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.

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, proved to be fantastic references, especially when it came to creating environments, landscapes and color palettes.

The main challenge on this advert was to create 7 highly unique and fantastical worlds within a 4-minute edit across 100 shots. Each world was very bespoke and with almost no real-world references to lean on, a lot of initial art direction and conceptual thinking 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.