In 2011 I started animating product concepts for Samsung's Product Innovation Team. The engagement started small, with work on the Olympic Genome Project in the run-up to the London 2012 Games, and grew from there: bigger asks, more complex projects, more riding on each film. I kept at it for years.
The job, structurally: an innovation team runs on ideas that don't quite exist yet, and ideas that don't exist yet compete for funding against things that already do. Somewhere up the chain, someone with a budget and very little time has a decision to make. A deck flattens the idea. A prototype is too early to hand over. What travels is a film: the concept animated as if it had already shipped, and close enough to real that a decision-maker can react to the thing itself instead of imagining it.
That was my seat. In-progress research and early product thinking came in; short films went out, produced to as close to a commercial standard the budgets would allow, for an audience you could count on one hand. Years of that work taught me the discipline my whole practice now runs on: vision translation, taking something that exists mostly in a team's heads and making it legible to the person who decides whether it keeps existing. The films did their job when the projects stayed funded, which makes for a strange kind of portfolio: the better the work, the less of it there is to show. Almost all of it stays behind glass.
What I can show is what it set in motion. The relationships from that orbit carried me into the next room: by 2014 they had led me to HUGE Design in San Francisco, where I spent eight years doing a cousin of the same job, and HUGE in turn carried me to Google in 2015. Nearly every engagement on this page traces back, one vouch at a time, to this one.
Every practice has a first domino. This was mine.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.