Jason Phillips
As vertical dramas have been gaining significant momentum across mobile-first platforms, production designer/ art director Jayden S. Chien has been a steady presence in projects shaping the format’s visual language. His recent work on Baby Bump to Billionaire’s Wife—which has accumulated over 63 million views on DramaBox—has drawn industry attention for the way its spatial and color systems structure character dynamics within short-form serialized storytelling.
Chien’s work involved the full spatial design of the series. He developed the show’s color palette, architectural logic, and prop language to heighten the series’ class-contrast narrative. Chien’s approach to the sets has been noted as crucial to engaging the series’ audience, according to co-participants.
DramaBox, one of the most competitive distribution platforms in the current overseas short-drama market, spans more than 200 regions and hosts tens of millions of registered users. For a title to cross 63 million views within this environment places Baby Bump to Billionaire’s Wife among the platform’s highest-performing projects of its scale, underscoring the commercial reach of productions shaped by Chien’s design framework.
Before entering the vertical-drama space, Chien had established a consistent presence in narrative short films. The production design and art direction for titles such as Hard Boiled Eggs, PAEONIA, and Dad’s Journal received accolades at Oscar-qualifying festivals. This foundation shaped his broader practice of building emotionally coherent environments. This body of work later informed his transition into new-media formats, where he applies narrative-driven spatial thinking to serialized mobile content.
Among Chien’s narrative projects, Hard Boiled Eggs stands out for its festival presence and the precision of its production design. As the movie tackles family dynamics and revelations, Chien applied a restrained cinematic realism, using color, texture, and domestic detail to support the film’s emotional shifts. The short was selected at the LA Shorts International Film Festival and eventually won a Gold Remi Award at the WorldFest-Houston Festival, two long-established festivals in the North American independent film circuit.LA Shorts is accredited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars), BAFTA, the Canadian Screen Awards, and the Goya Awards, while WorldFest-Houston is one of the industry’s longest-running festivals. In these contexts, the film’s recognition highlights the strength of Chien’s narrative-driven spatial design, particularly his ability to build environments that articulate character psychology without overstated visual cues.
The science-fiction short PAEONIA, for which Chien served as Art Director, marked a shift in his work toward genre-driven and effects-oriented storytelling. The short, which is about a genetic scientist’s experiments on a desert planet, was chosen for the AFI FEST Conservatory Showcase and also received the Best Sci-Fi Short award at the 20th HollyShorts Film Festival. HollyShorts is an official Academy Award–qualifying short film festival, and its award-winning works are eligible for consideration in the Oscar short film categories, giving it a high degree of professional recognition. In this project, Chien guided the visual and material logic of the constructed environments, ensuring the off-world setting remained visually coherent and physically grounded throughout the film.
In contrast to PAEONIA’s genre focus, the short film Dad’s Journal adopts a grounded, introspective tone. The film follows protagonist Charlie as he revisits family memories and sorts through his emotions by reading the journal left behind by his late father. The film was selected for the AFI FEST Conservatory Showcase, received awards at the Los Angeles–based Independent Shorts Awards, and was also nominated and screened at international festivals, including Oniros Film Awards® – New York and SIMI Film Fest. As one of Los Angeles’s long-established and reputable international film festivals, AFI FEST has been regarded as an essential professional platform for short films, while additional jury assessments and display opportunities are available through the Independent Shorts Awards and related festivals. For this film, Chien focused on maintaining visual coherence within the domestic spaces—coordinating spatial details, set elements, and material choices so that the emotional themes of memory and loss were supported by a unified on-screen environment.
In addition to his screen-based work, Chien was recently commissioned by Company of Angels—Los Angeles’s oldest award-winning professional theater company—to serve as Production Designer for its immersive production Ghosts of USC: The Wedding. Recognized for his narrative-driven approach to visual design, he was invited as a guest artist to lead the production’s spatial environment and overall visual direction, bringing his design approach into one of the city’s oldest theater institutions and marking a cross-disciplinary extension of his practice into live, site-specific performance.
Taken together, Chien’s work across vertical-series production, festival-recognized short films, and immersive live performance outlines a clear throughline in his visual practice. His work on design systems spans various formats: building engagement environments for mass-audience streaming platforms, defining the narrative space of award-winning short films, and adapting cinematic spatial reasoning principles to live performance. This cross-format continuity has become a defining aspect of his work, positioning him within a cohort of designers whose work moves fluidly between screen-based and immersive media.
Chien is currently developing new projects in both production design and art direction, continuing to explore how spatial design supports story, tone, and character across different forms of filmed media. As this work enters production and moves toward distribution, it is expected to demonstrate further the range and continuity of his visual approach within contemporary film and media.