I was starting high school when the war in Iraq was beginning. Every day there were new heartbreaking stories in the news. My senior year I painted a mural on campus and called it Fallujah. The mural is an homage to Piccaso’s famous Guernica which depicted the bombing of a Spanish town in 1937 and the resulting devastation. My mural portrays the aftermath of a car bombing during the Fallujah offensive in 2014.

A few years ago, I had the idea to use motion design to bring the mural to life. The process involved separating the image into hundreds of individual layers in Photoshop, and building new backgrounds. Then the layers were brought into After Effects and composed to create this 3D scene.

The mural and this animation are meant to be a reminder of the high cost of war.