Tiempo BBDO Drums Up Buzz for Bees in New Greenpeace Film

Honey - sweet, luscious, natural and full of golden gooeyness. One of natures finest exports, it’s global popularity never wavers. Not only does the humble bee produce wonderful honey, they play a hugely vital role in our global ecosystem. It is estimated that Bees pollinate a third of everything we eat as well as plants that yield seeds, fruits and berries eaten by birds and small mammals. 

But bees are under treat - changes in agricultural techniques and the introduction of harmful pesticides mean bees are struggling to survive. To fight for their survival Global NGO Greenpeace in Spain have launched their campaign ‘Their future is also ours’, to argue for the protection of these important creatures. In order to lobby government they need 250,000 signatures of support, but thy decided what about not only gathering human signatures….what about the Bees themselves? 

Tasked with making this a reality, agency Tiempo BBDO asked Glassworks Barcelona and Xavi’s lab to be part of this exciting campaign, to help develop a software that could track the movement of the bees, which in turn would act as a metaphor of their signatures. But we decided to go one step further - by designing a real time tracking system. 

Xavi’s Lab, Glasswork’s special projects department, developed an in-house software that converted an individual bees intricate movements into lovely vectorized paths, creating digital bees signatures. Adding to the uniqueness of the project, Xavi Tribo and his team also introduced robotics. Programming a robotic arm from Universal Robots, they were able to develop an algorithm that selected the best signatures and our UR10 robot arm then drew them using a beautiful Japanese calligraphy brushes, creating striking artistic images of the bee’s movement. 

Finally achieving to track 258,531 bees, creating hundreds of painted movements, we are really proud of being part of this innovative campaign. 

With some technically complex and intricate coding, we have created something charming in its final simplicity, to give Greenpeace the most important signatures of their campaign. Make sure you watch our behind the scenes film to catch an important insight into the project.  

If you would like to support the campaign, and give your signature too, please visit salvalasabejas.greenpeace.es