Designing deeper engagement with augmented reality activations

In 2018 after designing visual campaigns and distribution for Amplifier’s We The People and We The Future campaigns, I saw an opportunity to add more layers to the imagery we were creating. We always needed the simple hook of a powerful visual image and 1-7 words, but the leaders and causes portrayed needed more room to speak so I led the design of our AR app. The posters that were being distributed to 20,000 schools and seen by upwards of 10 million K-12 students could be animated to “come alive” and talk to these students. The first test was filming and animating a work that Shepard Fairey created from my photograph of Xiuhtezcatl Martinez of the Earth Guardians. Bemo Studios (much of the team behind films like A Scanner Darkly) was commissioned to do the painstaking rotoscope work to bring Xiuhtezcatl’s poster to life. The result was a direct appeal from Xiuhtezcatl to become an Earth Guardian, and from that moment forward we knew that AR was something that could transform almost all of our campaigns.

Over the past 5 years since that first animation I have been directing the AR activation of our campaigns in partnership with groups like Ai-Jen Pu’s Common’s, Patrice Culors, Valarie Kaur and more!

In 2021 with a grant from the National Geographic Society I built a series of AR activates street art and posters for the Campaign for Nature’s 30x30 campaign using iconic National Geographic photography to create the core art. The result was street art that turned into TV sets on the streets of India to play an animated short film on

Additional campaigns have focused on mental health in K-12 classrooms, and billboards imagining “A Just Economy” for Imperative 21.