So we've obviously been quiet on the film news and newsletter emails for the past couple months. The film has been charging ahead but we've been quiet on purpose. A hint why is because we are upgrading our website to a new 3.0 version which will be completely constructed using Drupal. Drupal is a backend content management system or CMS and one of the new leaders in open source web development. It is currently used by such sites as whitehouse.gov, economist.com and fastcompany.com. The new site will look very much like the one you've come to love but with a lot of new functionality. We are extremely excited to roll out some of the new bells and whistles in the near future. To find out when the update goes live subscribe to our newsletter for an email notification and stay informed as we get closer to the release date.

That's right folks, we've known this for about a month but can now share our great news! Please see the short article in the recent eOculus about the film and check out the Center for Architecture Foundation's website for more info on this crucial grant. The funds will go a long way to getting us to a final cut by the end of the year.

So March has flown by, but many great things have occurred. It began with a road trip to South Carolina for a close friend's wedding and continued with an epic, 7 day, 7000 mile, 7 interview road trip back and forth across the country. We shot interviews with:

William McDonough in Charlottesville, VA

Architects and Scientists involved with the Academy of Neuroscience For Architecture (ANFA) in San Diego, CA

Michael Reynolds in Taos, NM

These interviews provided amazing content for the film and pretty much complete the footage needed for two of our subplot topics of sustainability and environmental psychology. Beyond this we have more big news, but must wait to tell. The public announcement is coming very soon and will be included in our upcoming newsletter. Sign up here to get it in the next couple weeks.

Well February is proving to be a glamorous month for us at Archiculture. We've continued to develop the rough cut with a recent review session with new team member, Matt Dellinger who brought a fresh set of eyes and unbelieveable storytelling skills to the editing studio (photo). We have also cut a few semi-polished clips to submit for a slew of grants and film labs over the past few weeks. Beyond that we are frantically gather our tax info, receipts, invoices, and sending 1099s out for the closure of another fiscal year. Yuck.

I promise March will be a way more exciting month of news from the Archiculture front. Hint, six critically important key interviews are schedule on the subplot topics of sustainability and environmental psychology. More details on who and where to follow.

We sat down with the revered architect, professor, critic and historian, Kenneth Frampton in his office at Columbia University this past week. We discussed the historic evolution of the profession of architecture and where the architect sits in today's society. His depth of experience in academia and critical perspective on the profession proved invaluable in his commentary for the documentary.

Photos available here.

We met with writer, Matt Dellinger today to discuss the film and his potential involvement in the script writing process for our subplot topics. He is hot on the pursuit on finishing his own highly anticipated book on the "NAFTA Highway," Interstate 69 and looks to potentially get involved with our editing/writing process in the next few months.

After the meeting with Matt, we hoped in a Zipcar pickup truck and headed back to one of our main characters, Mike Toste's hometown of Woodbury, NY. We needed to get a few more shots of his suburban hometown to complete a grant clip we are submitting which showcases his character intro, where his thesis idea originated and a tie into the subplot topic of sprawl with James Kunslter interview footage. We had a blast testing our new crane and dolly from the back of the truck on the warm winter day. Wish us luck on the grant. These funds are critical for our final editing push.

So the new year has brought a big change to the day to day life of Archiculture. We have moved studios and now have an even bigger and better space to shoot the final scenes and edit the final cut of the film... we can even see the Empire State Building from our Brooklyn loft. Some fun photos coming to our facebook group shortly.

We also landed some pretty good press over on Architectural Record in the January Issue. We want to thank Murrye Bernard for her fantastic article which gets behind the scenes of the project and explores the origination of the film's idea. Thanks to everyone who has sent such nice emails regarding the story and hope that this is only the beginning for the "Year of Archiculture!"

Order your Archiculture Tshirts by noon 12PM EST on Monday, Dec. 21st and be sure to get them delivered to your doorstep by Christmas Eve. See the three available designs here. Remember every little bit of grass-roots funding helps and all proceeds go directly to the editing process.

As December rolls in, David celebrates a birthday and we hit the second anniversary of production. Two years ago (07DEC2007), David and I rolled straight up to Pratt Institute, fresh from our cross country roadtrip with a minivan full of clothes and film gear to start production. It has been a long, strange trip but we continue to get ever closer to the release of the film and grow more comfortable in our new home. Amazing to think this project started four years ago but the light is getting stronger at the end of the tunnel. 2010 is the year of Archiculture!

A slight break in the workflow for a holiday feast. One of us will roadtrip it home to see the family in Ohio, while the other will sacrificially stay in New York to keep the editing boulder rolling along. Beyond all this glorious editing work, plans are underway to get our trailer out to you all. We are talking with some online spots to launch it but one thing we do know is that all those who subscribe to our monthly newsletters will get first access. So sign up, stay informed, and see you in December!

We caught up with the infamous author of the "Dear Architects, I'm Sick of Your Shit" open letter, Annie Choi (photos). As someone who has subconsciously surrounded herself with many architect-friends and become the overnight spokesperson for the whispered dissent of their friends and loved ones, she was a perfect candidate to humorously and satirically explain the deepest character traits of architects.

Time flies when you're having editing fun. So after all the public hoopla over the trailer has come and gone we have returned to our hermit-like selves in the editing studio just in time for fall. We are discussing ways to make the trailer public at the moment and are not sure which outlet(s) we will pursue. I do know that those who are either subscribed to our monthly eNewsletters or on our Facebook Group will get access first. So sign up now because its coming soon.

Beyond that, we did take a day off and drive up to beautiful Saratoga Springs, NY to interview the well known author and critic of suburban sprawl, James Howard Kunstler. His interview provided some very fiery criticism to the somewhat insular architectural establishment by looking at oil dependent developments at the regional and global scale, and their impact upon multiple facets of our lives. You can see photos here and a blurb about him on the key interviews page.

The last two topics from the Roundtable discussion on Architectural Education vs. Profession are up now on our newly added Extras page under the videos tab. Keep an eye out for the October eNewsletter coming out early next week with a recap of the Trailer Premier and an update on the film's progression since. Subscribe here to stay in the loop as we get closer to the final cut.

The first two of the four topics from the Roundtable discussion on Architectural Education vs. Profession are up now on our newly added Extras page under the videos tab. The other two topics will be posted next week just in time for our next eNewsletter. Let us know what you think of the amazing discussion recorded at the Sept. 2nd Trailer Premier Benefit between our selected educators, professionals and recently graduated student-character panelists.

