a film in three actsTurndown
- Brand
- Aurelle
- Director
- Inès Moreau
- Film
- 60″ · 30″ · 15″
- Format
- Director’s Treatment
The Directory
Eight floors, one night.
Please ring for anything you need.
The Idea
A car checks in for the night.
Hôtel Belvédère · The Winter Ball
Once the last guest has gone to bed, a grand hotel has one more performance left in it.
Turndown is a sixty-second film about the most important arrival of the night. When an Aurelle pulls up to the Hôtel Belvédère during its winter ball, the night staff do what great hotels have always done for their favourite guests: they prepare the room. Only this time, the room is the car.
Between midnight and dawn, the porters, valets, chefs and concierges reveal who they really are — aerialists, contortionists, acrobats and fire artists — and turn an ordinary turndown service into a private, impossible show. Every act of care becomes a new way of looking at the car: its light, its lines, its roof, its cabin.
By morning, nothing seems to have happened. Except, of course, everything.
Tone
Impeccable manners. Impossible feats.
Played straight · Warm · Quietly funny
Played completely straight.
Performed completely beyond belief.
The humour of Turndown lives in the gap between composure and spectacle. Our staff never wink at the camera. A concierge can cartwheel across the forecourt and still adjust his cuffs on landing; a chef can breathe fire and still ask whether everything is to your liking.
We want the warmth of a story told at a hotel bar, the precision of a well-run kitchen and the quiet thrill of watching something you were never meant to see. Elegant first, funny second, magical throughout.
The car is never a prop. It is treated with the reverence the staff save for their most valued guest — and that devotion is exactly what makes the audience fall for it too.
The Look
Symmetry by day. Velvet by night.
Composition · Light · Palette
The Belvédère is photographed like a jewellery box: every frame a stage, every doorway a proscenium.
Centred compositions, layered doorways, mirrored corridors and gently exaggerated proportions make the hotel feel built for an audience. We will stage it the way a theatre would — in planes, from front to back — so that light and performers can travel through it.
We light only with what the hotel would have: chandeliers, sconces, lampposts and the glow of the ballroom spilling out across the snow. Warm tungsten against the clean blue of a winter night.
A palette that is rich, but disciplined.
Oxblood velvets, polished brass, black lacquer, ivory linen and the cool, clean light of snow. Deep shadows that keep their detail, and reflections shaped with care.
Against all this, the Aurelle’s paint and glass are the only truly modern surfaces in frame — a clear line between the world of the hotel and the guest it is falling for.
- Oxblood#6E1E22
- Midnight#14202B
- Velvet#1A3328
- Brass#B8975A
- Linen#EFE7D8
- Snow#F7F6F2
Camera
The most discreet member of staff.
Composed · Choreographed · Composed again
Act I
Before midnight, the camera behaves like a perfect concierge.
Measured dolly moves, precise pans and locked-off, symmetrical frames introduce the hotel with the confidence of someone who knows every corner of it.
The camera notices everything and comments on nothing: a glance between two guests, a valet straightening his gloves, the car settling beneath the porte-cochère as the snow keeps falling.
Act II — Act III
When the performance begins, the camera joins the company.
At midnight we leave the tripod behind. We fly with the aerialists on body-mounted rigs, orbit the car inside the concierge’s wheel and drop from the chandelier with the porter. Every movement resolves into a clean, composed view of the car — the light signature, the shoulder line, the glass roof, the cabin — so the spectacle always lands on design.
At dawn we return to stillness. One wide frame, perfectly level, lets the final joke land without any help.
The Staff
Twelve employees. Twelve secret talents.
Casting · Disciplines · Characters
Everyone at the Belvédère has a second job after midnight.
We’ll cast a company of real circus artists and give each of them a believable place in the life of the hotel. The uniform comes first; the discipline is only revealed when the night allows it.
What matters as much as the skill is the face: the pride of a night porter, the barely contained joy of a concierge who has waited thirty years for a guest like this.
Every role is designed so the performance grows out of the job. A luggage trolley becomes a trapdoor, a window-cleaning cradle becomes an aerial rig, a flambé becomes a flame.
The Night Register
On duty from 23:00 to 07:00 · Hôtel Belvédère
- NºRoleDisciplineTonight’s duty
- 01The Night ValetPhysical comedyTakes the keys, loses the keys, wins the night.
- 02The ConciergeCyr wheelInspects the bodywork the only way he knows: by orbiting it.
- 03The Head PorterChandelier aerialistBrings the light down from the ceiling, personally.
- 04The BellhopContortionistArrives folded inside a hatbox on the luggage trolley.
- 05 · 06HousekeepingAerial straps duoPolish the glass roof without touching the ground.
- 07The Night ChefFire artistRoom service, flambéed.
- 08 · 09The LamplightersPole duoDim the forecourt, one lamppost at a time.
