“Life is good for the pruned and pampered house-cactus Planty, but when her best friend Lavender’s attention is diverted to their neighbor Violet, Planty must overcome her jealousy and rediscover the blossoming nature of friendship, selflessness, and love.”
“Seeing Green” is my senior thesis project at Drexel University. I had the honor of being our project manager alongside my friend and classmate Amani Barnett, together overseeing a team of 3 other talented artists including Sabine Moufarrej, Maggie Plum, and Alysa Braga.
This was a year long project, starting in February of 2022, and ending in June of 2023, in which my team got to act as a small studio, carrying our project from conception of our idea, to pre-production (story development, concept art, storyboards, animatic), to production (3D modeling, rigging, texturing, look dev, animating, lighting), to post-production (rendering, color management, 2D FX, music & foley, compositing, and video editing).
We had the pleasure of presenting “Seeing Green” at Drexel’s Digital Media Showcase, and while we encountered many challenges along the way, it was an incredible learning experience to work on this project and I am very proud of my team for all that we accomplished with this.
Lighting / Cinematography / Rendering
I was the lead lighting artist for this project, and I really enjoyed getting to use lighting as a tool to help tell our story and convey our characters’ emotions.
As the lead, I art directed the lighting and cinematography of each of the 4 scenes in our short. A lot of thought went into the emotions that needed to be portrayed in each scene, what lighting choices could help show these emotions, and the logistics (time of day, position of sun, natural vs practical lights, etc). For example, we start our story with a bright and sunny morning to introduce the friendship between Planty and Lavender. On the other hand, for our highly emotional movie scene, we used cold blue lighting from the TV screen to amplify the feelings of loneliness and sadness.
We also strategically used depth of field to establish moods and themes as well. For the many dreamy scenes where Lavender is zoning out, we used shallow depth of field to blur the background. But when she is snapped back to reality by Planty (multiple times), everything comes back into focus.
I was directly responsible for lighting 2 scenes: our opening scene in which we introduce the friendship between Lavender and Planty, and the climactic scene in which Planty jumps out the window. For the other 2 scenes (the movie scene, and the ending scene), I was working with 2 lighting artists on my team to help them best achieve the lighting plans that I had laid out for these scenes. We incorporated lighting progress into our team’s daily check-ins so that I could give feedback and critique on the lighting for these scenes, as well as help troubleshoot the many issues that were encountered along the way.
With lighting being our final step before rendering, I also took on the role of our lead render wrangler. I was in charge of setting up our rendering –> denoising –> color management pipeline and workflow. I taught the process to my teammates and spent many hours with each of them to troubleshoot the vast range of rendering issues that they encountered. “Seeing Green” was rendered using Arnold, and color managed using ACES.
