Summary

My colleague and architecture graduate student, Ben Smith, and I wanted to create a project that examined the similarities and differences between being a film director and an architect. The film itself was a mechanism to compare and contrast each role. We paired Ben’s architectural knowledge with my film industry experience to decipher how each person thinks while working on a body of work. We recognized similarities in the pre-production stage of the film compared to the schematic, development, and construction documents stages of the architectural design process. The production and post-production stages of film making were most similar to the construction phase of building.

The film was split into three separate scenes. The first scene was a discussion between an architect and a client regarding the house he was designing for her. The second was a pre-production session between a film director and a director of photography regarding how the actors should move through the film set relative to a script. The third and final scene was a woman dancing through the house and using the space as if she were living her daily life. We had multiple meetings with the actual architect of the building used in the film to get his opinion on how certain features of the home were supposed to be used. This allowed us to give better direction to the dancer while she was moving through the space.