Tasked not only with celebrating Mexican culture and history, but also with bringing Johnnie Walker’s ‘Keep Walking’ tagline to life, Virtue (VICE’s creative agency) developed the strategy and campaign concept, as well as managed video production, event production, and coordination with various global partners.

We filmed this project in Mexico City, Mexico and London, UK.

We commissioned Satore Studio to develop Hik+ – a visual poem blending digital art, innovative projection technology and real-time social media interaction — to convey the idea of progress through an aspirational Mexican lens. Satore used various cutting-edge technologies – such as Cinema 4D, Coding, Notch, Maya, Houdini and After Effects – to bring the project to life.

The piece was unveiled live at the art festival Visual Art Week, and was projected onto Mexico City’s largest ‘canvas’ – the Torre Reforma skyscraper (measuring 100×40 meters). The installation ran for five days and could be seen across the city.

At the time, Mexico City was recovering from one of the worst earthquakes in its history and HIK+ was equally a love letter to the city and all of the people that live there. Accompanied by two poems, the digital/animation piece centered around a character stuck in a maze. The character was choreographed by the #1 ballet dancer worldwide, Isaac Hernandez, who brought the character to life through swift movement and dramatic expression. The film follows his journey through the obstacle-filled labyrinth, where he never gives up despite being presented with challenge after challenge.

The project ran concurrently with Diageo’s winter campaign for Johnnie Walker, which was greatly bolstered by the social interaction. The integration of live social media updates from the project created a virtuous cycle that increased clicks, shares and impressions. In total 120K people engaged with Diageo’s winter campaign generating 63M brand impacts.