Walmart "Essence Festival"

Essence Festival is a three day party held every Fourth of July weekend in New Orleans. By day, the event is a chance to bring forward thinking figures to speak on race, gender, culture, and art. By night, prominent musicians, such as Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blidge, and Puff Daddy, entertain the enormous crowd.

Walmart has been a long term sponsor of the event, and accordingly, has a number of visual installations through out the space. In both previous years, and this one, the team at Burrell has helped the brand execute on a number of these installations. One of the largest installations is an enormous 70 foot curved wall (that's a total guess on size, but it sure looks about right). The wall contains both large format printed assets and video assets.

For this years festival, the Mill design was asked to help create the CG environments that the live action heroes live in. For previous years, Burell had completed similar executions for the printed assets, but it had never attempted something so large in animation. The team was genuinely a joy to work with, which makes a huge difference, when you have printed deliverables at 20k and video deliverables at 4k.