Every year the "Hola Mexico" Film Festival showcases the best in Mexican cinema in Los Angeles, making it a success amongst Mexicans in the United States who come to watch the movies they otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. The challenge this year was: how could we generate excitement beyond a Mexican-only audience around a film festival that offers a wide variety of Mexican films (movies, documentaries, kids, classics, among others) as well as other expressions of this country’s culture such as food and music, without drawing upon the usual icons from Mexico’s imagery?

For many people, besides Mexicans, to discover everything that Mexico has to offer. The problem is that for many, Mexico is the same as mariachis, tacos, lucha libre and tequila. In short, for many Mexico equals clichés. To end this prejudice, we created a character (a Mexican renegade with a big mustache with two miniature pistols hanging from the tip of each end) with the authority to say: Goodbye Clichés!

Armed with his moustache, his purpose was to eliminate clichés and show the world that Mexico has much more to offer through cinema, TV, web videos and mobile app.

An intrinsic part of the main character was his gun-toting mustache.

We wanted the mustache and the guns to be photorealistic and to work as physical extensions of the character, like an additional pair of limbs. After some research, we determined that the best way to achieve this effect was to shoot the actor without any facial hair, and create the whole contraption in post-production, for hair and lighting consistency. The brushes of hair were carefully rendered for lighting and texture. In order to give it a natural look, each hair had to be individually generated in 3D, brushed and trimmed, much as it would be the case for a real one. The camera movements of the footage had to be recreated in a CG environment to match the actions of the hero. As they move and shoot, the mustache reacts to the expressions and reactions of our hero, becoming like a live appendix with its own personality.