We just put up photos from last week's interview with globally renowned and Pritzker prize winning architect, Thom Mayne of Morphosis. We were able to catch him for a 45 minute interview at his newly opened Cooper Union Building here in New York. It was critical that we shot a follow up interview after catching him briefly a year ago following a Pratt Instutute lecture. His commentary and insight were essential to construct our trailer and will be well respresented in the film.

The trailer premier benefit held last week in NYC was a massive success. We had over 400 people turn out to see the premier and celebrate with us. The roundtable (to be posted online shortly) spawned a very dynamic discussion while The Dirty Urchins and DJ Tim "Love" Lee kept the crowd energized with their Brooklyn Brewery beers. A big thank you to everyone who came out to the event and all who helped make it possible. Please be sure to check out all the amazing photographs taken throughout the night on our Trailer Premier NYC page.

RSVP now to the event which will be held Sept. 2nd at the Center for Architecture in NYC. We've got a lot in store for the party such as a Roundtable Discussion on Architectural Education vs. The Professional Practice, band performance by The Dirty Urchins, a live DJ set by Tim "Love" Lee, and of course an OPEN BAR with lots of free guest giveaways. A few new Tshirts will be available along with new button designs. Should be a blast! So tell your friends and RSVP now to make sure you won't get turned away like last year's event.

More event details here.

We've posted new photos from recent interviews with John Cary of Public Architecture on the recently completed Highline and with New York based Architect Audrey Matlock at her office. Both provided amazing content for the film which may also get into this new trailer...

This month has been hectic to say the least. We've been busy shooting all the footage of this year's AIANY Heritage Ball Video which the financial proceeds will be used for the film's final editing fees. We've also continued to gather footage for the film by interviewing local Architect, Audrey Matlock (photos coming soon) and shooting scenes for the upcoming trailer intro sequence which will premier Sept. 2nd at a big Benefit Bash at the Center for Architecture in NYC. Sign up here to get an invitation when details are available. The event planning team of Carlos Feliz and Barbie Steffen have been busy coordinating all the fun stuff we have in store for the event - roundtable discussion, DJ, band, beer, wine, food, green carpet, premier, etc. Lots of new tshirts for sale and other give-away items to be handed out to the crowd. Can't wait to release this trailer and party with you all!

What happened to June! Well for starters our production company, Arbuckle Industries, moved into a new studio space. David and I also took a little time off to venture home to see family and friends, and to let them know we exist beyond this website. We have also been busy gearing up for our September 2nd, Trailer Premier Benefit just confirmed at the Center for Architecture in NYC. So mark your calendars and keep an eye for RSVP details soon. The Archiculture team has also grown to include the talents of Carlos Feliz and David Kuykendall. You can read about it all in our latest newsletter and subscriber here to stay up to date with the film's progression.

In our continued attempt to open the film to a broader audience and diversity our interview base we sat down with Sway Calloway (interview photos) from MTV this past week to discuss architecture and the significance it holds within our current cultural landscape. Like our interviews with politicians, such as Mayor Joe Riley, and musicians, such as David Byrne, Sway opened the dialogue of architecture. Sway discussed how the built environment shaped his own upbringing in urban Oakland as a kid and how it has evolved along with his maturation as a musical pillar. Sway was able to explicitly illustrate architecture's impact upon modern society by placing it into contemporary cultural perspective with such things as music and sport. Keep an eye out for a few Raw Blog Clips to be posted in the coming months. A big thanks goes out to Dionysios's brother Nick for getting us the contact and setting up the interview with his good friend Sway Calloway... especially after he arrived on a red-eye flight from LA.

David and I have just completed our second director's cut of the footage. After receiving our production editor, Pierce Cook's, 25 hour cut in September. David and I started our own editing process with the footage. We began with a total of 160+ hours of footage last October and have since cut it to 80 hours in January and now to 45 hours in May. We will continue with a 3rd cut throughout the summer and by fall will have a 20-25 hour cut to move ahead with a final editor. The goal is a completed 80 minute feature by mid 2010.

For now we celebrate this small benchmark in the filmmaking process. Tomorrow we continue to edit and work towards our new trailer to be released late this summer.

Just posted a few new photos of our editing studio. Please excuse the mess but we spend countless hours at these desks. Check them out here.

We also just sent out our April Newsletter to all our subscribers. It highlights our plans for a new Trailer release this summer, recent and upcoming interviews, depth of new music received, and planned Archiculture Commercials to be shot this Summer. You can subscribe here to get on the list for next month's update.

Got a few interviews coming up with architects, designers and special others. We are quickly trying to grab a few more critical quotes, faces and names together to use towards our upcoming trailer which will be released this summer. Details will be coming for the big blow out party. We caught up with our friend and past interviewee Peter Lippman this week for further commentary. You will definitely hear some of that in the trailer while photos from our shoot at the Center for Architecture will be up in the next few days. I know most of you have seen our "Pre-Trailer" on the site currently but we are getting giddy to finally create a comprehensive piece which showcases our five student characters, the subplot topics discuss through their projects and drop a serious hook for the film. We hope you all finally get a real sense of the breadth and storyline from this film as we ramp up energy towards release in early 2010. Getting close!

We have been actively pursuing freelance work since production wrapped last May with the students' graduation. This work has provided continued funds to keep the project moving in the modern depressed economy because fundraising has dried to a trickle. Well today marks a biggie. Our production company has just been awarded the 2009 Heritage Ball Video project through the AIANY chapter. The funds made from this gig will provide much of the money needed to pay the the final cut editor. If we can't find the funds through grants, individuals or firms then we just have to work for it.

With some late night, coast-to-coast final tweaks by our web guru, Doug Havens we are able to unveil our new online home for the project. We’ve attempted to simplify navigation while adding a lot of new content such as profiles for our student characters (their thesis projects coming soon), backgrounds on our key interviewees, FAQs, a press kit and press subscription, a download tab with backgrounds, banners and posters, and a street team page. Have a look around and let us know what you think. Shoot us an email if you have any comments, even if they are horrible or great.

We also just sent out our March Newsletter. If you would like to receive these monthly updates on the project's evolution subscribe here.

We have shifted our focus on our blog away from the students and their studio lives to some of the key interviews we have captured to date. Head over now to see Raw Clips from:
Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, SC
Thom Mayne of Morphosis
Maurice Cox from the NEA and UVa

To come...
Zaha Hadid
Phil Bernstein from Autodesk
David Byrne from Talking Heads
Shigeru Ban

And for pure enjoyment:
Man of Action (1955) - An animated plea for urban renewal connected with 1950s efforts to “redevelop” American city centers. David found this doing some archive footage research.

