Flowers growing around the world illustrate HP's worldwide connectivity.

To tell the story of FTD’s use of HP technology to speed the delivery of international flower orders, tulips were portrayed stampeding across the world from Europe to Asia. Massive herds of CGI tulips were composited storming across different landscapes, wreaking a bit of havoc along the way. We had the task of creating the massive swarms of tulips that grow across the globe. CG artists at Digital Domain created hundreds of thousands of quickly growing tulips and supplied the compositing team with tens of layers of elements. Compositors then took these elements and combined them seamlessly with the live action footage. The challenges included developing a look for the tulips that was super-realistic. As the motion was not based in reality this was a huge challenge. A combination of CG elements and live action dust elements was used to blend the real and surreal. All shots were shot with a ‘wild’ camera which meant heavy 3D tracking was required throughout. The 1 minute commercial was finished with 12 bit colourspace to maximize the quality and allow us to more easily integrate the CG elements. This in itself presented a problem given the huge amounts of data that needed to move seamlessly between the artists on a regular basis.