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.

We developed an 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.

We came up with an application that recorded the bees in real time, that can pick out their flight paths. To do this, the application creates different points matched to each bee, assigns an identifier to each one, and then traces their flight path.

Head of Technology: Xavi Tribó
Software Developer: Xavi Tribó
Technology: Washington Neira
DOP: Dani Barrio
Editor: Phaded
Producer: Clàudia Barbal
Robot: Universal Robots
Shodo Studio: Yayoi Doho