Archiculturefilm.com 2.0 is set to launch next week when we send out our March Newsletter. Sign up to get our monthly updates and see all the new stuff we've added to the website. Way easier navigation too!

Photos are up from last week's shoot with one of our main student characters Michael before he headed back to Dubai for work. Check them out on our photos page. For all you video and/or photography nuts out there, notice the quality on these shots. They were taken from our new Canon 5D mark ii. Video clips form this new hybrid still/video camera should be up in the next few weeks.

I am heading to Chicago this afternoon to shoot the Converge : Exchange Conference being co-hosted by a supporting organization of the film, ADPSR. I will attempt to catch up with and get interviews of our old friends Bryan Bell of Design Corps and John Cary of Public Architecture while documenting the local socially engaging design work being highlighted at the event. I will also attempt to make some connections at the Chicago Architecture Foundation and meet up with fellow architects-turned-filmmakers Adam, Ian and Mike from Spirit of Space while in town for a few days. Follow our twitter for updates during the the journey.

We caught up with an old friend of ours last Friday the architect and seasoned professor, Terry Heinlein. Many of you will remember him from our pre-trailer when he said, "everytime you walk down a corridor, everytime you walk from the outside to the inside, everytime you move through a doorway, everytime you sit down in a space, you're being effected by the space." We received a lot of strong positive reactions to this piece and thought we would follow up with Terry while he was in NYC last week. Photos from his interview infront of the Flatiron Building are up now. For all you photographers and filmmaking nuts out there we used our new Canon 5D mark 2 to shoot these photos along with taking some beautiful secondary HD video shots.

Today also marks another day where we shadow one of our 5 main student characters to get more high quality B-roll footage of them around the city. We'll be following Michael around all day before he jet-sets back to Dubai for work.

We shot an interview at the 5th Avenue Apple Store here in New York this past Tuesday with Peter Bohlin. Peter is one of the founding members of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, who has been the chosen firm by Apple to design all their prototype retail stores. We got some great quotes from Peter discussing the importance and quality of urban space upon people and what it is like to work with a client like Steve Jobs and Apple. His extensive list of built work and lineage back to studying at Cranbrook under Eero Saarinen provide a great depth of experiences to draw from for content for the film.

This interview should prove invaluable for our general audience to associate one of the highest profile and recognizable brands in the world, Apple with the architecture and urban spaces they create. Photographs from the interview and last week's Opportunities Fair are now up on our photos page.

Sorry for the late notice but we've been invited to host a table for the film at tomorrow's Opportunities Fair at the Center for Architecture. If you are in New York, we hope you can stop by and say hello during the 2 hour lunchtime event. We will be looking to find fellow designers who can lend a hand, collaborate with, lead a task or even join the street team. We've got lots of holes to fill as we ramp up energy towards the film's release date and hope we find some inspired folks tomorrow.

For further details check out the event's posting on the Center's website which also list the other great groups that will be present.

David and I headed to Bethel, Connecticut this past Friday to the hometown of one of our main student characters, Dionysios. We went to get a little more background footage of where Dio grew up and to specifically interview his High School Art Teacher, Ms. Bogart. She was the one who helped put Dio on the path to study Architecture and to inevitably apply to Pratt Institute. Since she came up repeatedly during filming with both Dionysios and his parents, we knew we had to get her talking of the young Dio. The interview proved to be fantastic and will definitely have some footage in the film. This is the exciting stuff we think of during weeks and months of editing during post. Those small glimpses of the final film keep us going.

Check out photos from the trip, over on our Photos page.

Our editing workflow has grinded to a screeching halt due to faulty firware on our 6TBs of Seagate hard drives. Apparently everyone has been having issues with these if they are being used in a RAID system. So hopefully surgery attempt number two will be much more successful this Wed to get them updated and working again. Besides that we have been very busy getting some updates ready for the website. We are adding dropdown menus to the navigation bar which should make finding info/content on our site a lot easier. We are also adding a bunch of new pages such as Characters, Key Interviews, Press Kit, Downloads and more. Keep an eye out for the new pages in the next couple weeks and cross your fingers on getting those drives working again.

We would like to welcome Barbie Steffen to the Archiculture Team. She has taken the lead from Sam Danner and willl continue to evolve our PR plans as we move forward in Post-Production. She will begin sending out Press Releases in the coming months as we gear up for our trailer release this summer and film debut towards the end of the year. If you or anyone you know may be interested in joining our new PR list please subscribe here.

If you missed our latest newsletter in your inbox or have not subscribed yet, you can see January's here and/or subscribe for future newsletters here.

So in our ever-persistent attempt to open our filmmaking process up to you all - architects, filmmakers, designers, artist, engineers, parents, etc. - we’ve jumped on the twitter band wagon. We’ve been test tweeting the past week and are now somewhat familiar with the lingo. David, myself and some of our team members will be posting up to the minute updates everyday as we proceed through post-production. The best thing is they are a maximum 140 characters. So short little snippets about the making of with links, photos, stories, etc. So check us out and give us a follow. If you don’t know twitter yet, we suggest checking it out. Showcases the strengths of Web 2.0. We feel this could be an amazing way to connect to you, our audience, and get direct feedback at each step of the filmmaking process. You can check out our last 8 posts streaming on our home page for a sample.

Just shot one of most amazing interviews to date for the film. We sat down with an environmental psychologist/architect Peter Lippman to discuss mainly how architecture impacts people on various levels from aesthetics, to health, to learning. David and I were giddy from the broad range of topics covered and the conviction of Peter's words. His experience as a practicing architect, a father, a native New Yorker, an environmental psychology researcher and a collegiate professor provided a great depth of exposure to draw from for insightful commentary. Photos are up now from the interview and once we get to review this footage a raw video clip will be sure to go upon the blog.

Happy New Year to all our friends, family and supporters from team Archiculture. This month marks the start of our 4th year on the project. Hard to believe that 3 years ago the documentary idea David spoke of at my desk would spur this long journey. We have returned to our editing seats from short journeys to see friends and family, and are ready to continue forging through the hours of footage in post. We just sent out our last newsletter for 2008 a couple days ago and are deeply anticipating the new year. Around these parts we like to refer to 2009 as the Year of Archiculture in hopes of having the film completed this year. We are extremely excited with how the footage and story is shaping up but need a lot of time to filter it down into a new trailer and a rough cut. To stay updated throughout the process please subscribe to our newsletters and you will get all the monthly updated details in your inbox.

