The world of corporate videos isn't the most glamorous. Ditto the world of enterprise printing. And when the two worlds collide, there's a chance the end results will be less than explosive. But if a recent web campaign for HP is any indication, there's a potential for corporate videos to be charmingly abstract.

Last year, HP's enterprise printing audit service reduced the number of personal printers and copiers in multinational adhesive product-maker 3M's global offices by 47% by centralizing all internal printing as one, IT-managed service. The projected yearly savings to the company was $3 million. HP decided to use the 3M success story in a web campaign aimed at its corporate clients and turned to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners copywriter Todd Lemon and art director Kevin Hughes.

"Most Fortune 500 companies have alarmingly bad, disaggregated printing structures," explains Lemon. "Everything else in corporate America is really structured and controlled, but for some reason printing is that final frontier where it's very Balkanized and sort of chaotic."

After seeing a photo of a wall-sized mosaic of Elvis Presley made from Post-It notes on the Internet, the creative team decided the "Post-It Art" phenomenon would give their interesting, but somewhat dry material a colorfully poetic dimension.

The duo's creative director agreed, and decided to make Post-It mosaics the focal point of the accompanying print campaign as well. With 34 colors and eight palettes, 3M's sticky pads have been used to create guerrilla street art, wall installations and department store window displays. Post-It animations have also popped up on YouTube and in a spot for South African phone company MTN.

"This is a growing field of aesthetic endeavor that honors the humble Post-It and elevates it," says The Directors Bureau's Bucky Fukumoto, who Goodby recruited to helm four web films starring 3M's director of IT services Peter Godfrey and IT print services manager Paul White. "It's an everyday practical item so the appeal is that anyone could do this, but we took it to this crazy degree."

The clean, geometric aesthetic in the resulting four films recall everything from the op-art animations of abstract painter Oscar Fischinger to 8-bit Nintendo games. As hand-drawn renderings of Godfrey and White narrate, stop-motion Post-It animations graphically represent 3M's road to printing efficiency.

The creative team didn't have a set idea of what type of Post-It art they wanted, giving the director room to experiment with different imagery during the extensive pre-pro period. Working with animator Brian Covalt, Fukumoto shot frame-by-frame with an HD still camera, mixing traditional animation tricks with a few VFX cheats.

For the first film, Fukumoto projected a grid onto a 12 ft. by 20 ft. wall, which the art department (doubling as actors) filled in with Post-Its according to an animatic. Initially, the Post-Its proved too sticky and seamless. When the crew pasted everything down, it looked liked they'd painted the wall, meaning Covalt had to spend much of the two-day shoot ensuring the 1,081 Post-Its bent and folded so as to resemble... Post-Its.

The fourth film, "Green" required 3,072 of the narrow tab Post-Its to create a tree mosaic. Fukumoto Photoshopped a photo of a tree, pixilated it and broke it down into a grid-map for the art director to fill in. A similar idea to erect a city skyline from the tab notes was nixed because it didn't fit with the narration, he says.

Hughes also found Post-Its a somewhat challenging medium to work within. In creating the three print ads, he found the simpler, graphic images of a light bulb and HP logo easy enough to replicate, but capturing the nuances of 3M's director of IT services Peter Godfrey in a Post-It portrait required more work.

"Striking that right balance between the playful nature of pixels and actually conveying what something looks like is a little bit tricky," he says. "Peter isn't Elvis. He isn't a recognizable Hollywood type, he's a regular looking person. How do you bring out the character of someone no one recognizes? In the end we were looking for an interesting mix of colors, because ultimately, Peter was representing something bigger - he was going to be a symbol."