• Showreel

    Showreel

    Social spots, event work, explainers, and other motion pieces.

Web Videos

  • 12 Days of Samsara

    12 Days of Samsara

    12 Days of Samsara was a paid and organic holiday campaign: twelve fully animated videos, each covering a different Samsara product or customer resource, capped with a NASCAR ticket giveaway. Two weeks for the whole series. I built one modular Blender village and pulled fresh camera moves and story beats for each video.

    The village lives on a workshop bench scattered with tools and particle board, mid-assembly, like a Samsara take on the classic Hallmark Christmas town. I mixed purchased assets with custom models for every featured product, all the characters, and the Day 9 building.

    For snow I used the Blender plugin Woolly, which gives it a loose felt texture I really liked. I also rigged the delivery truck to follow a displaced ground plane so it traced the terrain without hand-keying every bump.

    I had full creative freedom here, and the campaign pulled thousands of survey submissions across the twelve days.

    Built in Blender. Composited in After Effects. No generative AI.

  • Learning.com Adspots

    Learning.com Adspots

    Learning.com needed spots for their new gamified product, pitched at K–5 teachers and students with stretch into middle school. Teachers wrote the scripts, which gave the series an authentic classroom feel. I brought the brand to life with bright color, bouncy motion, and expressive character acting.

    2D Characters illustrated by: Gabi Villegas
    Created in After Effects and Blender.

  • Samsara Organic

    Samsara Organic

    These are the smaller projects: quarterly earnings, G2 reports, customer spotlights, milestone posts. The source material is information heavy, and I enjoy that constraint. Motion, 3D, and tight timing get the numbers and names to land.

    Created in Blender and After Effects.

  • International Rebrand

    International Rebrand

    Samsara's rebrand changed the logo and the whole visual system. We stepped back from tech-blue and built motion around the people who use the products: drivers, operators, field crews. My job was to define how the new identity moves. Animated owl, brand anthem, reveal film, MOGRT templates, podcast intro.

    The motion got physical and deliberate. Stepped keys, guide lines, animated grids, hard edges. It has a tactile quality that feels at home on a construction site or a fleet yard. I built the whole system to scale across marketing, product, and editorial.

    Motion direction, animation, and 3D by me.
    Brand identity, logo, wordmark, and color system by Base Design.

Billboards & Events

  • NYSE Billboard

    NYSE Billboard

    I created two anamorphic 3D billboards for the New York Stock Exchange display in Times Square. One promotes Samsara's Asset Tag, and the other celebrates our NASCAR partnership with Jesse Love. Both pieces use forced perspective to make the 3D elements appear to extend beyond the corner of the building.

    That illusion only works from one viewing angle. The billboard wraps around the corner of the Hershey Building, so every camera decision had to line up with a specific place on the street. I picked the Red Stairs across the intersection because it's one of the busiest spots in Times Square, then worked backward. After a lot of trigonometry and a few AI-assisted math sessions, I calculated the camera distance, focal length, and viewing angle around the eye level of an average 5'9" pedestrian.

    This project sits at the intersection of motion design, architecture, and optics. Once the camera was locked, every animation had to respect that perspective. Even a small adjustment could break the illusion.

    Created in Blender with typography and compositing in Adobe After Effects.

  • Las Vegas Takeover

    Las Vegas Takeover

    Samsara took over some of the busiest locations in Las Vegas to celebrate its partnership with NASCAR driver Jesse Love. The campaign spanned an anamorphic 3D billboard on the LIDS building, airport displays, and the entrance graphics for the Formula 1 Paddock Club, all designed to feel like one cohesive experience.

    For the billboard, I created an anamorphic 3D animation that makes Jesse Love's race car appear to burst out of the corner of the building. Because the display wraps around the architecture, the illusion only works from a single viewing position. I used trigonometry and AI-assisted calculations to determine the camera distance, focal length, and viewing angle, designing the animation around the natural flow of pedestrian traffic along the Las Vegas Strip.

    I modeled, rigged, and animated a digital recreation of Jesse Love's actual race car in Blender, then adapted the creative across every display while maintaining a consistent visual language throughout the campaign.