We have posted some raw clips over on our blog as a holiday present to our friends, our online followers and the students we recorded 24/7. These are some of the random moments we captured during the 160 hours of footage shot during production last spring. We just completed our first round of reviewing all of this footage and will begin to frequently release pieces of the clips we have collected. So as we slowly watch and cut and rewatch, we thought it would be a fun way to share what we got on tape. We have continuously attempted to keep this entire filmmaking process as transparent as possible and thought it would be a good way to get some feedback/input during our editing process. So go ahead and give them a look. Tell us what you think - good, bad, laughs, frowns, lost - whatever comes to mind by posting comments below each. Many more are on their way.

Please be sure to send this along to anyone you think may enjoy and don't forget to subscribe to get our monthly newsletters.

Just re-organized the photos over on our photos page and added a slideshow function for each stage of pre-production, production and post-production. It was getting a little out of control with so many images and thought it would be good to have a simple way to play them in a continuous timeline. Give it a look and let us know what you think.

We just rolled past our one year marker for arriving at Pratt to start production. What a long journey it has been this past year but how quickly it has gone by. It also marked the birth of co-Director/Producer David Krantz. Head on over to the blog for more reflection and see some photos from the celebrating.

Finally!!! We have gotten around to creating a brand spanking new archicast over on our film page. This segment features footage from the past 5 months including trips to South Carolina, North Carolina, Washington DC, Boston, and an overall glimpse back into the filmmaking process. Give it a look to see what we've been up to.

We also just sent out our November Newsletter to our growing list of subscribers. We have evolved to use a secure html-based email program called MailChimp to send out our monthly updates. If you have not received our newsletters in the past subscribe here so you can stay up to date with the project. If you already receive them then please forward it along to a friend to further spread word of the film.

Some of you may have noticed a new name floating around on the site. We would like to introduce our new Production Assistant, Michael Selwa. Check out his brief bio over on the info page for a little background on the new team member to Archiculture. You will see some of his direct work in the photos taken during both the Shigeru Ban and John Peterson interviews. His role will certainly grow in the coming months as we continue to progress through post-production. We are excited to invite him into the film's family of makers.

Photos taken by Michael Selwa from our interview with Shigeru Ban this past Thursday are up on our photos page. Check them out.

Just got back a couple hours a go from interviewing Shigeru Ban after his lecture at Pratt Institute. His work crosses the spectrum from low-tech, global disaster structures to high-end, urban condo buildings. I first experienced one of his buildings during the Nomadic Museum's visit to New York back in 2005. Most people will recognize his work with paper in the form of massive cardboard-like tubes. He presented the perfect chance to discuss the global scale of architecture's social impact due to his work with the UN in the form of disaster relief structures. Photos by Michael Selwa will be up shortly.

We just posted some new photographs over on our photos page. They include shots taken from our new post-production studio, the NOMA conference in DC and interviews with Joe Brown, CEO of EDAW, and John Peterson the founder of Public Architecture. We would like to mention and thank one of our new team members, Michael Selwa, for assisting and taking photos during the John Peterson interview. He will be showing up over on our info page under our growing collection of Archiculture team members.

We hope you all have some great costumes picked out for Halloween tomorrow night. Holidays like these are great excuses to socialize and enjoy the city we are surrounded by. See you on the other side!

To rave reviews from our team here at Archiculture headquarters, our fiscal sponsor IFP has stepped into the 21st century by automating their donation process in a simple online format! This is huge. It has taken us up to three months in the past for the donated funds to go from the donor to our debt riddled accounts. So if you've ever been interested in supporting the project you are only one click away. Spread the news! We are doing victory dances in the post-production studio... We have cabin fever and it is only October.

Today marks yet another journey down the yellow brick road of grant pursuits. This one seems to be right up our alley for potential funding from a grant resource. The Arnold W. Brunner Grant via the Center for Architecture Foundation presents an extremely odd mixture of architecture funding which has a history of supporting film projects. This last aspect is extremely crucial to our endeavor. As many people know there is a plethora of grant and funding sources for film projects but few will even consider a project with underproven filmmakers such as David and myself without a pedegree of feature-length successes. The rich get richer, or they have a rich uncle. So we have consistently looked to our community of architecture and design to get behind this project financially to help tell their story to a broader audience. To date we have not been able to lock in a substantial grant but have been consistent finalists. Second place does not get a film into theaters so our fingers are crossed.

A blog on the subject is rumbling.

We were invited to participate in the opening of the Arch Schools exhibit at the Center for Architecture on Saturday. We had a loop of still photographs from production and the pre-trailer playing throughout the day-long opening. Students from thirteen architecture schools throughout the northeast ranging from Yale, to Buffalo, to U. Penn came to visit local offices, present their top projects, engage in a dean's roundtable discussion and then party into the night. The reaction to the documentary was very energizing and we got to meet a lot of passionate young students.

We just got back from the EDAW office here in New York where we interviewed Joe Brown this morning. The interview covered an array of topics from education, sustainability, and technology with a specific focus upon the global scale and interdisciplinary design work of EDAW. Photos of this interview to follow next week after our scheduled interview of founder and chair of Public Architecture, John Peterson.

Over the next few months, we will begin to make some significant changes to our website to promote even greater transparency in our filmmaking process and ramp up the promotional efforts as we begin this final stretch. A new and improved Directors' Blog will begin to leak sneak preview clips during editing with an open platform to permit your own commentary on our editing decisions. We will also start expanding our shop to include some new items. We just added a Limited Edition Archiculture Moleskin Sketchbooks which was handed out to the graduating thesis students as a show of gratitude for permitting us into their studios. We only have 19 available, so grab them quick. Also a new archicast is in the making and should be up shortly.

Also for those of you who have not subscribed[at]archiculturefilm[dot]com yet, here is our latest newsletter. As always you can get up to the minute updates via our RSS Feed.

October Newsletter07

We headed down to DC this past weekend to attend and present at this year's National NOMA Conference. After a brief presentation about the project and showing of a few "sneak" preview clips, we engaged the crowd in a 30 minute discussion on the film. A wide array of questions were posed ranging from the experience of taking cameras into the studio environment, to the personal transition from architecture to film, to the future of diversity within the profession. Everytime we present the project at this early, uncompleted state it continues to solidify the film's ability to spur a greater discussion within the design community. Thank you to all who attended. These presentations continue to provide us the energy to push forward.

While we were down in the Carolinas getting interviews with Mayor Joe Riley and Bryan Bell, we were able to get a copy of our footage from our editor Pierce. He has taken the 140 plus hours of raw footage and made the first pass of "selects." This has cut away all the fat of the project down to a live timeline of 20 hours in the editing studio. David and I will now take our turn at repeatedly watching the footage and further condensing it down to meet our vision of the script. This is an extremely exciting moment in the evolution of the project to be cutting together our footage and watching the realization of our concept for the documentary steadily evolute into a feature film. We are on the final stretch! We still have so much further to go, but the film is becoming a reality.

