Lavazza, the Italian coffee company, releases an annual calendar for which they commission well-known photographers to shoot coffee-related fantasies. This is one of the images that Mark Seliger shot for this years’ calendar. He contacted us to create a swarm of fireflies rising from the coffee and forming a demitasse in the air, a job too complicated for a traditional photo retoucher to do realistically. We used Maya particles to generate the swarms of fireflies and position them. We also took smoke elements shot by the photographers and treated them to create the steam rising from the cups.