CLCL 012b: Product Support O&S Cost Management Capstone
Examples of CLCL 12B: The Cost Cutting Adventureland!
Example Video: Cost Wars: I got a bad feeling about this!
Summary
This Defense Acquisition University credential course tackled one of acquisition’s least glamorous truths. Operating and Support costs account for most of a system’s life-cycle expenses, usually long after the excitement of contract award has worn off and everyone has emotionally moved on. DAU needed a course that made those costs impossible to ignore and hard to forget.
CLCL 12b was built to move learners beyond polite warnings and into an experience where cost consequences felt tangible, memorable, and just uncomfortable enough to stick. The goal was not to scare learners, although a little fear never hurt anyone who manages a budget, but to give them the confidence to recognize cost drivers early and deal with them before they quietly become someone else’s problem.
Solution
🏆 2025 MarCom Platinum Award Winner
My elite strike force of a multimedia team and I turned CLCL 12b into an immersive, narrative-driven learning experience disguised as a Universal-style amusement park. Because if learners are going to wrestle with Operating and Support cost management, they deserve at least one fun lap before the financial whiplash kicks in.
The journey begins in the Amusement Park, where early cost decisions feel safe, familiar, and wildly overconfident. Things escalate aboard the Cost Cruiser in Cost Wars, where small sustainment choices balloon into galaxy-sized consequences. From there, learners descend into the Sunken City of Atlantis, uncovering hidden risks that sink faster than optimistic assumptions.
Next up is the Temple of Cost Doom, a loving tribute to Indiana Jones and the universal truth that touching ancient artifacts always ends badly. The experience concludes in the Halls of Forgotten Cost, where neglected sustainment decisions return as familiar monsters. Not new problems. Just the ones everyone hoped would quietly go away.
By placing complex cost concepts inside recognizable cinematic worlds, the course transformed abstract analysis into experiential decision-making. Shortcuts backfired. Consequences stuck. Regret arrived exactly on schedule.
Built using generative AI for imagery and long-form animation, CLCL 12b delivered cinematic, TV-quality visuals in weeks instead of months. Not to move faster, but to tell better stories and prove federal training does not have to look like a compliance slideshow with voiceover.
My Role
I served as Creative Director for CLCL 12b, which mostly meant making sure the course felt like one intentional world instead of a collection of cool ideas arguing in a parking lot. I led the overall art direction from concept through delivery and personally built major visual sections of the experience, including the Amusement Park, Cost Wars aboard the Cost Cruiser, and the Halls of Forgotten Cost.
I combined traditional illustration with AI-generated imagery and produced long-form, TV-quality animated sequences using generative AI. What would normally take months was delivered in a few intense weeks, raising visual quality while quietly embarrassing the idea that federal training has to look boring.
Along the way, I helped shape the narrative structure, contributed to storyboards and dialogue, and worked closely with instructional designers and developers to keep the experience ambitious, coherent, and instructionally sound. When the final course was presented, people applauded. In federal learning, that is basically a mic drop.