Today, David and I headed up to White Plains, NY to presented the documentary film project to a group of enthusiastic architects at the annual New York State AIA convention. After our brief slide presentation outlining the project's origination, history, goals and timeline we showed the group a few raw cuts of footage. This sparked a pretty engaging 45 minute discussion on the documentary project. Everything from the experience and process of introducing a camera into the studio environment, to technology's influence on today's students, to the film's use as a future dialogue piece for architects and students to analyze our current standing, were discussed during the session.

It was good preparation to our upcoming presentation at the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) National Conference this coming weekend in DC. If you are around the capital we will be speaking Friday at 5:30.

This is the biggest and most critical news we have been able to announce since we wrapped major photography with the students' graduation in early May. EDAW, the internationally renowned landscape architecture, urban design, land and environmental planning firm has joined the ranks of David and I, to become Glass House Supporters of Archiculture. That's right folks, due to the foresight and vision of the amazing people at EDAW, we are able to continue work on the project. Their $10,000 donation will continue our payments of editing station fees and hours put forth towards the rough cut of the film. We have not been lucky enough to land any of our recent grants submissions and were getting close to pulling back on the project's workload in post-production. This donation keeps us within our time line and on the home stretch.

This donation has been in the works for some time now and we are extremely excited to finally share our new found supporter's enthusiasm for this immensely needed project. We only hope that this will enable others out there to see our shared vision and the necessity for such a documentary film project on the architectural studio to come to fruition and be viewable by all.

We have landed an interview with the Founder and Executive Director of Design Corps, Bryan Bell. Their motto "Design for the other 98% without Architects" is a rallying cry to promote good design that is accessible to all. This interview and his shared experiences with nonprofit design work will provide real-world case studies to support some of the student's socially oriented projects.

We originally met Bryan at this year's Structure's For Inclusion 8 Conference held at Harvard and are excited to finally get the chance to interview him. The interview will take place on-site at a Design Corps' green roofing project which is one piece of their Community Planning work for migrant farmworker's in Newton Grove, NC. New photos will be up when we return in mid-September.

We finally put up new photos from our May trip to Boston to interview Phil Bernstein the Vice President of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction division of Autodesk and a professor at Yale University. We had posted them earlier in our director's blog here back in May. More photos from recent interviews and post-production are on their way. Included will be some amazing photos of David Byrne and his Playing the Building exhibit.

We are excited to announce that we will be interviewing, Mr. Joe P. Riley Jr., the nationally reknowned Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina. He is "widely considered one of the most visionary and highly effective governmental leaders in America" and has been extremely influential in the realm of urban revitalization and education of our countries city-level politicians. To name a few of his accomplishments, he founded the Mayor's Institute of City Design, has been elected to nine consecutive terms as Mayor of Charleston, been president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors for 1986-1987, serves on the USCM Executive Committee, and received the Thomas Jefferson Award from the American Institute of Architects for Public Architecture in 1994. We will be interviewing him while we travel south for other interviews and footage during the month of September.

We were lucky enough to run into David Byrne, lead singer of the Talking Heads and internationally renowned artist, last weekend while we were at his "Playing the Building" exhibit interviewing Gavin Kroeber from Creative Time. He took the time out of his extremely busy and impactful schedule to sit down with us for a few minutes this past Friday at his installation to discuss this piece, and how we relate to our built environment. We are thinking of editing down a short piece of this soon so that you can see the amazing installation. We will definitely include some of the brilliant responses that David provided on our contemporary artistic and architectural landscapes.

A new photo set will be up later this week from the past couple of months of post-production.

Cut and pasting in the Final Cut Timeline is the project's fate right now. Exciting and daunting at the same time. Pierce has been cranking away at the footage down south while David and I have continued to hunt down any hints of potential funding around the globe. If you got a lead, shoot us an email.

We do have a few key interviews coming up. Shot an interview this past weekend with Gavin Kroeber from Creative Time, who is the group responsible for David Byrne's "Playing the Building" exhibit here in New York. While we were shooting the interview, we met David Byrne and look towards an interview with him over the next couple of weeks. His ability to transform space and people's perception of its experience through his visions could be very powerful for the film's audience.

We would like to apologize for our recent silence on the news page and blog postings but we have been extremely busy editing the 140+ hours of footage into our 90 min storyline. This is a very time consuming process and has filled all of our waking hours between our paid gigs.

We would also like to take a moment and thank some of our recent supporters. Beth Crawford and Suzi Brenner have been recently added to our supporters page with their generous donations to the project. We continue to hunt for any form of support and urge anyone who visits the site to keep spreading the word of the project. You never know where the break will come.

Hint... a new newsletter is in the making and should be out soon to all you subscribers.

As we continue to edit, our fundraising efforts are continuously being exhausted. Good moments are sprinkled throughout rough times as we begin to truly endure the reality of our current economic landscape in its relationship to the arts. We continue to charge forward and applaud/showcase graciously anyone who sees the potential in the project such as the office of Steven Holl.

Back to the editing station, freelancing and keeping our fingers crossed.

We have just found out from an old friend of ours, Carole Dean, that we have made it to the final stage of the Roy W. Dean New York Video Grant selection. We still have to make the final cut but have our fingers crossed in hopes of being awarded the $20,000 package of support.

If you are in Cincinnati, OH this coming Friday, come see a sneak preview presentation of the documentary at Baba Budan"s. The event will be directed by a few former classmates and friends of mine from Cincinnati's Architecture program, Mark Thomson and Ian McCain, who have graciously taken it upon themselves to organize the event. A portion of the proceeds from the happy hour drinks, coffees and beverages will go towards the project. There will also be a raffle for Archiculture Tshirts, and Buttons between showings of the film's trailer and a few sneak preview clips.

So if you are in the area come out this Friday evening to Clifton after work or school and help support the film. Also, please be sure to notify any one you know who may be interested in the film and in the city.

We let a couple of the students take over on this one to give them a little flavor of the other side of the camera. This one has a different feel due to the added dynamic of their questioning, introduction and conclusion. Give it a look over on our films page.

May Newsletter06

Archiculture is moving its base. That's right folks, rent is paid and our spot is reserved. Arbuckle Industries, David, Ian, Archiculture, et al are relocating to our new home in Bushwick. Check out our latest blog for a little more info. More details and some photos will be posted once we start moving in this Tuesday. Also, be sure to check out this visual blog of our 17 hour journey to capture Phil Bernstein from this past Tuesday.

