The project
Reload. makes a pickleball paddle with a replaceable surface — when the face wears out, you swap it rather than binning the whole thing. It’s a genuinely smart product in a market that’s been moving fast and thinking slow about sustainability. The website needed to carry that intelligence through into how the product is presented.
The animation was built in Houdini. Rather than delivering a finished, fixed render, the goal was to hand the client a fully operational system — a set of tools and HDAs that let Nick direct his own animation without touching the underlying setup. Camera movement, camera interpolation, product animations — everything was automated and exposed through a clean interface. Point, adjust, render.
The brief was straightforward. The execution was too — which is the best thing you can say about a project.
The collaboration
This was the best collaboration I’ve had. I worked with Nick Bicancic, the product owner — and because we both came from Media, we shared the same instincts about what good looks like. No friction, no translation, no having to explain why something mattered.
It felt like a Rolling Stones album. No complications, no irritation — just two people who trusted each other’s judgement, making a great product look exactly as good as it deserved to.