Script · Design · Animation
Measuring the plant, not the room
2 min read
Role
Animator and Art Director
Timeline
2022
Scope
Script · Design · Animation
Industries
Indoor vertical farming
Outcome
A two minute film, shown at Indoor AGCON 2022
The farm measures everything except the plant
The AGCON film is a two minute motion graphics piece arguing that indoor farming measures everything except the crop. I storyboarded it, cut the animatic and animated it in After Effects, working from assets my team built. It ran at Indoor AGCON 2022.
The brief
A controlled environment is supposed to let you grow the perfect crop, and for most growers it does not. Harvests come out inconsistent, and a plant recipe rarely survives being reproduced at commercial scale.
The film had to make one argument land with people walking a trade floor: a farm can be instrumented to the minute and still never measure the plant itself. Everything else was cut to make room for it.
The solution
The film carries one idea per scene, in bold type on hard cuts, so any shot can be read in a few seconds by someone who arrived halfway through. The visual system borrows from the racking a vertical farm actually uses: stacked bars, ordered grids, things that multiply rather than drift.
The sequence is ordered by the argument rather than by the product, so the gap is felt before the fix is named. It closes on per plant visibility, which is the one capability the company wanted remembered.
The process
The script came first and everything else was held until it was right. I storyboarded from it, then cut an animatic so the pacing and the order of ideas were settled before any finished frame existed. My team produced the assets against that animatic.
I animated the film in After Effects, and art directed the look across the assets so the scenes read as one piece.
The impact
What the film was used for
AGEYE used the film to make its case at Indoor AGCON 2022. It does the part of the pitch that is hardest to do standing up: it gets a grower to notice that their own farm measures the room and not the crop, which is the point at which per plant visibility stops sounding like a feature.
Nothing was measured after the show. What the film changes is where a booth conversation begins, because the person who stops has already agreed with the problem.
