Motel.Make Believe

Entertainment Studio 2019-2020, led by Natasha Sandmeier & Nathan Su.

Project by Chunsu Ouyang, Gesthimani Roumpani, & Yanrong Yang.

Software: Rhino, Cinema 4D

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 ambiences, as an introduction of ourselves to worldbuilding. All these elements that visually and emotionally contribute to the fictional worlds we are creating, define a scene's aesthetics and transform even the most seemingly rigid spaces. It is by utilizing these tools that we can create well-crafted fictions that resemble reality