    Created in Blender with typography and compositing in Adobe After Effects.

  • BEYOND 2026

    BEYOND 2026

    BEYOND is Samsara's annual customer conference, bringing together thousands of customers, partners, and employees for product launches, keynote presentations, and live entertainment. Over the past two years, I've created mainstage graphics, speaker introductions, brand reveals, digital signage, and countdowns for the event at the ARIA in Las Vegas, with additional content featured during a concert at Allegiant Stadium with Jake Owen.

    Designing for displays of this scale demands a different approach. Every animation has to remain sharp, readable, and impactful across massive LED walls while supporting the energy of a live audience. My focus was always on creating motion that felt bold from the back of the room while still holding up when viewed close.

    For the event countdown, I explored an AI-assisted workflow to meet an aggressive production schedule. Using Claude to develop prompts and Flora to generate footage, I curated hundreds of clips before assembling the final piece. Most of the generated content never made the cut. The final countdown features vehicles and equipment that Samsara customers see every day, helping the visuals feel familiar and grounded instead of generic.

    Note: I served as Assistant Director and storyboard artist for the Brand Anthem featured after the countdown. Animation by Eric von Dymi at Gunslingers.

    Created in Blender, Adobe After Effects, Claude, and Flora.

Explainers & Education

  • Ai Multicam Demo

    Ai Multicam Demo

    AI Multicam was still in development when this shipped. The brief was show what the feature does without leaning on a spec sheet. No camera-ready prototype existed yet, so I got to build the visual language from scratch.

    I had a reference photo of a box truck and a lot of creative latitude. I built a clean stylized 3D world in Blender and composited it in After Effects, keeping the look flexible so it could hold up as the product evolved.

    Created in Blender and After Effects.

  • Discovering Data

    Discovering Data

    Discovering Data is part of an educational series that teaches kindergarteners how to collect and read data through character animation and story. I directed and animated the episode: built every environment, animated the cast, and cut the final edit.

    Everything runs through Blender and After Effects. Building a pipeline that could produce 3–5 minute fully animated episodes every week was a good challenge, and I'm happy with how it held up.

    Credits
    Animation, Editing & Direction: Cailin Tamplin
    Character Illustration: Gabi Villegas
    Script: Natasha Vartanian
    Created in Blender and Adobe After Effects.

  • Mysterious House on the Hill

    Mysterious House on the Hill

    Mysterious House on the Hill is a third-grade episode about data collection, charts, and graphs, told through mystery and character animation. I built the world, animated the cast, and directed the story from script to final cut.

    The town and all the interiors took about a month to build. Once the assets were in place, I could produce 5–8 minute fully animated episodes in two weeks. That rhythm was one of my favorite parts of the series.

    Credits
    Animation, Editing & Direction: Cailin Tamplin
    Character Illustration: Gabi Villegas
    Script: Natasha Vartanian
    Created in Blender and After Effects.

Apps & UX

  • Friends Outpost

    Friends Outpost

    In Development

    Friends Outpost is an educational adventure game about curiosity and exploration. You wake up on a mysterious island as a small bird named Sterling with one prompt: "This is a strange place." From there you explore at your own pace, meet the island's residents, and uncover the community's stories and secrets.

    Every character introduces a different career through hands-on mini-games inspired by real work. You might fill cavities as a dentist, design jewelry, illustrate a book, or animate a character. Each activity gives elementary-aged players a playful look at what those professions are actually like, and sparks curiosity about the people behind them.

    Strange clues, forgotten places, and a few spooky surprises hide throughout the world.

    Built with Blender, Babylon.js, and Cursor.

  • Render Owl

    Render Owl

    When Samsara's marketing team needed more 3D product renders than one motion designer could reasonably produce, I built a solution. Render Owl is a desktop application that turns 3D models into polished product photography and animations without requiring users to learn Blender or manage a rendering pipeline.

    Users can import a model, adjust the camera and lighting through a simple interface, and export production-ready PNGs, SVGs, GIFs, or MOV files for marketing, documentation, and e-commerce. A companion Stager mode supports multi-product scenes, while a blueprint renderer generates clean technical line art alongside photorealistic imagery. Before importing models, I optimized each asset in Blender to ensure smooth performance, even on slower hardware.

