Creative Record
Immersive hospitality. Storyworld design. AI-forward business development.
Justin Bunnell explores immersive hospitality, experience design, and AI-forward business development through more than 20 years of filmmaking, entrepreneurship, storytelling, and building real-world experiences.
Years across film, brand, hospitality & experience design
Video projects delivered
Returning clients
Creative & hospitality ventures founded
Year-old Vermont beverage story revived
Entertainment cocktail & soda lounge opened and operated
Interactive web apps and game prototypes
Podcasts, branded campaigns, live events & immersive experiences
Everything I build sits inside one of these three areas, and the useful work tends to happen where they overlap.
Designing environments and service systems around how people feel, participate, and remember, not just around what they order. Story, atmosphere, ritual, recognition, and surprise treated with the same care as the drink in front of the guest.
Practical AI applied inside businesses I actually operate. Prototyping, decision support, staff training, operational systems, content and creative development. Automate the invisible. Humanize the visible.
Using filmmaking, characters, mythology, environmental storytelling, live entertainment, and interactive technology to turn ordinary businesses into worlds people can participate in.
A working model I use for thinking about how a hospitality experience actually lands on a guest, from the first frame they read to the last feeling they carry out the door.
What world am I entering?
Before a guest reads the menu or hears the music, they read the room. The story is the frame everything else hangs on: the era, the point of view, the reason this place exists.
What do I see, hear, smell, touch, taste?
Light temperature. Music curated for the moment, not the shift. Textures under a hand. The smell of ginger from the bar. Sensory detail is where atmosphere becomes real.
What can I participate in, not just observe?
A ritual to perform, a card to hold, a menu that behaves like an artifact, a game to play, a stranger to meet. Participation is what separates being a spectator from being inside the story.
Does this experience acknowledge me as an individual?
Names remembered. Regulars noticed. Small acts of specific attention. The moment a guest realizes they aren't a transaction is the moment the experience begins to belong to them.
How do I feel when I leave compared with when I arrived?
The only measurement that actually matters. Not satisfaction. Change. A guest carrying a slightly different mood, story, or self-image out the door is the point of the whole system.
Working framework, in active use at Venetian Soda Lounge and other projects. Not a finished theory. A tool I sharpen every week.
The whole career comes back to one question: how do you create an experience someone carries with them after it's over?
It started with film editing and visual effects. Two decades of learning how images, sound, pacing, and story shape what an audience feels. That grew into commercial filmmaking, creative direction, brand storytelling, and eventually founding RetroMotion Creative.
Then the screen wasn't enough. Reviving Venetian Beverages and building the Venetian Soda Lounge moved the same principles into physical space. Hospitality, lighting, music, live entertainment, environmental storytelling, and the very specific work of designing how people feel in a room they're actually standing in.
Original projects like Rufus Hightower, Gingy 9000, and SodaBarVT pushed the idea further, combining fictional worlds with real businesses so guests could participate in the story instead of just watch it.
AI is the newest tool in the kit. Not as a replacement for the human parts, but as a way to prototype faster, sharpen operations, and give the team more capacity to deliver the parts that only humans can. Automate the invisible. Humanize the visible.
One thread across all of it: making experiences that change how someone feels.
Essays on immersive hospitality, AI-forward business, storyworld design, and the film craft underneath it all.
In 1914 a circus train derails on a cold Vermont night, the animals escape, and the ringmaster is found dead. An AI-produced gothic mystery about control, fear, and the wildness people keep trying to cage. Produced by RetroMotion Creative.
An original short film for Venetian Soda Lounge and Venetian Beverages: a grumpy soda maker, a loyal robot named Gingy, and a ghost with unfinished family business and strong opinions about ginger ale. Built out of old soda plant lore and the emotional needs of mechanical employees.
Twenty years of Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition told through the Northeast farmers they supply. A film about milk prices, succession, and the specific weight of keeping a family operation alive for one more generation.
What running a lounge, several businesses, and a family at the same time actually does to a person. I went to therapy on camera, and the advice did not make the to-do list.
Julia Randall performing "On the Internet" live at Venetian Soda Lounge, filmed by RetroMotion Creative. She won the lounge's Emerging Songwriters Competition, and the prize was a full day at Tank Recording Studios.
A short bar skit built around the Maple Whiskey Sour. The lemon, it turns out, has feelings about being used this way.
Began professional work in film editing and visual effects, contributing to feature films and other screen projects. Learned to control what an audience sees and feels — pacing, illusion, image, and sound.
Expanded into advertising, branded storytelling, and regional media production across commercial, nonprofit, and institutional clients — the beginning of connecting storytelling to real business objectives.
Launched a cinematic production company focused on story-driven video.
Brought back a heritage Vermont beverage brand connected to family history.
Built and opened a vintage-inspired cocktail and soda lounge in Burlington, Vermont in August 2022.
Created and developed the Rufus Hightower universe, an original adventure IP inspired by 1930s pulp serials, golden-age cinema, tiki culture, occult mystery, and immersive hospitality. Built a transmedia world spanning live events, cocktail menus, video content, interactive experiences, and game concepts, with recurring characters, lore, branded artifacts, and serialized storylines. Designed the IP to function as both entertainment and experiential marketing, connecting audience engagement, hospitality, storytelling, and brand-building into one cohesive creative platform.
Co-created a podcast about AI for everyday people.
Designed and built a web-based interactive mystery and case-file experience.
Built practical AI-powered workflows for video production, content strategy, and business operations.
For collaboration, immersive hospitality projects, AI-forward business development, creative leadership, speaking, or something interesting you're building, the channel is open.
