Rebel With a Rake Garden Visualizations
Showing viewers what a garden could look like years before the plants get the memo. 3D visualizations composited into live footage for a YouTube series about gardening in places that really don't make it easy.
The Show
Rebel With a Rake follows Michelle Yahn, a gardener with strong opinions and a gift for meeting people where their landscape is - literally. Each episode drops her into a new yard with a new set of challenges: a California hillside scorched by wildfires, a Florida property so flood-prone the lawn has opinions about it too. Her approach to unconventional gardening is the whole point, and the show needed visuals to match.
The Problem With Plants
Gardens are notoriously bad at showing their work. A freshly installed design looks like sticks in dirt. A mature one looks like the cover of a magazine. My job was to bridge that gap - sourcing accurate 3D models of the specific plant species Michelle was designing with, building out the proposed garden in 3D, and compositing those renderings into the actual source footage so viewers could see the vision, not just the muddy hole where it would eventually live. It's part visualization, part time machine.
Process
Working closely with the production team, I matched camera angles, lighting conditions, and seasonal context to make the composites feel like they belonged in the frame - not pasted on top of it. Getting the plant models right was its own rabbit hole: the difference between a correctly scaled Ceanothus and a generic shrub is exactly the kind of detail a gardener notices immediately. The goal was visualizations Michelle herself would stand behind.