Motel: reflections on a film production/interior design collaboration

Abstract

A couple sit, pace the floor, or make love on the disheveled bed. She leaves in a car, driving beyond the future. He arrives from the past, and can only stay half an hour. In Motel, three short films explore the spaces of an anonymous motel room, and the spaces of a relationship and time-travel. Scholar/practitioners in the fields of creative arts and design are increasingly looking to locate their creative practice within a research context that leads to the development of new insights, processes and approaches. Motel was a transdisciplinary practice-based research collaboration between a group of scholar/practitioners: three filmmakers and two interior designers from RMIT University. The project aimed to explore the innovative potential the academy affords to situate filmmaking and interior design practices outside usual industrial/commercial contexts so as to create what Geuens (2007) calls a ‘differential space’ of film production. The Motel research group used techniques of reflective practice—reflection-inaction and reflection-on-action (Schön 1983)—to analyse shifts in practice and conceptual frameworks brought about by the constraints applied to the collaborative project. These constraints came from a set of collaborative ‘rules’ applied to the production process which, among other things, altered the usual hierarchical relationship between design and film, which privileges the director and his/her vision. In Motel the interior designers called a halt to the machinery of production, demanding an examination of established practices. The traditional A4 film scripts were tilted sideways and exploded, laid out alongside each other like patients in a ward, and new intimate relationships were formed. Exactly what was interior and what was exterior came into question. The space of an Australian motel room, and the space of filmmaking itself was interrogated, dissected, made new. The resulting triptych of short films is only one of the media objects to have resulted from this innovative collaboration.