Palms Motel
A fictional 1970s Palm Springs motel, posted one slideshow at a time.
Watch the series on TikTok →
The idea
A motel that never existed, told one post at a time. Each slideshow was six images under the same line, “POV: you just moved to Palm Springs, 1977,” set to a piece of viral audio. The point was the world, not the single image.
The prompt system
Consistency came from a prompt framework split into fixed and variable parts. Fixed: the era, the camera (Hasselblad, 28mm), a sage-and-coral colour temperature, and a Slim Aarons / Architectural Digest reference. Variable: the scene. Same recipe, different room, so 288 images still read as one set.
Finishing and the store
Raw Midjourney outputs went through Photoshop for grading and artifact cleanup, then out as TikTok slideshows. A handful sold as poster prints through a Shopify store before the time it took to run made it not worth keeping open.
ROLE
Solo. Directed the look, built the Midjourney prompt system, graded and finished every image in Photoshop, and ran the TikTok series end to end.
PROBLEM
Most AI imagery falls apart as a set: every picture looks like a different photographer on a different day. The aim was the opposite. One motel, one world, every post looking like it was shot on the same afternoon, in the same light, by the same person.
OUTCOME
Forty-eight slideshow posts off the back of one prompt system. The series passed 100k likes, and the top post hit 770k views.
SKILLS
OPEN FOR WORK
finbar@finbar.studio