- 10 · 11Two Guests on a BenchHand-balancing duoWere never really guests.
- 12The Night ManagerJugglerKeeps the keys, the cards and the evening in the air.
The Night
From the last waltz to the first light.
Act I · Check-in — Act II · Turndown — Act III · Wake-up Call
The Arrival
Snow falls on the Hôtel Belvédère, where the winter ball is drawing to a close. Through the iron gates and up the long, lamplit drive, an Aurelle glides to a stop beneath the porte-cochère.
The doormen straighten. A guest in an evening coat steps out, hands the keys to the night valet with a small nod, and disappears into the warm noise of the ballroom.
The Ledger
At the front desk, the concierge opens a leather-bound ledger and writes a new line: Aurelle — late arrival — turndown requested. He underlines it twice.
Around the lobby, the staff exchange a look we will come to recognise: the look of people who have been waiting a very long time for exactly this guest.
Midnight
The last guests drift upstairs. The orchestra packs away its instruments. Above reception, the grand clock begins to strike twelve.
On the final chime, every member of staff turns, in perfect unison, toward the revolving door. Beyond the glass, the car waits in the snow, lit like a stage.
The Ritual Begins
What follows is the hotel’s oldest ritual, performed for its newest guest. In six connected movements, the staff prepare the car for the night as if it were the finest suite in the house — and in doing so, each of them reveals the discipline they keep hidden by day.
Every act of service gives us a new way of seeing the car. The performances build in scale and speed, the keys passing from hand to hand, until the whole company is in motion around a single, perfectly lit vehicle.
I. The Luggage · II. The Inspection
The valet wheels out a brass luggage trolley to collect the bags. A hatbox lid lifts, and the bellhop unfolds from inside it, rolling down onto the snow to gaze up at the car’s light signature, framed in perfect symmetry.
The concierge arrives to restore order and takes the keys — then lifts a Cyr wheel from behind the reception desk. He orbits the car in one long, continuous move, inspecting every line of the bodywork with professional pride as reflections turn across the doors.
III. The Light · IV. The Glass
High above, the head porter lowers himself from the lobby chandelier, carrying the light down to the car like a candelabra. Hanging upside down, he squints at the room number on the key tag.
From the roof, two housekeepers descend on aerial straps, polishing cloths in hand. They glide in slow spirals above the glass roof, passing the keys between them, and we fall with them toward the cabin below.
V. Room Service · VI. Lights Out
The night chef crosses the forecourt with a silver cloche. He lifts it and breathes a single, controlled ribbon of fire — a flambé for the guest — that travels the full length of the car’s reflection.
The lamplighters climb the lampposts and spiral down them one by one, dimming the forecourt as they go. Then the whole company works as one: a blanket folded on the driver’s seat, a chocolate on the dashboard, a Do Not Disturb card hung from the mirror. The valet closes the door with a soft, satisfied click.
The Morning
Morning. The snow has stopped. Our guest steps out into a forecourt that looks exactly as it did the night before. The staff stand in their places, immaculate — if a little out of breath.
Look closer: the porter is still inside the chandelier, perfectly motionless. A housekeeper is tucked behind the canopy, just out of sight. The guest opens the car door. On the dashboard, a single chocolate. On the mirror: Do Not Disturb.
Do Not Disturb
And on the back seat, beneath a perfectly folded blanket, the night valet is fast asleep.
The guest glances at the concierge, who does not blink, and closes the door very quietly so as not to wake him. We pull back to a symmetrical wide of the hotel in the morning light, the car at its centre.
Super — Make every arrival an occasion. AURELLE
The Hotel
A building that could only exist on film.
Forecourt · Façade · The way back to the gates
We’ll build the forecourt as a stage.
A sweeping horseshoe drive, a theatrical façade with slightly exaggerated windows, and a porte-cochère that frames the car like a proscenium arch. The façades are layered and partly detached, so light can pass through windows that lead nowhere.
This version leans into fantasy, in the spirit of the grand hotels of the Belle Époque. It gives the car’s clean, contemporary lines a beautiful contrast — and makes its arrival feel like an event.
Contemporary variations
We are also exploring quieter, more architectural directions: sculpted limestone, deep arches and pewter façades at dusk. They give the car a calmer setting and let its silhouette do more of the talking.
Looking back toward the gates.
The reverse view opens onto the long, curving drive, lined with lampposts that fade into the mist and a distant tree line.
It gives the camera depth for the arrival in Act I, and for the empty, snow-quiet morning of Act III — the same space, before and after the night.
Goodnight
Great hotels understand something about luxury that we often forget: it is not about what you see. It is about everything that was done while you weren’t looking.
Turndown is a love letter to that idea — to the people who work through the night, and to a car worth staying up for. I would love to build this world with you: the hotel, the company, the choreography, and that single chocolate on the dashboard.
Sleep well.
Inès Moreau
Make every arrival an occasion.