For the launch of iPhone 11 Pro, the live wallpapers needed to communicate to the incredible power, beauty, and sophistication of these devices.

Our concept was a powerful, endless wave. We wanted the wave to appear incredibly detailed, energetic, and lifelike, as if it was captured out in the world with a professional camera. But it need to be made digitally, so it could dynamically come to life when pressing the screen, and show off the all-new Super Retina HDR display. The wave needed to look unique across the four device colors, and pass seamlessly to iOS Dark mode.

Looking striking in a technical aspect, as well as dramatically beautiful, the wave would help to introduce the “Pro” story for iPhone.

A team of designers, FX artists, animators and compositors at Apple created an immersive, hyper-real wave animation, pushing the limits of particle simulation. Along with the desire to achieve a photo-real look, the simulation also had to loop infinitely. This called for a massive amount of control over every particle in the simulation.

The animation relied heavily on layered simulations, some were sourced from others and affected by each other. This layering is what allowed us to achieve complex internal motion, which gave different physical properties and added extra detail. We also wrote our own surface operator solvers from scratch to drive the particle and fluid motions.

Finally, lighting control gave the ability to seamlessly switch the creative to the new iOS Dark mode. These complex animations successfully encapsulated the sophistication and power of iPhone 11 Pro.

As far as brand relevance, the first “Pro” devices were launched by Apple in 2006 for Mac, and signify the highest level of professional-grade processing power and performance. As the first “Pro” for iPhone, these wallpapers helped to launch the product worldwide in September 2019, signifying a moment of professional-grade performance for iPhone. Apart from being implemented on every purchased iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max device, these wallpapers have appeared in marketing imagery across touch points in print, social, on apple.com, and Retail stores. This work is still currently running in communications.