For now, David and I continue to hunt for means of making an income via part time jobs and freelance work while keeping Archiculture evolving and fed. We have spent a large amount of time reviewing and logging the 140+ hours of footage shot over the semester and scheduling office presentations and interviews. Pierce, after relocating to South Carolina, has begun working on the film's rough cut, continues to tweak Archicast4 and is editing another video surprise... check out the last few photos from the Move Out set to get a clue.

We arrived back last night from DC on our chariot ride via Bolt Bus which was written about in our latest blog posting on its free wifi network. We are so enamored with their service we have already bought tickets on the coach to Boston this Tuesday to interview Phil Bernstein who is the Vice President of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction division of Autodesk and a professor at Yale University. Autodesk is better known to the architectural community as AutoCAD and Revit. We hope to discuss with Phil the impact technology is having upon today's architecture and the studio setting. For now check out our latest round of photos from DC to see all the amazing people we were able meet with while we were in town. A new Archicast should be up in the next couple weeks.

We leave this morning on a bus to DC for four days of meetings, presentations and interviews. On the agenda is Jess Wendover, Director of The Mayors" Insitute on City Design (MICD), Michael Geary, Andrew Caruso, and Tony Vanky of the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), Jessyca Schwarzkopf the American Institute of Architects' (AIA) Sustainability Resource Architect, Anica Landreneau the Sustainability Knowledge Manager at Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK) DC, and Michael Monti the Executive Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Hopefully we come back with some new supporters and some amazing footage. We will let you know how it goes and will post a few blogs while we are away. We continue the Archiculture Campaign Trail to DC!

The campaign trail has begun! The folks at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) were gracious enough to permit David and I time to present the project to their New York office yesterday evening. The response was very positive to the trailer and sneak preview clips which spawned an interesting Q&A session following. We will begin doing these types of promotional/fundraising presentations at every office or event which will permit us. We figured the last place we can turn to raise funds and awareness for this project is directly to our core audience. If interested let us know and we will make time for you. For now back to the trail planning.

After a missed opportunity on Thursday after Zaha arrived from London for her lecture, we were able to land twenty minutes with one of the most prominent architects in the world following graduation. It took us five different times to set up for the interview before we were able to pull her away from her booked schedule of lecturing, meeting, speaking and accepting an honorary degree from Pratt. It was good training on our end for rapid fire 3 point lighting techniques and testing our abilities with extremely limited settings. A few months ago we would have been unable to deal with such circumstances but now we have become pros. Zaha was very animated and energetic to our questions which will prove invaluable to the film's content. What took 10 hours of work from two people and 20 minutes of Zaha's time will boil down into 15 - 30 seconds of film time. It was all worth it.

Take a look at our latest set of photos from the interview and of graduation to see the production.

That is right folks, we just put up photos from the last 2 weeks of production. There were over 1500+ taken over that time span, so it took us a good bit of time to digest and post them. They trace all the last minute production/design work leading up and through the final reviews. In two days the students graduate.

We are also scheduled to interview Zaha Hadid, the 2004 Pritzker Prize winner tomorrow night. You can see her work here. She is in the neighborhood for the School of Architecture's Spring Lecture Series and to receive an honorary degree as part of Pratt's Commencement on Friday, May 9. I'll let you know how it goes.

Immediately following Saturday's final honors reviews and a little bit of celebration that evening, we dove deep into two grant submission. The first one was due yesterday for From the Heart Productions' Roy W. Dean New York City Video Grant and the second was due today by the New York State Council on the Arts for Individual Artists in Film, Media and New Technology Productions. Now that these are out of the way and our fingers are crossed, we will begin to determine how we will survive the cost of living in New York City and complete our transformation into Archiculture salesman. We have trips scheduled to DC and Yale University for interviews/fund raising in May. We will also be presenting at a few office in New York throughout the month to help raise funds. Much more to share in the pipeline but too early to unveil. We will keep you posted as we acclimate to our new post-production lives.

Today starting at 10AM is the final review for the thesis students. It is the climax of the semester and the closure of major production for Archiculture. Lots to share but too exhausted and busy filming to fully describe. Their journey as students of architecture and our own as documentary filmmakers are coming to an end.

Not to make the situation worse for the students, but spring has finally arrived in full force. This is making it very difficult to stay inside and labor over a computer, drafting table or model. We have managed to get outside for a few campus shots and capturing a couple of the students on their bicycles or skateboards. Photos will soon follow.

If you have not looked in a while, check out some of the recent post in the student's blog such as the recent thread of "Quotes," the "COUNTDOWN" realization or the anthem "I think you need a healthy dose of Thesis."

We have also been fairly busy keeping our blog updated with new posts; "Breaking Down the Barrier," "It is 4am, where is your kid at?," "A shake of reflection, a bit of excitment, and a tad of terror" or everyone's favorite "Discouraged, Like a Boneless Chicken."

The students have moved into a very intense mode of production using computers, 3D printers, laser cutters, the woodshop, plotters, plaster casts and the metal shop. Amongst this we were able to interview one of the students at his office and home studio. There is even a visit from Legoman. Check out the two new sets of photos from the past week to see their round the clock efforts.

We just posted some new photos of our trip to Harvard to present and film at the FuturePresent symposium and Structures for Inclusion Conference. It was an amazing mix of students, professors and professionals discussing case studies from around the world on socially conscious design initiatives. Putting the power of the built environment back into the hands of the communities who are severely underserved was the rallying cry. Two of the students from Pratt, whom we are documenting, were also invited to come along to join in the conversation. Personally, it was an extremely inspiring group of people to listen to, film and interview. Some of the people we were able to grab for short interviews for our film were Derek Ham, Clifton James, Steve Lewis, Toni Griffin and Casius Pealer. The Archiculture Team would like to specifically thank Harvard, Design Corps and the efforts of the GSD student group for Social Change and Activism for thinking of our project and making our participation possible.

For the full list of photos from the event, visit our Archiculture facebook group.

Like the students, we have gone into a very intense production mode. They are receiving their last significant critiques this week as they transition into full blown production for the final two weeks of the semester. The hopes are to have all their major design ideas solidified by the end of today's studio, so they are only "ironing out the details" when they begin to construct final models and drawings. Some are further along than others, but the studio's intensity is definitely building.

In culmination with their efforts we are attempting to capture as much of this creation as possible. Some amazing ideas will formalize and be created over the last few weeks of the semester and we have to be there with our cameras. Late night bodega runs for coffee, going to the hardware store for sheets of MDF, sporadic cigarette breaks are all apart of the studio culture. We must capture them before our characters vanish. So we must apologize in advance for any less frequent news updates leading up to graduation. Please bare with us, we will be back to normal in a few weeks.

