Creative leadership from strategy through delivery — multiple deliverables for high-stakes audiences under tight timelines.
Project: Targan
Category: 3D / Motion / Creative Direction / Technical Visualization
Timeline: 2021–2023 (two major releases)
Deliverables: 3 product “elevator pitch” animations (Swine + Aquaculture), iteration rounds for conferences + awards, social media content
Role: Creative Director
I led the visualization and animation projects for conceptual systems to sell their vision to investors.
TARGAN is an innovative company in animal biotechnology and agtech, focused on developing rapid automation solutions for animal protein production including vaccination, screening, sorting, and beyond.
Their challenge was not a lack of ambition but rather the need for effective communication: the concepts were complex, existing only in theoretical stages, and they were facing imminent major conferences and opportunities with investors.
I stepped in to build investor-ready animations under brutal timelines—turning technical concepts into a story that makes sense in seconds, not slide decks.
Early System Sketch — Aligning Decisions Before Design
This sketch aligned engineers, stakeholders, and production on how the system decides what happens to a fish before any animation began.
Constraints
Ambiguity
Evolving product details while production was already in motion (classic early-stage startup physics).
Speed
Around 6 weeks to ship the full swine animation for the first conference.
Stakeholders
Weekly reviews + technical & non-technical feedback loops needed to merge in a visualization that spoke to all audiences (scientists, consultants and investors).
Role Shifts
Initially, I was a late add to the team in a 3D generalist role for the initial swine animation. By the 2nd iteration, I was the creative lead on both aquaculture & swine.
The Visual Strategy
I defined how the system should read to a non-technical audience: what gets simplified and what has to be shown to earn trust.
The Story Mechanics
I designed the flow so a viewer can answer, quickly:
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What is it?
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What problem does it solve?
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Why is it behaving this way?
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What happens next?
The Build + the Finish
Modeling, layout, animation, look-dev and delivery while managing a team of sub-contractors that was unfamiliar.
Decision A: Make the Machines Understandable before making it beautiful
Decision B: Use constraints as a compass
Decision C: Cut corners that don’t cut trust
If the audience can’t mentally “operate” the system by the end of the video, the visuals don’t matter. Clarity earns permission for style.
When time is the enemy, you don’t have space for ambiguity. I pushed feedback toward decisions that reduced production risk and increased comprehension.
For the 2023 refresh versions, we reduced cost without reducing credibility. I convinced our CEO to read the VO script for early iterations…and the client liked it so much he became our VO talent. A pragmatic solution to keep scope focused on visuals when budget limitations became obstacles.
How I Would Improve
If I could rewind the tape, I’d force one early alignment meeting where we lock:
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the single message for the audience,
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what must be technically correct,
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what can be simplified,
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and what feedback is out-of-scope once animation begins.
Startups move fast. The only way to keep up is to make decisions faster than the chaos.