"After his fiancé's sudden death, a medic-in-training becomes targeted by a spirit with the ability to manipulate thoughts." The compelling question of Something Beautiful is, “What is the price of clinging to internal perceptions?” The central idea of this project is to create a story about a character whose internal conflicts surrounding an event, in this case his boyfriend’s death, end up creating an environment in which those internal perceptions and his adherence to them lead to a potential downfall. Throughout my college experience, almost all of my open-ended work has involved some psychological aspect. The idea of one’s view and experience being vastly different from the truth, with little way of knowing, fascinates me. It’s a powerful way of assembling a story and an inherently nontraditional way of depicting things – one I’ve found works. The brain is a maze and there are countless engaging, innovative ways to depict this maze. The result of this project will be a 10–15-minute festival-ready short film exploring the themes discussed above. Production was a difficult process outside of the capstone system, and editing is underway as of April 2022, with a full release and festival run planned for the summer.

This thesis seeks to answer, how could architects design for mystery and suspense and how would the perception of those spaces change for the spectators? By looking into production designers, art directors, and screenwriters, specifically the film Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock one can analyze their use of architecture as part of the way that they build mystery and suspense by making movies that can help test if architecture spaces that are originally designed for a different purpose can build mystery and suspense. This research re-creates one scene from the film in four different locations: three on Arizona State University Tempe campus and one in an apartment complex. These short movies tested in different architectural spaces as such as, entering and exiting of buildings, access under a building that restricts individuals from seeing who is coming in or out, enclosed architecture, and by having hallways that lead up to each other and not permitting the occupant/participant to see everything around them. After filming the movies were compared to each other and a set of drawings was made to understand important choices made in each movie. What this thesis comes to investigate are the movies which are tools architects can use in their design process. Instead of starting a project from a sketch, why not start it from a movie. As this thesis reveals the act of choosing a film, dissecting it, and re-creating the experience of the film in their own movies in different locations can create a unique project.