The Brief 25 days. 25 panels. One building.
A large-scale out-of-home campaign for BMO, displayed on the digital wraparound screens on the exterior of Toronto's Eaton Centre. Wrap the Good was a holiday advent calendar with purpose — 25 sections of the screen, each representing a Canadian small business supported by BMO, revealed one per day throughout December at one of the most trafficked intersections in the country.
My role was motion design and animation, working within a broader creative team to bring each business's moment to life in After Effects.
Motion Design Animating 25 product reveals in After Effects
Each panel was its own animation — a reveal built around the featured business's product, designed to feel like an unwrapping moment while staying within BMO's brand system. Working in After Effects within a tight corporate colour palette meant the motion itself had to carry the personality: the way a product enters frame, the timing of a hold, the energy of a transition became the primary tools for making each day feel like an event rather than just a content update.
The production scale was significant — 25 finished animations, all needing to feel cohesive as a single growing composition, with consistent technical specs for a display format that doesn't forgive sloppy file management or inconsistent sizing. Version control and organisation across a run that long is its own discipline.
Safety Areas & Technical Constraints Animating inside a grid that doesn't always line up
The Eaton Centre display isn't a single clean screen — it's a system of individual panels mounted across an architectural surface, which means the joins between them are physical, not digital. Some edges are clean. Others aren't. Bezels cut through the composition at irregular intervals, and certain panels meet at angles or offsets that don't resolve neatly on a flat artboard.
Every animation had to be built with that reality accounted for. Critical content — a product, a logo, a moment of reveal — had to live within a defined safe zone that guaranteed nothing important would land on a bezel or get eaten by an awkward panel join. That safe area wasn't uniform across all 25 sections either. Each tile had its own geometry, its own edge behaviour, its own set of constraints that had to be mapped before animation could begin.
In practice, this meant working from technical spec sheets that defined the safe zones per panel, building custom guides in After Effects for each composition, and making design decisions — where a product sits in frame, how an animation moves through space, where text can and can't go — with the physical installation always in mind rather than how it looked on a monitor.
It's the part of large-format OOH work that rarely shows up in a case study, but it's where a significant amount of the actual production time goes. Getting it wrong means a product reveal lands half on a bezel. Getting it right means nobody in the audience notices the constraint existed at all.