Here’s how It was done

Software & Plugins

• Adobe After Effects

• Red Giant Universe

Introduction

Last month (Sept 2026), I had the opportunity to dive head first into a new project with Monzo. Working with Global Street Art, they were in the process of having a giant mural painted in London’s Southbank. It was our job to bring it to life in a sweet reveal video for their social pages. With Tom & George at Greenmen Productions PM’ing it, and BBH overseeing everything, I brought everything together in AE.

The Brief

The idea was simple: the artist would throw a spray paint can at the mural wall and when it hits, it transitions from the sketched outline to the full painted mural.

The Project

Once I had received the footage from the team, my first port of call was to get the mural area cleaned up. Since this was a quick turn around, and the idea hadn’t been finalised, filming didn’t begin until the mural was finished, meaning the team couldn’t get footage of the blank mural area or footage of the mural in its sketch form. Instead, I blanked the wall in post production, then layered the digital version of the mural outline that the artist sent us over the top, with some distortion, lens blur and noise effects to blend it in (Corner Pin came in very useful here to get the perspective right!).

Up next, I split the footage into the foreground and background areas. Since the area the artist was standing in was in shadow, it needed to be brightened a lot more than the rest of the scene to make it stand out. Having the two separate areas gave more control over the final look, it just meant I needed to matte his hard hat along the top of the wall too.

One element we hadn’t expected at the get go was that they requested for the artist’s tattoos to be blurred / painted out (contact me if you’d like me to run through the process). At first, this was challenging, but once I had R&D’d the technique, it soon came together. In order to mask their legs for a base layer, I used After Effects' built-in roto brush tool. After a few iterations, the cutout was working well and I could start layering effects on top to remove their tattoos. I added some blurs, solid colour mattes matching their skin tone, and plenty of grain and colour correction effects to remove as much detail from the tattoos as possible without losing shadow detail from the legs.

After that, we also had a request to remove the logos on their shoes and socks. The above technique didn’t work so well here as the shoes lost detail after all the effects. Instead, I just used the content aware fill tool to quickly paint out the logos (I did try this technique first on the tattoos, but the tattoos were too large for this to work).

Next up came the can. Since we wanted it to “hit” the wall, we couldn’t use the original can the artist threw (there was a market below the mural so he had to throw it in an area without people!). To achieve this, I hid the original spray paint can behind the new mural layers and created a 2D recreation of the can to mimick the path the original one went, adding more “distance” and a definitive bounce off the wall. Adding a simple shimmer light over the can with more shape layers and some glows, then a shadow shape layer matched with the light direction, the spray can throw came together nicely. To finish it off, I added some motion blur, match grain, and some displacement to really pull it into the footage. To top it off, I added a bit of impact dust when the can “hits” the wall.

The final piece of the project was the bus transition. They didn’t ask for this, but Tom & George managed to capture it towards the end of their shot. I thought it could be a nice way to transition to the end card, and they agreed, so we went ahead with it. Since there was such a big gap between the artist walking off-screen and the bus coming on screen, I cut the bus out with the roto tool so we could place it wherever we liked in the timeline. This also meant that we didn't get any weird jumping frames (e.g. on the cloud) like we could if I had just cut the bus footage and stuck it on the end of the mural shot.

After all that, the final step was to colour correct everything. With some areas requiring dedicated colour correction, I masked the Monzo logo and the artist's high-vis jacket and colour corrected those separately, the former to better match the actual Monzo logo colour and the latter to desaturate the vest.

You can check out the full behind the scenes breakdown of the edit in the video below. Thanks for reading!