From Origin to Echo

Many Lives, One Fragile Planet

A panoramic motion piece that turns eco-environmental advertising into a glitchy visual memoir of children, animals and the Earth they share.

Project Overview & Final Outcome

From Origin to Echo is a practice-based motion design and VFX project that reimagines eco-environmental advertising through peaceful, multi-species imagery. Instead of relying on shock or disaster, the work focuses on quiet moments where children and animals simply share space: jellyfish in open water, cranes in wetlands, buffalo on dry plains, parrots in rainforests and whales in polar seas.

The project takes the form of five horizontal panoramic motion posters, each built as a looping scene that could function as a stand-alone environmental “ad” in public space. Together, they sketch a loose timeline from fragile origin to deep time, suggesting that human childhood occupies only a small interval within a much larger field of planetary life.

For the final outcome, these posters are edited into a single visual memoir: layered with film grain, glitches, torn edges and overprinted frames, as if the Earth’s memories were recorded on a tape that is starting to fail. Children of different skin tones appear and reappear among animals and landscapes until the image suddenly collapses into static and the sharp hiss of a screen switching off. This abrupt ending leaves the work hanging between beauty and interruption, hinting at how delicate the signal is between humans and the more-than-human world.

Background & Initial IdeaEditing & sound sync
— Premiere Pro

Visual timing & motion design
— After Effects

The project began with a simple question:

I started by looking up lifespans across species: tiny creatures that only live for days, jellyfish that seem to restart themselves, cranes and buffalo that outlast generations, and whales that can live longer than a human lifetime many times over. Very quickly, human time started to feel small – especially the brief window of childhood.

At the same time, I was looking at a lot of eco-advertising and noticing how often it leans on shock: dying animals, disasters, apocalypse. My first instinct was to organise the project around “five human races”, as old visual systems often did, but it felt historically loaded and too narrow for what I wanted to say.

So I shifted the idea. Instead of categories of race, I kept five children with different skin tones and let them simply share space with animals in their own habitats. The project slowly turned into a panoramic “broadcast” from the planet itself – a quiet, glitchy visual memory of how many different lives, human and more-than-human, are trying to live together on the same Earth.

Concept & Meaning

The core idea of From Origin to Echo is to look at Earth as a living archive and to use nature as a mirror for human life and collective childhood.
Instead of warning people with disaster images, the project asks a quieter question: what happens if we simply watch different lives sharing the same planet?

I chose five animals that differ strongly in lifespan, habitat and cultural symbolism:

• Jellyfish – origin and fluid existence
• Crane – balance and spiritual awakening
• Buffalo – survival, labour and resilience
• Parrot – language, memory and ancestral voice
• Whale – time, wisdom and cosmic solitude

Together, they form a loose “timeline” of experience:

Origin → Balance → Survival → Memory → Wisdom

In each scene, one child with a different skin tone is placed inside a symbolic ecosystem and briefly co-exists with the animal – sometimes surrounded, sometimes walking alongside, sometimes simply listening or gazing from a distance. The child is not a hero saving the world, but one small life among many.

Across the project, layered grain, glitches and overlapping frames make the images feel like a fragile broadcast from the planet itself. The work suggests that human time is only one short layer inside a much longer multi-species story, and that eco-advertising might also speak through gentle coexistence and shared memory, not only through fear.

System Design

The project is built as an internally coherent visual system:

• Five animals with dramatically different lifespans
• Five habitats drawn from representative Earth environments
• Five children with different skin tones and cultural hints
• Five experiential states: from unconsciousness to reflection

Mapping of the system:

Together, these elements keep the project readable as one system: different lives, different places and different timescales, all held inside the same eco-advertising “signal”.

Process · Modelling & Animation

This project was built like a small film, but with the discipline of a poster: every decision about the animals, children and environments had to read clearly in a single, wide frame.

Designing the animals and environments

I started with silhouette and habitat. In Maya, each animal was blocked out with simple shapes to make sure it felt iconic in the panoramic composition: the dome of the jellyfish, the vertical lines of the cranes, the heavy mass of the buffalo, the diagonal wings of the parrots, the long curve of the whale.
At the same time I sketched their worlds – open ocean, wetlands, grassland, rainforest and polar sea – keeping the layouts simple so the eye always has a clear horizon or depth cue to rest on.

