Animated Brand Film

Stellar Waterworks

Client Direct - Stellar Waterworks

Role: Copywriting, creative direction, animation, producing

Stellar Waterworks had fifteen years of experience, patents on the technology, the people who built the last market leader, and a company that hadn't officially launched yet.

This film was how they'd introduce themselves.

Stellar has a challenge

Stellar Waterworks builds water treatment equipment for cities. Their customers are engineers and one.perators — people who don't gamble. Pick the wrong equipment and it can affect thousands of homes, or end somebody's career. So they buy from companies with a track record.

Stellar didn't have one yet. The team did — twenty years building the equipment that led this market before this company existed — but Stellar itself was brand new, still weeks from its official launch.

The other problem: the marketing in this industry is rough. Water treatment videos are accurate, careful, and boring as hell. I could get every fact right and still lose the room in the first ten seconds.

So this 2D animated brand film had two jobs running at once: earn trust from engineers who know more about the subject than I ever will, and be watchable by literally anyone

How it was made

Confession: before this project, I didn't know a thing about water treatment. Zero. That's a problem when your job is writing a script that has to convince the people who install this equipment for a living.

So step one wasn't a storyboard — it was a phone call. I asked Cliff every "stupid" question his own customers already know the answer to. How the chemistry actually works. What keeps an operator up at night. What their competitors can't do that Stellar can.

Almost every good line in this script came out of that call, not out of my head. Cliff's knowledge did the heavy lifting. My job was turning it into something people would lean in to watch.

Text discussing project processes, water treatment, engineering challenges, and equipment maintenance. The text is split into two columns.

First Draft

Text document discussing water treatment, filtration systems, and the importance of system design and diagnostics in water quality maintenance.

Final Version

Sketches of spaceship design options, including asymmetrical, organic, geometric, rocket, UFO dome top, and water droplet shapes.

A digital space-themed display with starfield backgrounds, HUDs, graphs, and illustrations of spacecraft, planets, and space systems in shades of black, blue, green, and teal.

Building my team.

Script locked, it was time to bring in an illustrator. I handed it to Courtney Haberl — an art director and illustrator I've worked with for years, and my former business partner at Hyperfocus Motion.

I gave her a visual treatment so she knew what had to happen in every frame, then got out of her way. She built a moodboard first, then hand-illustrated all 33 frames of the storyboard.

She also sketched a handful of spaceship concepts for Stellar to choose between. I had a favorite. Didn't matter — the call belonged to the client. Cliff took the options to his team and came back with a winner, plus the best note of the whole project:

"Tactical for sure, we're a bunch of engineers in an engineer industry. All those wavy lines and fever dream-esque scenes make us clutch our side rulers and fall to the ground. The organic rocket ship wins the team vote, with water droplet in second."

That one email locked the 2D illustration style and animation direction for everything that came after it.

Illustration of a spacecraft cockpit with futuristic displays and controls, viewing a cosmic, water-like space environment featuring planets, nebulae, and flowing water streams.

A drawing of a kitchen sink with a faucet, a transparent test tube with a screw cap, and a view of outer space with planets visible through the window.

Sketch of a kitchen countertop with laboratory glassware and a large pill bottle in the center, under the title "ACT 1 - THE CALL."

A sketch of a test tube with liquid inside beside a checklist indicating poor water quality, labeled as BAD.

A diagram showing a pill bottle inside a microwave, with a hand pressing a button labeled "OUTPUT 1:1 to 20:1" on a control panel.

A sketch of a test tube inside a Petri dish, with a checklist on the right side showing a checkmark next to 'Stellar Waterworks' and an unchecked box next to 'Generic competitor.'

Illustration of a test tube filled with liquid, surrounded by a circular border, with a checklist on the right side containing three checked boxes and four unchecked boxes.

A hand pressing a button on a desk with a computer screen displaying the words 'Send Distress Signal'.

Line drawing of Earth viewed from space with radio waves emanating from a point near North America, indicating a communication or signal being received.

A hand-drawn sketch of a satellite or space station orbiting the Earth, with radio waves emanating from the planet.

