Up Up and Away

Plano, Texas has been known as the Balloon Capital of Texas since 1980, home to one of the state's most beloved annual hot air balloon festivals. T-Mobile's Experience Store in Plano needed content that felt native to that community — and Up Up and Away was built around exactly that idea.

The content lives on a four-screen lenticular display inside the store — vertically oriented monitors displaced across physical space that, viewed from the right angle, create an anamorphic depth effect. I served as art director, 3D designer, animator, compositor, and VFX artist on the project, and was involved from the earliest concept stages. To quickly iterate with the client on the look and variety of balloons, I used AI image generation to rapidly explore options before committing to the final lineup — a process that compressed weeks of back-and-forth into a fast, visual conversation.

Each balloon was built and textured in Substance Painter, and all animation, compositing, and visual effects were produced entirely within After Effects using its native 3D capabilities — a deliberate production choice that kept the workflow lean without sacrificing the depth and dimensionality the format demanded.