Case studies from projects I’ve led or contributed to.
These are real journeys — building teams, launching initiatives, creating media, and designing systems that help organizations communicate what they know.
Scott talks about learning to record and master drums with Roland’s flagship electronic drum set.
A 3D environment study inspired by David Bowie’s song Life on Mars.
2nd Century Enterprise Systems (2CES) Situation: A brand new Vice President was leading a large company-wide transformation to modernize the tools and processes used in the manufacturing, engineering and supply chain operational areas. The scale and impact of this change was unprecedented at the company and they needed help winning thousands of teammates over to embrace and support the change. Approach: While the company already had a Creative Services group to handle internal company communications, support was limited given the scope of this transformation. In addition, I made it a point early on to change the typical business model I saw employed by most Creative Service Managers by embedding myself on the teams we supported. Their success was our success; it was not enough to merely ship a video or graphic on time. It needed to have impact and yield some measurable results. I spent hours and hours learning about the various product teams supporting 2CES so that I could become an ambassador for the program. ...
Digital Media Services View fullsize Situation: Our executive sponsor wanted to augment his communication and change management support and relied on me to scale an internal creative team. Approach: I started by learning the tools and then built processes to ensure we produced the highest quality content we could. I recruited other passionate communicators and designers, curating and developing training content to help people build their design skills. Being a part of the Office of the CIO, we used IT project management tools like Jira and later on Team Foundation Server to track our backlog and assign work as user stories. We developed templates for our work so we could estimate costs and schedules to our clients with accuracy. It also helped us build roles on the team and easily hand off work, which made it possible for us to scale our operations. The projects just kept coming, and our team organically grew from 2 to 8 people in three separate locations. ...
Evidence of Insurability Situation: This was a follow-up project from the Open Enrollment videos in which the PlanSource marketing team needed help with an explainer video for a client. They had a script, but needed help turning it into an animated explainer video. The turn-around needed to be quick and there was very little direction given, other than they wanted the video to be animated. Approach: Once the voice over was sent over, I got to work on the storyboard to get the concept approved. I didn’t have much time or source material to work with, so it was a bit of a challenge coming up with material that would support the script. Having sold life insurance before, I knew the product wasn’t exactly the most cheerful topic to feature so I tried to keep the animations simple and abstract. The characters were more abstract shapes than actual human figures. When discussing the barriers to the process discussed in the video, so as to not insult hardworking underwriting and HR teams, we used metaphors to represent the frustrations people feel when completing the manual process PlanSource has automated. Once I had a solid storyboard approved, it was on to animation. ...
Information Technology Identity Refresh Situation: As a technology and transformation leader at the company, the Information Technology & Data Analytics (IT&DA) team had more than 150,000 stakeholders relying on them for service desk support, information security, and hundreds of web applications. The organization had multiple websites for each of these areas, but no real hub to connect all of them. Approach: Our Digital Media Services team partnered with the Office of the CIO to develop a narrative and web experience we thought might connect these disparate products. We started with identity exercises to help define a unified design language for the new identity. This included everything from choosing colors, imagery, textures, iconography, and even the copy used throughout the site. We sought to mirror so much of the transformative work happening at the company by blending the digital and the physical throughout the site. We tested our designs with stakeholders from all over the company, refining the experience until we released the update. ...
Open Enrollment Situation: The PlanSource marketing team needed help recording and editing six videos for their clients, guiding employees through the Open Enrollment process with PlanSource. Approach: The marketing team sent me the scripts and provided the talent; I took care of the rest. I booked studio space at Pixel Studios here in Charleston to provide us with a controlled environment, free of audible and visual distractions. I brought my lights, mics, teleprompter, and cameras to get the videos recorded quickly. The budget was pretty small for these videos so we needed to be efficient with our time at the studio space. I did get some help from the marketing team while at the studio, having them supervise the performance and make our selects during the performance. This made editing in post a breeze. ...
Sarofsky Motion Design Sabbatical Situation: I enrolled in the Motion Media and Game Design programs at the Savannah College of Art & Design when things slowed down (at work, at least) during the 2020 pandemic. I ended up meeting the extremely talented Sarofsky founder, Erin Sarofsky, at SCAD’s first ever 100% remote COMOTION festival. A couple months later, I was offered an internship opportunity to come see how things work at Sarofsky and contribute to projects I don’t normally see at Boeing. ...
Website Development Services Situation: After seeing what we did with the IT&DA website and identity, a number of internal product teams approached the Digital Media Services team to perform similar refreshes of their teams’ identities. Approach: We met with each team, carefully unpacking their unique value propositions and the objectives they expected from having a website in the first place. We used the StoryBrand framework to construct narratives for each product team, placing their customers as the heroes of their stories. I built a Bootstrap web template so we could quickly spin up a site as these were all going to be maintained by our team. We didn’t use a web builder like Squarespace or Wix so we needed to keep the overheads low for development. Our focus was on content and experience, not on making things super complex. We did add Google Analytics to each site so we could track usage and determine which content needed our attention. ...
Content Strategy Workshops Situation: The company had a very active and robust intranet, with employees from anywhere in the world able to communicate their ideas to others. Teams could easily set up websites, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts in an effort to advance their initiatives. Much like what we see with media on the world wide web, product and service teams were constantly struggling to find ways to connect with their audience and get the attention they needed. ...