MOTHELL - Ep01E

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The Mothell is always open.

Come in. Sit down.

Something will come along.

Okay, let me try to explain a bit of the context, even though words aren't really my thing.

The concept is very simple: we're in this surreal diner/motel floating in a space/non-space, where ambiguous characters come looking for... rest? Comfort? Who knows... And where things happen. In every episode a new character is added, and there will be no time ellipses — they'll all be consecutive. All episodes together, watched in a row, will form a single short/feature film, I imagine.

Nothing earth-shattering in the traditional sense, but every episode is a metaphor for something — although I won't be the one to say which ones, I'd like everyone to see what they want in it.

There's a lore behind it, and what happens happens for a reason, but again, I'd like you to discover it as you go through the series.

I'd like to tell you how this idea was born, but I've spent the last two weeks working so intensely day and night on this project... so many ideas, so many changes of direction, additions, modifications, that I've forgotten what the initial spark was.

I think that at some point I simply said to myself "Hey, let's try to produce something, doesn't matter what." And so I started putting together some of the low poly assets I've created over the last few years, without worrying too much about the story, just to see what happened. To have that feeling again from when I was a child and played with my toys, and it was enough to just spread them out in front of me on the floor, and suddenly they came to life and anything could happen.

And, just like back then, everything happened. I took my "abandoned factory" assets and built a diner out of them (if you look closely you'll notice everything is wrong — the tables are workbenches, so too high to comfortably eat at, and the counter is too low, which is why the protagonists sit in those awkward positions — and those are just two examples), I added a couple of human characters, and made up something for them to do.

From there some stories started taking shape in my head, enough to start thinking about making a series out of it, and what seemed like a one-off thing now feels like one of the most interesting projects I've ever come up with. We'll see if that's true.

The only rule I gave myself: I want it to be weird, to look off, to reflect my personal pursuit of the "not beautiful."

I know, not much of all this happens in this first episode — the main goal here was to see if I was capable of finishing one — but I promise you, as we go on, it'll get better.

Then, obviously it's all weird — or maybe I should say New Weird? I'm a huge Jeff VanderMeer fan — so I imagine you have to be into the genre a bit, but either way I'm giving it everything I've got.

I'm also leaving here a photo of my paper storyboard, even if you probably won't make much sense of it, I can barely make sense of it myself haha — initially I was planning to post it only as a reel on Instagram, which is why it's in vertical format.

Thank you so much for your attention and see you next time!

Much love,

Alberto from Blatero Studio