Mind of the Malt Master”.

Happy Finish supported Space producing the experience end to end. The opening sequence offers stunning nature perspectives of Scotland and aerial views of the original Glenfiddich brewery, to place you at the start of the Whisky brewing process.

This project was challenging from a VFX vantage compared to traditional film-making, 360°VR can rarely apply many of the common shortcuts such perspective hiding or cut-aways. The technical artist’s attention to detail also gets divided across a larger plane of a 360° circumference as opposed to just a single perspective. At the core of the production it required careful planning and execution of a green screen shoot with actor Steve Hay by our VR & VFX Supervisor, Davide Preite. Both the CG environments and a replica of the Glenfiddich stag were built in 3D Max and Maya and rendered with VRay.

Commenting on the project, Dele Momoh, VR & VFX Producer at Happy Finish, said, “We are always thrilled to work with creatively daring and progressive clients to produce cutting-edge projects. With the new and rapidly growing medium of Virtual Reality the story has really only just begun. There are quite literally worlds worth of new creative ground to cover. One of the project’s key challenges involved orchestrating different film elements on stage of a 360° environment. We had a live character and narrator shot on green screen, leading us through a sequence of full CG and 2D environments interacting with a full CG character, a stag.”


CLIENT | Space
BRAND | Glenfiddich
VR CREATIVE DIRECTION | Daniel Cheetham
VR DIRECTOR | Danny Vaia (Punq)
VR & VFX PRODUCER | Dele Momoh
VR & VFX SUPERVISOR | Davide Preite
360° SHOOT PRODUCER | Sam Adam
360°| James Brown