It's A Long Story brings to life the unusual backstory that separates Bulleit Bourbon from other premium bourbons in the market. Just like the stories told over a whiskey between friends, this video recounts Bulleit's dark history and the legendary whiskey that lived on long after the founder's - Augustus Bulleit's - untimely disappearance.

Collaborating with the agency, scripts & storyboards were carefully designed to take the viewer on a journey through a dry and thirsty landscape, celebrating the bourbon's dark history.

The team worked tirelessly for a solid three months using a complex mix of live-action, stills photography, 2D & 3D animation, and just about every post trick up our collective sleeve.

From the very start of the commercial, we see all design departments working together. The hero parchment design, hand animated in After Effects, was given to the 3D department as a texture and then using a morph tool the team then transitioned the ink shape through to the live action hand. While this may sound straightforward it was a very complex process and took many versions to master.

The bar environment is a combination of 3D photogrammertry and a full 3D character, built in Maya and rendered using vRay. A grain layer and 2D dust particles that reflect in the light were added to enhance the environment. The bourbon liquid was a CG Realflow fluid simulation, graded to perfection to represent the product at it's best. There were many incarnations of the liquid in order to get both the look and the shape of the pour looking desirable. As we reach the end of the liquid, it transitions into a fire-like substance, created using an in-house custom-made Particular plugin for Nuke.

Throughout the animation, we see 2D script text, tracked into the backgrounds of the environments, re-itterating the story by way of referring to the original Bulleit recipe, some text is hand drawn while others had been researched to reflect documents of the time.

3D cameras are used throughout the TVC in order to create depth and allow for multiple layered composites seen from a variety of angles. As the horse rides away in the fully CG town, reminiscent of a scene from a western movie, we look through a pair of live action boots, shot in camera on a turntable to imitate the parallax of the shot. The CG horse and rider were animated in Maya before being tracked into the environment, enhanced with graded, edited photography.

The forest was a great feat as it was almost entirely created in 2D, using a complex composite of staggered plates of illustrated trees and live action smoke plates. The overbearing clouds seen in the frontier wide were also satisfying, being the result of days of research and design tests; Cloud images were projected onto a 2D card within 3D space. The camera would then travel along the flat picture, creating the illusion of moving. 2D depth enhancements ensured the effect of multiple clouds could be achieved.

One of the best things about this job was the client’s confidence in our crew’s overall creative vision. Such support and outset bravery from a client is so refreshing, and allowed us to really utilise our whole skill-set.