A sketch of a control room with four people sitting at control panels, watching a large display screen showing the time 19:34, and multiple monitors surrounding the main screen.

Drawing of a control room with multiple monitors, with a large central screen displaying the message 'Incoming Distress Signal' in bold letters, and two operators seated at control panels.

A hand pressing a button on a telephone answering machine with a screen that reads 'ANSWER THE CALL.'

Sketch of a control room with multiple monitors on walls and desks, with three people operating control panels

Sketch of a rocket launching from a platform with smoke and clouds around it, two tall structures with flags on either side, city buildings in the background.

Sketch of a spacecraft dashboard with multiple screens showing graphs and gauges, and a hand reaching out to interact with a touchscreen.

A hand pressing a button on a device with the word 'LAUNCH' displayed on a screen.

Sketch of a spaceship launching into the sky with a trail of smoke, city skyline in the background, and clouds around.

Sketch of a spacecraft flying through space, with lines indicating speed or motion.

Drawing of a spaceship cockpit with multiple screens and control panels, a hand reaching for one of the controls, and lines indicating motion or speed.

A space scene depicting a spaceship launch in space with Earth and the Sun in the background, showing a rocket ascending into space.

Sketch of a rocket launching from Earth with dashed lines pointing to a set of charts on a screen, including a downward graph labeled 'Water Wrong'.

Sketch of a control room with multiple screens showing gauges, charts, and data, and a hand operating a device.

Sketch of a digital HUD display with graphs and a screen labeled 'HUD DETAIL', likely part of a video game interface or simulation.

A sketch of a dashboard with graphs and a sign that says 'Disinfectant' on the left side.

Sketch of a computer monitor displaying a sediment analysis, with a graph showing sediment layers, a small line chart, and a keypad.

A hand-drawn sketch of a control panel with multiple screens and graphs showing increasing trends.

Sketch of a laboratory or exhibit with a large teardrop-shaped object inside a transparent cylindrical enclosure, with technical or scientific markings and a circular base, set in a room with framed panels on the walls.

A black and white sketch of a large floating water droplet inside a glass enclosure in a room with paneled walls.

Sketch of a laboratory scene with a water test tube, a sign reading 'Water quality = good', and test tube rack with three test tubes.

Sketch of a spaceship cockpit with multiple screens and a hand reaching for controls, with a bright sky visible through the windows.

A hand-drawn sketch of a spaceship launching from Earth, surrounded by radiating lines.

A pre-visual test

Storyboard done, next step was an animatic — a rough cut of the sketched frames, timed to a scratch voiceover, before anyone animates or illustrates a single real frame.

I recorded the script in my own voice and cut it against the pencil sketches to see how the whole thing would actually flow.

And it didn't. I'd written the visual treatment with a specific pacing in mind, but seeing it timed out for real, it just wasn't landing. So I went back in and reorganized the sequence — the same editing instincts I use on live-action footage, just applied to a stack of 2D illustrations instead.

That one step saved hours of production time chasing an idea that wasn't going to work. It's one of the most underrated parts of the whole animation process — you find out what's broken before you've animated a single frame of it. Cliff had a few quick notes once he saw the animatic too, and because we caught them here, they cost minutes instead of days.

All that was left, was to make it.

All that pre-production work meant that by the time animation started, we already knew exactly what needed to be said, what needed to be built, and how it all fit together. Production turned into assembly, not discovery.

I'm a big believer that 80% of a good 2D animation project happens before anyone touches a keyframe. Do that work up front, and the rest is execution.

This video does real work for Stellar Waterworks. Nobody calls a water treatment company for fun — they call because something's wrong and it needs fixing. This film tells them who Stellar is, what they do, and whether they're worth trusting, in under two minutes, before a single sales call.

That means prospects can self-educate, understand the brand, and start trusting Stellar before they ever pick up the phone — which means Stellar spends less time convincing people they're legitimate, and more time being a great partner to the ones who reach out.

“We all huddled around the monitor to watch for the first time. As a bunch of passionate sci-fi and water nerds, this was out of this world.”

— Cliff Tormaschy, CEO, Stellar Waterworks

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