The World health organization states that “Although it is unequivocal that climate change affects human health, it remains challenging to accurately estimate the scale and impact of many climate-sensitive health risks. In the short- to medium-term, the health impacts of climate change will be determined mainly by the vulnerability of populations, their resilience to the current rate of climate change, and the extent and pace of adaptation.” But what happens in the long term when adapting to climate change will simply get harder at which point our bodies are unable to cope with the impact of the environment’s hostility? With the wellness industry now being “one of the world’s fastest, most resilient markets,” outranking the pharmaceutical industry several times over, it’s easy to see wellness, not healthcare, becoming the clear & present winners of the climate change business providing "coping with climate-anxiety" an emerging market to profit off of. The International Finance Corporation posits that the “Climate Investment Opportunities” will total $23 Trillion in Emerging Markets by 2030. When you have a total addressable market of the entire planet, the climate crisis provides a perfect excuse to make every business a climate business. Spa Sybarite is one such example.

Inspiration: The project is a piece of design fiction or speculative architecture that is meant to render and highlight a plausible scenario to provoke and instigate thought on the impact of climate change on health and wellness as well as their corresponding industries. The design of the spa is meant to take inspiration from the ultra-luxurious, high-end establishments that I was trained to design during my 5 years of experience working in the hospitality sector of an architecture firm. The clients would provide me with Pinterest boards filled with images of other luxury spas from around the world of the materials that they wanted me to select for their projects. These materials were never-region specific and would often need to be imported using unsustainable methods, even while they strove to achieve LEED accreditation for their buildings. The treatments themselves are not science fiction, but present-day reality. Bathing complexes, IV therapy, nutrition-specific hydroponic systems, and Immersive virtual reality caves are all popular technologies today, which the film packages and rebrands as “climate-specific treatment”. —-- Process: Production: This film was shot on a green screen stage in Burbank, Los Angeles. The only live-action elements were the actress herself as well as the props that she came in contact with. Everything else was CGI and built out digitally. The entire film was shot over a single day. The sets of the project were designed and crafted digitally from scratch over 6 months. Pre-Production: Before the shoot, we built the 3D model of the spa and the lighting rigs digitally, and every camera move was pre-planned and pre-decided with my cinematographer to match on set. So we knew how to light the shot quickly on the shoot day, and talented actress Kyla Dyan knew her blocking even before arriving on set. This helped us be efficient on the day of the shoot. Post-Production: The post-production of the project involved weeks of tracking and re-matching the lighting to what was captured on set to accurately place the actress in the environment of the spa.