Once the proportions were set, the animals went into ZBrush for high-resolution sculpting. Muscles, folds, feathers and soft tissue were carved in to support close-up lighting tests, then brought back into Blender with clean topology and baked maps. Basic, semi-realistic materials were assigned at this stage, just enough for them to feel alive before the later stylisation.

Designing the children

The children were created in Daz as a parallel layer to the animals. I customised body proportions, skin tones and facial features to suggest different backgrounds without turning them into stereotypes. Each pose was designed in response to the animal and the landscape:
standing very still between cranes, reaching up beside a buffalo, listening under the parrots, floating gently in front of the whale.
Clothing was kept simple and practical, matching the climate of each scene so that the kids feel like they really belong there.

Modelling & layout

With characters and creatures ready, everything was brought together in Maya. I refined scale relationships, staging and camera framing for the horizontal format, checking that each poster works both as a still and as a moving loop. Environment meshes were kept relatively light – sculpted terrain, water surfaces, tree masses and ice – so that lighting and atmosphere could do most of the storytelling.

Animation

Animation is intentionally subtle, designed for slow, seamless motion posters rather than fast narrative cuts.

• Jellyfish pulse and drift vertically.
• Cranes shift their weight and make small head movements.
• Buffalo breathe, flick their tails and take occasional steps.
• Parrots skim through the canopy in short bursts of flight.
• The whale glides almost imperceptibly through deep water.

The children move even more gently – breathing, turning their heads, adjusting their balance – so they read as present but never dominate the animals or the landscape.
The camera motion is limited to soft pans and drifts, stretching the sense of time and allowing each scene to feel like a living postcard from a shared planet.

VFX Breakdown

A short VFX breakdown revealing how 3D renders of children, animals and landscapes are layered with grain, glitches and torn edges to become a fragile “tape-like” eco-memoir.

Post-production

After the 3D scenes were rendered, the project was rebuilt in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
I first edited the five motion posters into one flowing timeline, testing different lengths and transitions so that the film feels like a single continuous “broadcast” rather than five separate clips.

In After Effects, I focused on colour grading and atmosphere – pushing the blues of the ocean, softening the wetlands, warming the grasslands, deepening the rainforest greens and cooling the polar scenes – so that each habitat has its own mood but still belongs to the same world. On top of that, I added film grain, flicker, slight glitches and time offsets to create the feeling of an old tape slowly breaking down.

Finally, in Premiere Pro I refined the overall rhythm and sound: cutting to a calm, ambient soundtrack, adjusting the timing of the glitches and letting the last frame collapse suddenly into static and hiss. This final cut turns the piece from clean 3D imagery into a fragile visual memory that ends just like a TV being switched off.

Critical Reflection

Working on From Origin to Echo made me rethink how I put nature and life into images. At first I almost followed familiar patterns: using “five human races” as a visual system, or borrowing fear-based imagery from environmental campaigns. Letting that go forced me to look harder at representation – how quickly people become labels, and how easily animals are reduced to background texture instead of lives with their own timelines.

Shifting the focus to children, multi-species lifespans and quiet coexistence also changed my VFX approach. I had to trust small movements, long pauses and soft camera drift, and accept that a wide, calm frame of a child and an animal simply sharing space could be powerful enough. The glitchy tape look became a way to admit fragility: this work isn’t a perfect fantasy, but a broken signal that could cut out at any moment, much like our relationship with the planet.

The project doesn’t claim to define what “good” eco-advertising should be, but it has shifted my own practice. I’m more cautious about using fear, more aware of who is centred or silenced in an image, and more interested in stories where humans are just one voice among many.

Credits & Tools

Concept, Design & Direction
Junbing Zhang

Software used

• 3D modelling: Maya & ZBrush
• Character base models and posing: Daz 3D & Blender
• Layout, Lighting, Animation & Rendering: Blender
• Editing & sound sync: Premiere Pro
• Visual timing & motion design: After Effects & CapCut

Special thanks

• Manos Kanellos
• Emily Sakai