Coral Arena, Charlotte Taylor And Nicholas Préaud’s Surrealist Underwater Short Film

The film explores the nature of weightlessness underwater, by using an otherworldly architectural form of multiple connecting staircases submerged deep at the bottom of the ocean. “The stair, a rudimentary architecture element suggestive of directionality and movement, is taken out of its usual context and transformed into an underwater folly,” explains OMA to IGNANT. The spiraling stairs create a three-dimensional structure on which marine life begins to rapidly grow: vibrant coral reef unfurls with consciousness, as jellyfish bobble nearby and an iridescent ecosystem materializes. As the film comes to a close, the final sequence portrays a vivid and thriving underwater home growing over and around the architectural structure, “the skeleton holding a new body of life,” Taylor says.