MULTITUDES & MULTIVERSES
Entertainment Studio | UCLA AUD MS.AUD Fall, Winter, Spring 2024-25
Natasha Sandmeier & Liam Denhamer
Still from The Linewomen by Xinyi Li and Yu Shi, MS.AUD 2024
MULTITUDES & MULTIVERSES
Brief & Course Objectives
Worldbuilding is the subtle, intricate act of designing the environment in which a story lives. It is a craft that defines the space where narratives unfold, the backdrop against which characters breathe, struggle, and exist. A successful worldbuild creates coherence—a bond between the space and the story—so that the environment feels lived-in, integral, and essential to the narrative it holds. When the world doesn’t fit the story, the fabric unravels, and the immersive power dissolves. Every single element within that world becomes a cue, a guide to the audience's understanding of the narrative: the atmosphere, the objects, the colors, the quality of light, the passage of time, the sounds, the texture of materials, and even the way a breeze drifts in from a window.
This year, we are turning our attention to a single room as the locus for an entire universe of stories. A room, on the surface, seems limited—a static space with four walls. But within those boundaries lies the potential for an infinite array of narratives. The room is not just a container; it’s a reflection of the world beyond it. It is the way we come to understand time, space, and the lives lived within it. The objects that populate the room, the marks left behind, the shadows cast at different times of day, all create a dialogue with the outside world. Through this room, we will see the world, and through its design, we will define the narratives that take place within it.
Worldbuilding is more than set dressing. It’s about creating a cohesive language between the space and the story it tells. The architecture of the room, the way the light falls across the floor, the view through the window—these are not just background elements; they are as crucial to the narrative as the characters who move through the space. The room will speak to the world it inhabits, telling us about the society that built it, the technologies that shaped it, the people who lived and worked within it, and the cultures that evolved through it. A well-designed room allows the audience to feel the presence of time, the layering of experiences, and the evolution of the world outside its walls.
We begin with Richard McGuire’s HERE, which provides our structural inspiration. In McGuire’s graphic novel, a single room is viewed from the same camera position across millennia. Each frame reveals a new moment in time, often several time periods layered together on the same page. It’s a simple premise, but it holds within it the complexity of time’s passage and the subtlety of how space evolves. Just as McGuire's frames shift between eras, we too will explore the way a single room can act as a vessel for countless stories, shaped by the ebb and flow of history, culture, and human presence.
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities reminds us that spaces are not static; they contain traces of the past. Every room holds its own history, etched into the surfaces and corners, much like the lines of a hand that reveal the map of a city’s life. As you explore the design of your room, think about how it evolves over time, how its materiality and form reflect the shifts in culture, technology, and human behavior. The room is both a
Page from Richard McGuire's HERE
Page from Richard McGuire's HERE
witness and a participant in the life that unfolds within it.
Jeff Wall’s A View from an Apartment offers us another lens—one that focuses on the precision of worldbuilding. In Wall's photograph, every detail is intentional, from the proportion of the window that mirrors the frame of the photograph to the meticulously chosen view of Vancouver’s harbor beyond it. His work reminds us that worldbuilding is not just about creating a backdrop; it's about building a narrative space where every element tells its own story. The view outside the room matters as much as the room itself. The world you create will spill out beyond the walls, shaping the viewer's understanding of the larger universe outside.
As we navigate this year, the room will act as your gateway—a carefully crafted space that reflects the world around it. Whether through subtle, mundane changes or dramatic shifts, the room will evolve. Your challenge is not just to design the room, but to craft a world through that space, to think about what the room says about the people, technologies, and cultures that shaped it. The room will act as a mirror, showing us both the world inside its walls and the world outside, shifting across time. The success of your worldbuild lies in its ability to support the narrative while simultaneously revealing the depth of the world beyond.
In this studio, you are not just architects—you are worldbuilders. The room is your canvas, the space where your story takes root. Let the world unfold through the room, layer by layer, frame by frame.