We will be presenting tomorrow at the FuturePresent symposium at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. We were invited up by the Social Change and Activism student group to film the event and give a presentation on our documentary. Pierce and I will stay throughout the weekend to cover the Structures for Inclusion Conference and get some key interviews from the amazing list of speakers. David will come back to New York on Friday to present at the Northeast AIAS Quad Conference being held here at Pratt to architecture students visiting from as far away as Virginia to Maine. So we are very busy pushing the project out to a greater range of the architectural community and are very excited for the people we are about to interview and film for Archiculture.

See you when we all get back. For now check out some of the recent blogs by us and the student, and the new photos uploaded today.

Our latest episode of our Archicasts has been posted on our films page. Give it a view to see how production has been treating us the past month along with our recent adventures during spring break. Of course a new Archicast coincides with our monthly newsletter which went out this morning for March. If you are interested in receiving these notifications email us at subscribe[at]archiculturefilm[dot]com or you can stay even more up to date by adding our new RSS Feed .

March Newsletter05

A whole bunch of icons have been inserted at the top of our website to further the network of Archiculture. Some of you may know a lot of them, others may know none. The point is to enable users of social networks, social bookmarks, wikis, photo networks and video sharing to have greater access to the content of Archiculture.

Another major addition is the new RSS Feed button at the top left corner. This enables instant updates when new news, blogs, photos, or archicasts are uploaded. For more information on RSS Feeds and how to set one up check out this wikipedia article.

Now that spring break is behind us and the halls are filling back up with students, the reality of the end of Archiculture's production is growning near. We are five weeks from final reviews and seven from graduation. The clock is ticking and the amount of work to accomplish for both us and the students is building. It will be an exciting process to capture.

We just got back from a trip north to interview a few of the students' parents. It was nice to get out of the city for a bit and see where some of them grew up. Each family greeted us with open arms and lots of fantastic food. We thank them each for inviting us into their homes.

Photos from the trip will be up shortly, but for now we just uploaded three new sets. Photos from the week leading up to midterms, from the two days of midterm critiques and from our Trailer Debut party at the Center for Architecture are now up on our photos page.

We have finally arrived to a very significant stage in the lifespan of any documentary film project, the Trailer. This is the point at which others are able to begin to comprehend your concept with actual footage. Real people with vivid moments in motion. No more text, graphics, articles, descriptions, or our own talking heads, it is all in this 2 minute and 30 second clip to begin to understand and embrace the story. We only hope our families, supporters, donors, friends, viewers and potential grant funders see the potential in this glimpse into the future of Archiculture.

It will be will be debuted live tonight at the Center for Architecture in New York and online via Archinect[dot]com at 7PM. We will post it on our films page tonight when we arrive back from celebrating.

If you have any comments. We would love to hear them. Good, bad or ugly we need them to keep us engergized and pushing our own abilities. Send them to trailer[at]archiculture[dot]com.

Some how we have arrived at the mid term critiques which start tomorrow and continue on Thursday. I'm sure some of the students share our feelings for wondering where the past eight weeks went. Tons of energy and work poured into our respective projects but amazing how fast it has gone by. After this week and spring break, there are only five weeks left till the final reviews. The tension is building and the studio is full of energy.

We are excited to follow their journey.

We have posted two new sets of photographs from the past two weeks of production. We got our hands on two still camera flashes for our Nikon and Canon, and can already see the impact on the quality of your shots. We are excited to see how these will help with the low lighting situations of the studio.

A big thank you to Emily and Matt for the equipment.

In our ever present search for writing talent we have landed a new Grant Coordinator in Ben Parker. With a degree from Clemson University in English, Ben has been instrumental in developing and editing grants and proposals for Archiculture. Without his expansive knowledge of morphemes, demonstrative adjectives, zero articles, the Flesch-Kincaid Index, and capital letters we don't know where we'd be. We welcome Ben to the team.

In the constant search for new team members, we have landed a critical one in our new production assistant Emily Levy. She is a recent graduate of Pratt's architecture program and her local knowledge has proven invaluable. Emily has been involved with the front end of editing our trailer, managing our photography collection, coordinating efforts for the trailer debut event, and providing a much needed injection of creative life into the project a few days a week. We look forward to her continued input into the project.

We were able to corral Thom Mayne of Morphosis into an interview following his lecture last night at Pratt. Thom has a pretty impressive portfolio of work and recieved the Pritzker Prize in March 2005 for his efforts. He also helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) in 1972, and frequently teaches at both UCLA and SCI-ARC today. The interview was brief but we covered a wide array of topics from the meaning/purpose of the architectural thesis, what today's students face in the field, and what are some of the significant issues facing the profession and our society. Keep an eye out for some of this footage in our trailer.

We have new pictures up on our photos page from the past two weeks of production. You'll see a few shots from our professor interviews, some of the recent studio moments, and a few detail shots of the students' work. There will be more photos coming online as we progress towards the midterm reviews March 10th and 13th, and prepare for the Trailer Debut Party.

This 24/7 live feed, aka "MomCast," of our office at the School of Architecture at Pratt, is to show the 24 hour nature of this documentary's production as we attempt to keep up with the students' schedules. The students have been joking that we have been uncomfortable when they point the handicams at us, so we thought we would level the playing field with our own documentation. David goes further into the logic behind the streaming video on his latest blog posting.

We do not know what this feed will turn into, but are open to your interpretations. I could see us setting this up occasionally in the studio space during the busy nights leading up to a major critique or scheduling live viewing sessions as the film unfolds. For now we stream to you a live feed from our filmmaking base.

February Newsletter04

We had the pleasure yesterday of interviewing Maurice Cox, the new Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts. If you have not heard of him yet, you should. The man has carved out a pretty amazing path with his architectural training. In brief, he received his degree from Cooper Union here in New York, then moved to Italy where he worked with Giovanna Galfione. He then began to teach at Syracuse University's Italian Program before joining the University of Virginia's faculty in 1993. Since he has been an elected City Counsel member and Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, and helped found the CP+D Workshop. The interview covered a broad range of topics from democratic design, to architecture's role in our daily lives, to the purpose of an architectural thesis project. The exciting part for us was the realization that we just shot at least a few minutes that will definitely end up in the film, due to the clarity and elegance of Maurice's powerful answers. Keep an eye out for some of these moments when our trailer is cut in mid March.

