Elephant Valley
To celebrate the opening of Elephant Valley, the San Diego Zoo wanted to bring a piece of the habitat beyond its gates.
So we dropped elephants into downtown Los Angeles.
Towering above the corner of Figueroa and Pico, a herd of photorealistic giants emerged from the concrete and steel. Designed as a larger-than-life anamorphic billboard experience, the installation transformed a familiar city intersection into something unexpected—a fleeting moment where the wild felt remarkably close.
- Client
- San Diego Zoo
- With
- The Shipyard
- Services
- Animation
- Live Experiences
- Year
- 2026
Explore
10 Assets
Process
We started by hand-sculpting a detailed 3D elephant model using reference of the African elephants at the San Diego Zoo, then built a custom rig to bring it to life with realistic weight, movement, and deformation.
To make the anamorphic illusion work, we recreated the Moxy billboard to scale in 3D and placed a virtual camera at the real-world viewing angle from the street corner. From that exact perspective, we hand-animated the elephants walking toward the viewer and appearing to break beyond the screen.
The final image was built through a traditional CGI pipeline — modeling, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, projection, and compositing. The rendered scene was projected back onto the billboard geometry and exported as flattened media that resolved into the final 3D illusion that played in real life on the curved LED surface.
Related Work
We've had some practice. Check out our other work shown on the Moxy screen:
Credits
Creative Director: John Bashyam Head of Production: Chris Grey Producer: Grace Parsons 3D Generalist: Carlos Aartsen Modeler: Paul Liaw Rigger: Tim Petre Animator: Rich Deforno Compositor: Elliot Fan
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