A View From An Apartment by Jeff Wall
WINDOWS TO WORLDS
Project 1 | Fall Quarter
Fall Quarter Project 1: Windows To Worlds
In this first quarter and project, you will begin to explore the infinite narrative potential of a single room. Drawing inspiration from McGuire’s HERE, we will use a room as a gateway to multiple timelines, each revealing different moments, lives, and transformations across time. The room acts as both a witness and a participant in the unfolding of history, culture, and technology. Your task this quarter is to design and develop a room that exists across various frames of time—past, present, and future—while paying careful attention to the subtle and dramatic shifts that alter the space, and the world both within it and beyond its walls.
A Multitude of Timeframes
Your room will exist in multiple timeframes—1, 10, 50, 100 years—and at times, it may leap into the far future or past, 1000 or even 100,000 years. Within these windows, the room will transform, reflecting the technological advancements, cultural shifts, and environmental changes that occur over time. You will build this narrative of transformation to craft a world that feels coherent and grounded, yet rich with speculative possibilities.
For midterm, you will develop both the primary room and iterations of the room (the frames), first as stills, and then as a large-scale image. The narrative layers of the room should begin to emerge, setting the stage for a speculative journey through time.
Media & Tools
Your worlds will be built primarily in Unreal Engine, though you can use or propose alternate tools or media if relevant to your narrative.
Constraints
The room is the focus of your exploration this quarter, and the narrative should remain grounded in the space itself. This is not a project for elaborate sci-fi devices—no robots, time machines, explosions or drones—but rather a study in how subtle changes in architecture, materials, textures, lighting, characters, and objects tell a story over time. You will design (worldbuild) the space with the understanding that each window, each frame of time, reveals a world in transformation. What do the changes in the room tell us about the world beyond? How does the room reflect the evolving demands and technologies of each period?
Deliverables
Weekend 1: Photogrammetry
To kickstart this process, your first task will be a weekend photogrammetry project, in which you will use your phone’s apps to document a room—either your own or a space on campus. This initial exercise will give you a foundation for understanding the spatial and material qualities of the room you will soon develop, to examine all of the artifacts within a room that give it its character, to understand connections each of the windows and doors enables, and to explore the ways in which the room is used and inhabited.
Midterm Deliverables:
5 Stills
Multiple stills of the room (minimum 5), showing the different moments in time within the frames.
1:1
Room Print
A full-scale print of your room using our plotter, providing a physical representation of the space and its evolution and proposal for how you would insert yourself into the foreground for the final.
Script & Treatment
A narrative worldbuild that presents the backstory of the room at its chosen moment. You can refer to the Paper Street House narrative (from Fight Club) as a reference for how to craft a rich, speculative backstory. Following this, you will write a speculative timeline that projects the room forward and backward through five additional set evolutions, spanning multiple time periods that sets the stage for your stills.
Still from Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho
Final Deliverables:
Film
A short 2 minute film that brings the room to life through its different iterations. This sequence should move through at least five distinct moments in the room’s evolution, capturing the atmosphere, lighting, and inhabitation across time. This film will focus on the narrative arc of the room and its inhabitants.
Presentation
A slideshow (or presentation film) that fully documents your research on the changes and transformations of technology, cultural shifts, environmental changes and other influences that build the world behind your film and narrative. What we see in the film is the tip of the iceberg - show us the behemoth of research that lies beneath the waterline.
Physical Mise en Scene
With the 1:1 print as your background, insert yourself as a character within the foreground of the image. Complete the mise-en-scene with the necessary props to flesh out the scene. Photograph and document the installation so it appears as an additional frame of your world.
Revised Script & Treatment
A refined script and narrative treatment that fully articulates the timeline of the room and its inhabitants. This should expand on the midterm version, incorporating feedback and further speculation about the room’s future and past. The timeline should include speculative worldbuilds for at least five additional set evolutions, maintaining consistency with the aesthetic and production design language established in the midterm.
Character Interaction
Integrate characters into your primary room and at least 2 of your alternate worlds / frames. This character should interact with the room in a way that reveals both the space and its narrative evolution over time. The character’s presence should be intentional, highlighting key moments in the room's transformation.
