HP Z8 Fury - The Drop

HP wanted to launch the Z8 Fury, a high-performance desktop workstation, in a
dramatic way. So we engineered a high-stakes stunt as powerful as the machine itself to demonstrate its infinite possibilities.

We introduced the Z8 Fury workstation by dropping it out of an aeroplane and filming it for its launch video. Inspired by the helplessness you feel while waiting for a task to render under a deadline, the extreme, never-been-done-before stunt was a visual declaration of the Z8 Fury’s force and ferocity.

We strapped a stunt person to a desk with a Z8 Fury to test its speed and performance— then released the workstation from a plane at 13,000 feet, sending it on a free-fall to Earth. The machine had 30 seconds to render for its life and complete processing before the stunt person could eject and the workstation hit the ground.

The Z8 Fury is designed to speed up compute-heavy tasks like working in VFX,
machine learning, and language processing. What takes another machine five minutes only takes the Z8 Fury 30 seconds — and the stunt proved its credentials by visually communicating the impact of its incredibly fast rendering speeds.

The video gained tens of thousands of views in the first few weeks and went viral in the tech community. The stunt kept viewers on the edge of their seats and showed what extreme performance looks like when it’s put to the test.

‘The challenge was to engineer a stunt for HP that would put the Z8 Fury’s survival on the line, and require it to prove its credentials, or face complete destruction. The only snag was we couldn’t use a point of comparison. So the only sensible solution was to throw it — along with an operator — out the back of a plane at 13,000ft. And hope the Fury lived up to its rep!’
- Cole Paviour, Director, UNIT9

Learn more here.