The keynote address for the 2024 edition of HPE Discover, delivered by President & CEO Antonio Neri and with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang as his special guest, merited exceptional visibility. Sphere Las Vegas was chosen as the keynote venue — guaranteeing a measure of spectacle, but also extraordinary visual, technical, and creative complexity.
The core initiative that would be announced in the keynote was a new AI solution, combining HPE server hardware and HPE GreenLake software with NVIDIA GPUs and tools in a set of off-the-shelf, ready-to-deploy, pre-scaled private cloud configurations. The challenge we were to solve? To depict these configurations, and all their components, in animations that would play on Sphere’s immense LED screen as Antonio Neri and Jensen Huang announced the collaboration and the solution: HPE Private Cloud AI.
Our solution began with photoreal 3D renders of the hardware components of all four HPE Private Cloud AI configurations: storage, network switches, racks, and HPE ProLiant servers, plus the NVIDIA Tensor Core chips and NVIDIA Grace Hopper superchips built into them. Adcetera then developed animations of the NVIDIA chipsets building into latest-gen HPE ProLiant servers, as well as rack builds assembling into the four HPE Private Cloud AI configurations. In addition, we developed animations depicting the software layer controlling HPE Private Cloud AI — combining HPE Ezmeral software with ready-to-use NVIDIA tools for inferencing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning.
Each video segment included sound F/X and photoreal surfacesand materials, and was timed to play at specific cues in thekeynote presentation. So far, so straightforward. But all this work had to be delivered at extraordinary scale: 4K resolution, 60 frames per second, for playback on a screen that would make a standard, 42U server rack nearly 8 stories high. Combining the capabilities of our NVIDIA-powered in-house render farm with additional, outsourced resources, we delivered ahead of schedule, with files that ultimately performed even at a larger scale than originally requested.
With our in-house writers, videographers, animators, and creative directors collaborating just steps away from each other, we turned our ambitious vision into reality while maintaining high production standards. This seamless teamwork fostered clear communication and complete transparency for our clients, allowing us to retain creative control as a full-service production house. Our combined decades of expertise in video production and social media strategy equipped us to tackle this project with precision, ensuring its success from concept to launch and delivering results that truly went beyond limits.
