In 2017, Greenpeace set itself a challenge: to gather signatures for a comprehensive action plan to protect bees and promote organic farming. Their goal was to collect 250,000 human signatures, paired with 250,000 bee signatures.

Glassworks’ special projects division, Xavi’s Lab, developed innovative software to track bees in real time and programmed a robotic arm to paint their movements. These movements were understood as the signatures of the bees.

During the shoot, the robot and the real time tracking system were placed in between the hives. Our in-house tracking software converted the bees’ route points into vectorized paths, forming the beautiful digital bee signatures. An algorithm selected the best-looking signatures, which were then drawn by the UR10 robot arm using Japanese blending.

Thanks to the ‘beeutiful’ on-set performance of the guest stars, no post-production work was needed at any stage of the project.