Explaining a refinery that fits in a shipping container
An animation of the Oyster electro-extraction process, made for a company whose technology is sealed inside a unit nobody can see into.
The client
Nth Cycle refines critical metals. Its electro-extraction technology recovers nickel, cobalt and other metals from battery scrap and low-grade feedstock, so they re-enter electric vehicles and solar rather than being mined again. The company was founded by Megan O’Connor and opened its first commercial production site in Ohio.
The challenge
The technology is a closed industrial unit: everything that matters happens inside it, chemically, and none of it can be photographed. Investors, partners and customers all had to understand a process they could not see, at very different levels of technical depth.
Approach
TODO: how the animation was built — what the model came from, how the process was broken into steps, and what had to stay technically exact for an audience that includes metallurgists.
Render Twin produced the animation. The brand and website it sits in were made by the studio that commissioned the piece.
Where it started
Time at the model with the engineering team: the assemblies, the interfaces and how the system behaves, before a single frame is built.
The film
- Nth Cycle Oyster technology film preview
Oyster technology
TODO: one line on what the animation follows — the feedstock in, the electro-extraction step, the refined metal out.
Film coming soon
Deliverables
Outcome
TODO: outcome — where the animation ran (the new site, the Ohio commercial plant opening, investor and partner conversations) and what it changed.