When Whataburger launched a custom Fortnite map to drive a giveaway, the brand needed social content that could bridge two worlds: their real Austin restaurants and the game-engine universe they'd already built. Austin agency McGarrah Jessee brought the project to Camlock Films, an Austin video production company, after a creative saw Nick using Unreal Engine for animatics and recognized the perfect fit. Whataburger already had the Fortnite map and a library of Unreal assets for their branded world; the goal was authentic, funny social content that dropped the Fortnite version of their mascot, Whataguy, into a real store. The package: one :30 hero spot and three :15s for paid social across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

The core challenge was integrating a game-engine character into live action convincingly — capped by a hero shot where Whataguy's Fortnite self appears reflected in a restaurant window. Compounding it, we filmed in an active Whataburger that needed to keep selling food throughout. That meant a production designed around the store's operations rather than the other way around: we ate lunch off-site during the scout so the location could keep serving, and we planned coverage to lock off only what we needed, when we needed it.

To make that precision possible, Nick scanned the interior and used a drone to scan the building's exterior, giving us exact angles to plan around so the manager could keep the restaurant running while we maximized the available natural light. Time of day was critical — the reflection shot depended on it, and it was composited later. We shot on an ARRI Alexa LF with Angénieux primes using a small, efficient crew. On post, we split the work with Speed Collective: VFX supervisor and compositor Will joined us on set to ensure every plate was captured correctly, and Speed Collective handled color and finishing while we cut the spots in-house, building the comedic timing that sells Whataguy's deadpan presence in the real world.

The campaign delivered four pieces of branded content that fused real-world production with Fortnite's visual language — exactly the kind of cross-medium problem agencies struggle to staff for. It's a clear signal of what Camlock Films offers as a production partner: an Austin production company fluent in both traditional commercial production and game-engine workflows like Unreal. For agency creatives and producers searching for a Texas partner who can pull off live-action and virtual production in one brief, this is the standard we hold.