El Segundo Art Walk: Animated murals using the power of Augmented Reality (AR).

Context

Every year on the last Saturday in August, El Segundo in California hosts an art walk featuring food trucks, live music, and over 40 creative businesses who provide gallery tours of their studio. Each gallery displays original art from various LA based artists, celebrating the community and culture that thrive in El Segundo and the greater Los Angeles area.

We had a special opportunity to partner with the El Segundo Art Walk (ESAW) with the goal of highlighting murals found along the route by using Snapchat. For this project, I animated characters in After Effects for "The Fox" (located on the side of Sweet Spot Media, 19 W Grand Avenue, El Segundo) and "Moving Forward" (located at Labib & Funk Associates at 312 Main Street, El Segundo).

A running animation of an eastern European inspired painted fox.

Running animation from The Fox mural.

Animation of a kid wearing overalls walking.
A boy with a red hat runs.
A girl in a tank top runs.
A girl in a blue sweater walks.

Running / walking animations from the Moving Forward mural.

Software

After Effects
Duik Angela
Photoshop

Timeline

1 Month:
August 2023

My Role

• Animator
• Graphic Designer

CONTENTS

1. Image Manipulation

2. Motion Graphics Process

3. Reflection

1. Image Manipulation

2. Motion Graphics Process

The Fox

Using Photoshop, I began by cropping the fox from the photo, and segmenting all the body parts onto different layers.

An eastern European inspired fox mural spanning the width of a small building.

Unaltered image of the mural.

Each joint was cropped onto its own layer so the legs could move fluidly.

Additionally, areas of all layers had to be redrawn (including editing out the windows), so they could be animated seamlessly as a whole, otherwise gaps between layer movement would show up.

I did this with the clone stamp tool and Photoshop's AI autofill.

Screenshot of Photoshop layer organization.

Photoshop layer organization.

Other elements, like clouds and grass, were also cropped onto individual layers. Afterwards, I touched up the background, again using the clone stamp tool and Photoshop's AI autofill.

A mural with blue sky and green hills.

Final static background, in the shape of the building, with the clouds, grass, and fox edited out.

Moving Forward


Following the same process as The Fox and with the help of my teammate Ada Loong, we cropped out 5 kids from the Moving Forward image.

Green hills with kids running across.

Unaltered image of the mural.


I again layered all body parts and joints onto individual layers in Photoshop, edited out all kids, and touched up the background image to be seamless.

Edited background with only the rolling hills and trees.

Final static background with kids and soccer ball removed.

1. Image Manipulation

2. Motion Graphics Process

3. Reflection

The Fox

The direction of this mural was to have the 2D fox jump out of the mural and land onto the pavement as a 3D model.

Concept diagrams and text for The Fox mural.

Concept by Christian Enriquez.

After importing the segmented Photoshop file to After Effects, I used the puppet tool to transform each body part while using a reference to make sure the jump was realistic.

After the jump animation was complete however, we were having trouble with rigging the 3D model jump animation. We decided to pivot to a mostly static 3D model and a looped running animation for the 2D fox, which was much more simple to construct, again primarily using the puppet tool.

A looped jump of an eastern European inspired painted fox.

The original jumping animation (not looped).

An east european inspired fox running on a background with blue sky and hills.

The final running animation with background.

Moving Forward

The direction for this mural was to have kids running across the field kicking a soccer ball.

For the first kid, I used Duik Angela, an After Effects plugin for character rigging. Duik Angela is quite a powerful plugin and I really enjoy using it, however I realized that Duik Angela was not the tool to use for the rest of the project due to the unconventional proportions of the kids and their initial poses causing difficulties during the rigging process.

Animation of a kid wearing overalls walking.

Animation using Duik Angela.

After the first kid was animated, I began working on the next 3 while Ada Loong worked on the 5th, again primarily using the puppet tool. The end result are 5 kids in total running across the mural while kicking a soccer ball.

Animation of a kid wearing overalls walking.
A boy with a red hat runs.
A girl in a tank top runs.
A girl in a blue sweater walks.

Running / walking animations from the Moving Forward mural.

5 kids running and walking across a field kicking a soccer ball.

All the animations on the background.

2. Motion Graphics Process

3. Reflection

Return to Top

Overall, the El Segundo Art Walk murals were a huge success, with a couple thousand views by the end of the day!

After Effects is my favorite software to work with. Not only were my teammates awesome to collaborate with, the work itself was fun and exciting, and the turnout was astronomical!

ESAW was also very happy, they asked us to come back next year to do more murals, which I eagerly await!