Things like this: NeoPixel Stick - 8 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED - COM-12661 - SparkFun Electronics could make your job relatively easy.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11061 This would have enough PWM outputs to properly drive each LED.
If you have a team of developers they can probably help you get the kit set up pretty easily.
I’ve had to do this exact process for several projects in the past, using the real LED’s was much more valuable than anything I could have done in an animated demo for several reasons:
1 - You learn that the LED’s aren’t linear and understand how to adjust
2 - You can see the impacts in real time, and quickly tweak the Arduino with peers in the room. Updating the Arduino on the fly can be done in seconds. Re-rendering an animation or re-laying out an after effects file not so much.
3 - When you are finished, you will already have basic code of the timings and settings required to handoff which minimizes the confusion. If you have the developers write the Arduino code in the first place that’s half the battle.
4 - People can get a true feeling for the product, when I was doing this we learned that the real behavior required it to be performed in under 200 ms for it to appear correct. That would only give you 6 frames of a video @ 30fps which you would have to keep playing over and over. Keeping the Arduino on a loop or triggered by a switch makes it easy to see.