Fall Quarter Schedule:
Weekend 1: Photogrammetry
Week 1: Select reference image and sketch 10 potential world overlays.
Week 2: Model the room and refine 8 of the possible windows / overlays, narrowing down to 5 end of week
Week 3: Add 1 or 2 windows / overlays to the room.
Week 4: Add 3 additional windows / overlays on the room.
Midterm: Stills and Previsualization with 5 windows / overlays.
Final: 2-3 minute film with minimum 5 windows / overlays.
** All image references will be posted to ARE.NA and shown during Week 1 session1.
Still from Everything Everywhere All At Once, directed by The Daniels
ENTERING WORLDS
Project 2 | Winter & Spring Quarters
In the first quarter, students constructed a static composition with dynamic overlays, revealing the intersection of time within a singular domain over thousands of years.
In the winter and spring quarters, we shift from the static to the dynamic, from the room to the world. Students will begin to frame and explore the connection between their superimposed worlds. These once dynamic masks will evolve into full frame compositions, immersing the viewer through multiple moments in time within a single film.
The ambition is for your films to focus on a singular catalyst that serves as a deviation in time - whether it be a decision, character, tool, industry, or technology, this narrative construct will tie these worlds together, and meld its path to its will. In history, subtle decisions can have drastic ramifications for future events. The objective of your films is to illustrate this variation and investigate its transcendence across your defined worlds, revealing how your narrative shift reverberates through time.
As we move into the Winter and Spring Quarters, we transition from the static exploration of a singular room and its layered narratives to a dynamic exploration of those worlds. The camera, once fixed in a single position, now begins to move. It enters the windows, exploring new narratives, alternate times, and spaces. These once dynamic masks will evolve into full frame compositions, immersing the viewer through multiple moments in time within a single film. The worlds you created in the Fall were snapshots—moments frozen in time—but now those worlds open up, revealing the connections between them, the spaces in-between, and the broader narrative that tethers them together.
The work you developed in the Fall Quarter serves as a launchpad, but the trajectory for this new project is open-ended. You might continue refining the worlds you began to build in Fall Quarter, or you might shift direction, evolving new layers, new stories, or new rooms entirely. The worldbuilding, however, must persist, growing deeper and more complex as you move into these multiverses, uncovering how seemingly disparate moments and spaces can coexist and interrelate.
Week 1: Catalyst Workshop
At the start of the Winter Quarter, we will hold a Catalyst Workshop to explore how seemingly insignificant habits, innovations, or global events can serve as pivotal moments in shaping worlds. Take, for example, the shared meal. While eating is a personal necessity, the act of gathering for a meal has shaped cultures, economies, and social structures for centuries. Whether it’s a humble family dinner, a celebratory feast, or a ritualistic gathering, meals have
the power to forge connections, establish traditions, and even negotiate political decisions. Or consider larger transformations such as global deforestation, the development of large scale shipping infrastructures, or the rise of digital communication. These catalysts alter trajectories across dimensions and scales—affecting economies, politics, societies, and the built environment. In your work, you will select or develop a catalyst that acts as a narrative bridge between your worlds, driving the evolution of your project.
Media
In Project 2, you will explore multiple paths, where each world you've built can unfold into a richer narrative. For most students, this will culminate in a short film that explores how different timeframes or realities interact, but there are other potential outcomes: each frame could act as a new chapter or a new level in a video game-like experience. Your narrative may hinge on the decisions of a character, a societal change, or a technological development, threading these diverse worlds into a cohesive whole.
Flexibility of Groups
As with any narrative, worlds evolve. While you are free to continue working with the same room and world you developed in the Fall, you may also choose to integrate new elements or collaborate with others, reshaping your project in unforeseen ways. The important thing is that the project evolves—whether through refined storytelling, deeper worldbuilding, or more complex interconnections between your worlds.
Still from The Favourite, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Winter Quarter Schedule & Deliverables:
Week 1: Catalyst Workshop & research.
