Art Innovation
Art Innovation is an organization that presents digital exhibitions on large billboard screens around the world, including New York, Hong Kong, Miami, and Seoul. From June 23 to 29, 2025, they held a dual exhibition in Times Square, where I showed a new short animation, Discovery, along with some previous works. The timing was really tight — I had to prepare everything in about two weeks while working a full-time freelance role — and it was also my first time creating a piece with the NakedEye effect.
The pressure was real, but I’m very glad with how it turned out.
Discovery
“Discovery” is a small 8-second animation I made for this exhibition. It’s about a father and daughter who are obsessed with dinosaurs in the deepest jungle. I wanted to create something heartfelt, fun, and a bit charming. It’s also a kind of love letter to American cinema—the first movie I ever saw in a theater was Jurassic Park, and I was obsessed with dinosaurs for a while after that. I started wondering: what if dinosaurs could see people digging up their bones? That idea became the starting point for this piece.
Making
The main challenge was creating the NakedEye effect. I had never worked with it before, but luckily there were plenty of tutorials available, so I could figure it out. First, I built the scene based on the screen’s dimensions. I also placed a camera roughly where a viewer would stand —
I estimated that position using the reference photos Art Innovation sent me. After finishing the animation, I rendered an image from that camera. Then I projected this rendered image onto a plane with the same dimensions as the final output and rendered it again. The final video looks very stretched, but from the intended viewing spot, it appears properly 3D.
Credit
Exhibition Organiser : Art Innovation
Direction / modelling / texturing / lighting / animation / composite : Marina Nakagawa
Software
blender
After Effect
Substance Painter