ACQ 3200: Adversarial Foreign Investment and National Security
Examples of Screens of ACQ 3200
It's a Mystery
Summary
This Defense Acquisition University course addressed a serious and growing threat facing the acquisition workforce: adversarial foreign investment attempts designed to gain access to sensitive U.S. technologies through financial and economic channels. The challenge was not a lack of material. It was almost too much of it. Thousands of pages of source content, over a dozen subject matter experts, and a topic that can quickly feel abstract until it is already too late.
ACQ 3200 needed to help learners recognize how these threats actually surface in the real world, understand how to assess risk, and apply regulatory and acquisition responses with confidence. It also needed to do all of that without putting learners to sleep halfway through the explanation of risk calculus. This is where the mystery began.
Solution
🏆 2025 MarCom Platinum Award Winner
🏆 2025 Gold Horizon Interactive Awards Winner
🏅 DAU Honor Roll Course
My team of multimedia ninjas and I designed ACQ 3200 as a multimedia-rich, narrative-driven learning experience framed as a Scooby-Doo-style mystery. Because sometimes the best way to explain a complex national security threat is to let learners chase it through a spooky theme park with a flashlight. The course blends live-action video with animated storytelling, turning real-world case studies into an investigation filled with shadowy investors, compromised supply chains, and business deals that feel just a little too convenient.
Live-action actors were filmed and transformed into cartoon characters, letting the experience shift smoothly between realism and metaphor. Learners follow a small mystery-solving team as they unpack concepts like the Wheel of Death, Valley of Death, Risk-Based Analysis, and the Contracting Cone, uncovering how adversarial investment strategies hide in plain sight. Along the way, they earn “ACQ Snacks,” because serious learning still benefits from positive reinforcement and snacks are universally persuasive.
Visually, the course leans into a spooky amusement park aesthetic with illustrated environments, cinematic framing, and atmospheric lighting. Interactive knowledge checks and branching scenarios keep the experience engaging while ensuring every mystery delivers concrete, job-relevant acquisition insights.
My Role
I served as Creative Director for ACQ 3200, overseeing all creative direction across the course and ensuring the experience felt cohesive, intentional, and fun without undermining the seriousness of the subject matter. In practice, this meant guiding everything from visual style and narrative tone to character design, UI approach, and overall user experience.
I personally created all of the illustrated backgrounds for the spooky theme park environments, combining hand illustration with generative AI that was, at the time, barely out of beta inside Photoshop. This meant pushing emerging technology hard, troubleshooting quirks in real time, and occasionally discovering new limitations at the exact moment I needed things to work. The result was a set of rich, atmospheric environments that would have been significantly more time-consuming to produce using traditional methods alone.
The animated characters were hand-drawn and animated by one of the graphic artists on my team, while the UI was designed and built by another. I oversaw both efforts closely, ensuring stylistic consistency across characters, interfaces, and environments so the experience felt unified rather than stitched together. I also directed the integration of live-action actors into their animated counterparts, helping bridge the gap between filmed performances and the illustrated world they were dropped into.
Throughout the project, I worked closely with instructional designers, developers, and leadership to balance humor, clarity, and instructional integrity. In short, I led the creative vision, built a significant portion of the world myself, shepherded a team of talented artists through untested workflows, and helped deliver a course that made learners laugh just enough to stay engaged while learning how to spot threats that are anything but funny.