Droga5 turned cognac-making chaos into an interactive WebGL film for Hennessy V.S.O.P

Creating Hennessy V.S.O.P Privilège hinges on chaotic variables — changing weather, varying harvest cycles, distillation and maturation — yet every bottle must taste precisely the same, year after year. For its first marketing push on the V.S.O.P brand, Droga5 had to turn that complexity, mastery and tradition into something brown-spirit consumers would feel online.

An interactive film drops you inside the chaos of cognac-making and lets you feel it resolve into the same balanced bottle, year after year

The 'Harmony. Mastered from Chaos' campaign centred on a responsive WebGL microsite with an interactive film, built from advanced capture techniques — 3-D LiDAR scanning, depth capture and binaural audio recording — layered over live-action footage. It was directed by Ben Tricklebank of Production Tool with digital production by Active Theory, VFX by Blacksmith, editorial by Rock Paper Scissors and sound by Plan8.

The experience launched 30 June 2016 as the first work of Droga5's integrated campaign for the brand. No traffic or sales results were disclosed in the material.

Hennessy V.S.O.P Privilège is the product of circumstances nobody controls: weather changes, harvest cycles vary, and distillation and maturation hinge on a multitude of variables. From that chaos the maison's cellars produce a cognac that is supposed to be exactly the same in every glass and every bottle, year after year.

Droga5 New York, winning its first push on the V.S.O.P brand, made that paradox the experience. 'Harmony. Mastered from Chaos' launched 30 June 2016 as a responsive WebGL campaign microsite built around an interactive film.

The production mixed 3-D LiDAR scanning, depth capture and binaural audio recording with live-action footage — directed by Ben Tricklebank through Production Tool, with Active Theory on digital production — to give web visitors the sensation of moving through the craft rather than watching it.

The interactive format mirrored the claim: instead of asserting consistency, the site lets visitors navigate the variables themselves and arrive at harmony.

LiDAR scanning and binaural audio translated cellar craft into a sensory web experience, making a 200-year-old process feel current.

As Droga5's first V.S.O.P work, the digital experience set the tone for the integrated campaign that followed.

When your product's story is controlled chaos, don't describe the consistency — let people step inside the chaos so the sameness of the result becomes the proof of mastery.

The microsite launched as the opening move of Droga5's integrated campaign for Hennessy V.S.O.P in June 2016. Later work for the brand by Droga5 (such as 2016's The Piccards film) followed; no results for the experience itself were disclosed.