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Motel Make Believe

What: Studio project

Where: UCLA AUD

Instructor: Natasha Sandmeier, Nathan Su

Team: Chunsu Ouyang, Gesthimani Roumpani, Yanrong Yang

I also managed this project!

Motel Make Believe

Los Angeles is the established world capital of filmmaking. Embracing its identity, the urban fabric has learned to facilitate all functional needs of the entertainment industry, and manages to contain smaller, constantly transforming worlds within its world, all at various scales. Everything is seen as a potential movie set. In this context, we discovered the story of Pink Motel, a 1949 motel in Burbank, whose identity is now being preserved only for the needs of the movie industry. Inspired by the motel’s multipurpose identity and staying within the room scale, we examine how an environment as mundane as a typical motel room can be treated as a blank canvas to accommodate different movie genres, moods, and ambiances, as an introduction of ourselves to worldbuilding. All these elements that visually and emotionally contribute to the fictional worlds we are creating, define the scene’s aesthetics and transform even the most seemingly rigid spaces.

Sound & video edit by Gesthimani Roumpani.
Motel Make Believe ISSUU publication
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