    I built the application in Cursor using Three.js for real-time rendering inside an Electron desktop app, packaging it for both macOS and Windows. More than just a rendering tool, Render Owl gave non-3D designers the ability to create consistent product imagery on their own, freeing me to focus on higher-impact creative work.

    Built with Cursor, Three.js, Electron, Blender, and Claude Code.

Personal Projects

  • Lower Manhattan Night with Milky Way

    Lower Manhattan Night with Milky Way

    An animation about day-dreaming.
    Made in After Effects, Illustrator and Blender.

    Credits:
    Narrated by: Tom Gallagher
    Story and Illustrations by: Pip Craighead
    Animated and Directed by: Cailin Tamplin

  • Shop at the Edge of Town

    Shop at the Edge of Town

    Trapped in eternal night, a shopkeeper tries to close when a man enters; a supernatural presence follows him.

    Director's Commentary:
    I love the tone of early Universal monster movies: the camera work, the way actors move, the whole otherworldly pace. I chased that feeling here without copying the classics shot for shot. Characters and discomfort carry the horror. Loneliness and a half-seen world pull from expressionist film. Call it a midnight special in a modern wrapper.
    Hope you enjoy your visit to the Shop at the Edge of Town.

    Cast/Crew:
    Starring (in order of appearance): Taelor Danae Castellano and Marshall Gluskin
    Written and Directed by: Cailin Tamplin
    Produced by: Tim Johns, Ezra Goldberg-Johns, Cailin Tamplin
    Director of Photography: Tim Johns & Elijah Brune
    Original Score: Jeremy Oliveria
    Post-Production: Cailin Tamplin
    Assistant Director: Ezra Goldberg-Johns
    First Assistant Camera: Daniel Castellano
    Makeup FX: Aubrey Crocker
    Gaffer: Nathan Lathrop
    Boom Operator: Logan Vosburg
    Grip: Brittney Schwiezer-Wylie, Aubrey Crocker
    BTS Photography: Elijah Brune
    Set Décor: Jesse Hardman, Athena Goldberg-Johns
    Special Thanks to Location Owners: Sarah Del Rosa of White Country Farm, The Brune Family of a creepy basement
    Special Thanks to: Forage Coffee Co for providing delicious coffee to the set!

  • Valley of Ghosts

    Valley of Ghosts

    An experimental animation about a windy valley, and pits of deep horror.

    Credits:
    Animation/Illustration: Cailin Tamplin
    Original Score: David DeCoste

  • A Weeping in the Woods

    A Weeping in the Woods

    Synopsis
    A distraught gas station attendant checks-in to a filthy motel and begins to hear whispers coming from behind the curtain.

    Directors Note
    A Weeping in the Woods is a character piece with classic atmospheric horror dressing. You stay with Warren the whole run because the story is his experience. If his read on the motel warps, you go with him. I leave more questions than answers on purpose. A feature version is in the works; watch for a crowdfunding push.

    Cast/Crew
    Starring: Andrew John (Tevis)
    Written, Directed, Produced, Edited By: Cailin Tamplin
    Director of Photography, Color Grading Artist: Arturo Mendez
    Original Score: Bryce Miller
    Foley Artist: Quinn Jacobus
    Lighting, Grip: Danny Castellano
    Cult Members / Extras: Alexa Tamplin, Mason Storm Faulkner, Ethan Lounsbury, Ruben Mendez, Quinn Jacobus, Taelor Danae Castellano, Isaac Tamplin
    Special Thanks: Don and Cindy Tamplin, Richard and Melody Stevens, Jessie Hardman, Rogue Valley Fellowship, Forage Coffee Company.

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      Taking motion design to the next level
      

      



      
    
      
    
      
        
      
            
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                    Portrait of Cailin Tamplin
                
      
            
      
            
      Taking motion design to the next level
      
            
      
                Cailin Tamplin is a motion designer creating playful, thoughtful work across 3D, animation, and interactive media. He helps brands and teams communicate complex ideas through clear, engaging visuals while building tools that make creative work easier. His work blends storytelling, design, and technical problem-solving.
            
      
            
        
                
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