Los Angeles, California, USA
★ Award-winning
Awarded the ASLA Southern California Chapter Merit Award in Analysis and Planning
Los Angeles
Parks Needs Assessment
Video Series for LA Recreation & Parks
LANDAU was chosen to produce public engagement videos and animation for OLIN x Los Angeles Recreation & Parks (LA RAP)’s Parks Needs Assessment.
With the guidance of the Los Angeles’ city staff and the OLIN team, 7 videos were produced by LANDAU Design + Technology to bring public awareness to the Parks Needs Assessment. We are tasked to produce video content throughout the 10-month parks needs effort, starting with an initial project kickoff video, some social media videos in between, and a final video announcing the final park plan.
This project is part of a bigger collaboration with OLIN and other firms.
Principal: Chris Landau
Story Lead, Head Video Editor & Motion Graphics: Gina Rattanakone
Storyboard Revisionist, 3D Animator: Sabrina Rattanakone
Motion Graphics Support: Yaoze Yu
Audio Specialist: Tim Day
Voice Talent: Vanessa Moyen
Video 1: Engagement Kick-Off (May 2025)
Video 2: Final Draft Plan (Nov 2025)
Social Media Videos for Instagram @lacityparksneeds
Production
We understood that the audience could be anyone and everyone. We need to be loyal, friendly, and welcoming.
Visual Development
We were working with two branding guides to achieve the best of both worlds— LA RAP’s own branding and OLIN’s LA PNA branding. LA RAP already has a strong identity and culture for their park enjoyers and residents. It’s such a pleasure to have the opportunity to breathe life and animation into these values.
Our choice of stylized characters was inspired by the people in the LA Parks’ activity icons. You also see these kinds of personified people typically on way-finding and signage too.
We used LA PNA brand colors throughout the video’s design.
Storyboard
Before producing any video, we start with a script and a storyboard! OLIN wrote the outline and gave us approved scripts to turn their message into visuals. The team does a bit of pre-visualization brainstorming while the script writing is happening, so there were some solid concepts by the time we drafted the storyboard and animatic. Our artists got to sketching, animatics edited, and some draft revisions before we have an approved version to move forward with!
A blend of 2D & 3D Elements
We used Blender 3D to create posable models for the people characters. They are rendered in a flat shaded style to mimic a flat 2D style— we used the 3D character animations for the complex and entertaining scenes and blend them all within motion graphics. For some scenes we did opt for 2D vector characters, so not all of the people are entirely 3D. The result is a satisfying 2.5D animated style that is a unique engagement piece for the project (and the animators got to create something awesome together). Of course, the 3D is just a very small part of the videos. The majority of the work are actually motion graphics! Because of the flat style of the models, many assets are just images and shape layers.
Our bread and butter: The main production was edited and animated on Adobe After Effects.
Audio Team
Lastly, we also couldn’t have sparked the rest of the magic without our audio professional, Tim Day. He curated the music tracks, recorded Vanessa Moyen’s professional voiceover at the studio, and did the final audio mix for the longer videos.