HP has given us an insight into the huge technical effort it has taken to create the latest instalment in the popular DreamWorks' Shrek franchise - Shrek Forever After in 3D - and we have to admit the numbers are pretty mind blowing.

The film was made using a combination of HP Z800s, HP Halo telepresence solutions, HP StorageWorks X9000 network storage systems, Cintiq tablets, ProLiant BL460c G6 blades for server management, and DreamColor displays and printers.

The total amount of data required to make the film was a humongous 76 Terabytes with a whopping 46 million hours of rendering. That's over 5000 years of rendering hours. In comparison, the first Shrek title required 6 Terabytes and had 5 million rendering hours.

Getting the hair right was one of the trickiest jobs for the designers - Fiona in beast form has a hairstyle that took 9 months in total.

In the movie, there is a scene set at an Ogre camp that features 35 torches in 59 different shots. To create this the artist needed 2065 layers of just the torches and 4130 layers to make it stereo.

If you were wondering just how big Shrek is supposed to be then wonder no more. For the designers to create the world in which Shrek lives and all of the other characters they use the following dimensions for the world's most famous ogre: He's 7-feet tall, has 22 teeth and his hand is about 34cm from the base of his palm to the tip of his middle finger. His shoe size is a (US) 22. The same as Shaquille O'Neal.

Maybe those Wayne Rooney comparisons are a bit harsh then. On Shrek.