Week 2: Storyboard the narrative.
Week 3: Previsualization.
Midterm: Presentation of previz 2/3 time jumps/worlds
Week 6-10: Evolve the previsualization.
Winter Quarter Final Deliverables:
Previs: A refined full-length previsualization of your film including minimum 5 time jumps / worlds
Catalyst Research Document: A detailed exploration of your chosen catalyst—what it is, how it impacts the worlds, and how it serves as a narrative device that bridges the frames.
Mise en Scene Proposal and draft: This could be a set including props, building components, actors, etc.
Spring Quarter Deliverables
Film: A short 6-10 minute film (or alternative media as per our conversations)
Booklet: A booklet of minimum 40 stills from your film produced as your own interpretation of McGuire’s HERE. These stills should highlight significant moments in the narrative, emphasizing shifts in time, worldbuilding, and character development.
Catalyst Research Document: A detailed exploration of your chosen catalyst—what it is, how it impacts the worlds, and how it serves as a narrative device that bridges the frames.
Mise en Scene: This can be in person at final review, or completed off-site or in advance. In either case, the Mise must be documented fully through photograph and film.
Lightbox: You will produce a still, printed in house, on plexiglass and mount in into your lightbox.
Still from WANDER, by Maira Yasir and Yuxin Tian. MS.AUD 2021
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Routledge, 1985.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Harcourt, 1974.
Crewdson, Gregory. Beneath the Roses. Harry N. Abrams, 2008.
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2017.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Books, 1984.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Alphaville: A Film Language of the City. Studio Vista, 1965.
Gursky, Andreas. Photographs 1994-2010. Schirmer/Mosel, 2010.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Monacelli Press, 1994.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper & Row, 1974.
Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Penguin, 2007.
McDowell, Alex. Paper Street House, Fight Club: Worldbuilding in Practice. Design Manchester, 2019.
McGuire, Richard. HERE. Pantheon, 2014.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Indiana University Press, 1982.
Miéville, China. The City & The City. Del Rey, 2009.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Rakennustieto, 2001.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley, 2005.
Peters, Jens. Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner. Prestel Publishing, 1999.
Sanders, James. Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. Knopf, 2001.
Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. MIT Press, 1996.
Wall, Jeff. Selected Essays and Interviews. Museum of Modern Art, 2007.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
ATTENDANCE
University and/or Department attendance policies will be rigorously enforced. Each unexcused absence will result in the reduction of one letter grade. More than two unexcused absences will result in a failing grade.
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
Students are required to complete all assignments. Students are required to submit all final project materials (images, model photographs, assets, sound files, animations and videos, etc) digitally by the end of the course. Film / video formats will be outlined by the teaching team. File naming conventions: PLEASE REFER TO AUD FILE NAMING GUIDE FOR ARCHIVING, WHICH IS DISTRIBUTED AT THE END OF EACH QUARTER.
PRIVACY
This program uses video recording or other personal information capture for the purpose of facilitating the course and/or test environment. Pursuant to the terms of the agreement with UCLA, the data is used solely for this purpose and any vendor is prohibited from disclosing this information. UCLA also does not use the data for any other purpose. Students may not distribute recordings or other instructional materials provided as part of remote learning by faculty, teaching assistants, or invited guests.”
ACCESSIBILITY
UCLA CAE (Center for Accessible Education) RECOMMENDATION:
If you are already registered with the Center for Accessible Education (CAE), please request your Letter of Accommodation on the Student Portal. If you are seeking registration with the CAE, please submit your request for accommodations via the CAE website. Please note that the CAE does not send accommodations letters to instructors--you must request that I view the letter in the online Faculty Portal. Once you have requested your accommodations via the Student Portal, please notify me immediately so I can view your letter. Students with disabilities requiring academic accommodations should submit their request for accommodations as soon as possible, as it may take up to two weeks to review the request. For more information, please visit the CAE website (www.cae.ucla.edu), visit the CAE at A255 Murphy Hall, or contact us by phone at (310) 825-1501.