Photos from the past three weeks of production are up on our photos page. We will attempt to load a new set each week, so stay tuned. Also, be sure to click on one of the thumbnails to see the new slideshow our web master Doug has created for easier viewing.

We have begun a video blog called Archicasts on the films page. The first one is up now and begins to tell the story from the perspective of the creators, David, Ian and Pierce. Please give it a look and let us know what you think. We plan on releasing new casts about once a month. If you would like to know when new ones are posted, please send an email to our subscribe list. Once you subscribe you will be included to our newsletter list. For examples checkout our first three from the past few months.

January Newsletter03
December Newsletter02
November Newsletter01

In an attempt to open up our own process of making the film, we began a directors' blog back in October. We also recently created a blog space for both the faculty and students to write their own posts throughout the making of the film. We left the format very open for the students in an attempt to make it an exploration into their thesis experiences. We hope you check out the posts from this past week and continue to follow them through the next 13 weeks of creation. Who knows were their writings will take us.

As for the faculty blog, it will be up shortly after I get them set up.

We have shot one week of footage so far. The Undergraduate Chair, Evan Douglis, formally introduced us to the 5th year thesis students and faculty this past Thursday. Following his introduction, the three of us presented a brief outline of the history of the project and our shooting agenda. We then opened the floor for a public Q&A session for the students and faculty. Some great questions and concerns were posed about the project. We answered each to the best of our abilities and left with a very high level of support. Close to every student who attended was interested in being interviewed and will permit us to film them. Now that we have begun to establish a rapport with the students, we embark on a similar dialogue with the professors over the next couple weeks.

Beyond filmming we have been busy going to the P/A Awards, streamlining our workflow, logging footage, updating our website, blogging, planning a big trailer debut party, meeting local organizations, meeting directors Alysa Nahmias of Unfinished Spaces and Anna Holtzman of Subway Dreams, getting interviewed by the Clinton Hill Blog, nestling into our new production lives and actively pursuing new sources of funding.

The spring semester at Pratt began today and so did full blown production of Archiculture. We spent most of the afternoon capturing the School of Architecture buzzing with refreshed students and faculty in the midst of the semesterly studio selection lottery. What a stark contrast in footage between the calm and quiet halls of last night, to the energic faces that have now filled the building. We will post some still shots of the footage in the next week or so.

Also, details on the package we wrote about arriving on Sunday are available on our recent blog posting.

That's right folks. The project is getting a belated holiday gift on Sunday at JFK airport in the form of a 180 lb package. We will reveal greater details once we get it back to the school and unwrap our new toy to find out exactly what it can do. For now all we can tell you is that it will infinitely increase the potential of this film.

First off, Happy New Year! We have now officially been working on this project for a year and a half...

Enough reflection, now onto the fun stuff. With steady feedback from our group of filmmaking friends and online research we have decided to forego our plans to shoot the film on our Sony FX1 and instead use Panasonic's HVX200. This change in equipment means a significant upgrade to the creative options (and cost) we now have for the footage. David and I originally learned on a HVX200 with Empty Kingdom, so we are reasonably prepared for the transition but are quite excited with the new footage potential. New frame rates, recording formats, color quality, stereo XLR jacks, and the list of benefits goes on. Mostly geeky film stuff but it will have a drastic impact upon the quality of the final HD film.

Beyond that we also purchased our second on-camera light, two body rigs, and another full audio kit to complete our two one-man camera crews. The next week will be spent testing the equipment in the studio spaces before the students arrive back January 14th.

The past couple days have been filled with finalizing our equipment research with our in-house guru Pierce Cook and physically testing pieces at B&H and at Abel Cine Tech in the city. We've also met up with Bill Menking, the co-founder of Architect's Newspaper, and Mimi Zeiger of Loud Paper to discuss the project and pick their brains on the New York Architectural community. The agenda for rest of the week is to locate an accountant, interview potential interns and spend some time with a few other local filmmakers as we prepare to head home this weekend for the holidays.

Today, we were able to check out some of the potential students for the film at Pratt during their final reviews for the fall semester. Very exciting range of interesting projects with great jurors for the students to feed off of, as they begin serious design next semester. For now we continue to prepare for production and nestle into our new home at Pratt.

We arrived this past Friday morning after about 4,000 miles (see David's blog entry) and a few brief stops in Austin, Houston, New Orleans and South Carolina. It was definitely a marathon with a packed van and just enough space for the one of us to recline in the passenger seat for sleep. We were able to meet up with our script writer and post-production guru Pierce Cook along the way to maximize the journey and take breaks from the 24 hour driving schedule.

Today is David's birthday and marks the end of our time in San Francisco. Check out our latest blog posting to see our route. We have plans to post a few time lapsed road clips and photos once we arrive in New York City. We've said our good byes and are now making the last minute preparations for production at Pratt Institute. For now 3,600 miles of road awaits.

Check out the photos page for some shots taken by Danny Lee of the AIASF fundraiser this past Wednesday.

Check out the photos page for some shots taken by Danny Lee of the AIASF fundraiser this past Wednesday. We want to sincerely thank everyone who came out and helped support the project. We hope you were able to get a glimpse of our process and the potential for this film.

Keep an eye out for another event like this in SF sometime in the spring or summer once our trailer is cut.

We are would like to invite anyone reading this to a Send Off Party. Archiculture's leaving its home of San Francisco and moving cross country to begin production. The celebration will take place at AIA San Francisco on Wednesday, November 28 from 5:30-7:30. It is a chance for the local architectural community to meet the directors, learn more about the project, and help support a grass roots documentary about our profession and our training. For those of you who know the directors of the film, this will be your last chance to send them off before they move to New York to begin production at Pratt Institute. We roll out of town with all our gear in a rental on Friday, November 30th. We will have a brief presentation midway through the party and will provide drinks and music. We look forward to meeting you and sharing this impactful project.
Please forward the info along to anyone you know who may have interest.

The article we've been mentioning is now out in this month's issue of Architect Magazine under the title, Studio Verite. We think its a great intro for people to the project and a really well written condensed piece. The photo in the printed version is a massive 2 page spread of our work station. A bit odd to see your words quoted for the first time. Braulio Agnese did a great job of conveying the grass roots effort of the project and definitely enjoyed the views out of our apartment.

We have finally unveiled our new website! This has been a massive undertaking over the past three weeks. Somehow through the help of Doug Havens, our amazing team and reduced work schedules, it is finally ready for you to explore. Please check it out and give us some feedback. We are excited for the evolved look of the project and the new content such as the demo reel, added info, press page, expanded links, etc. If you are curious, our old site is still running and can be found here (old site). We thought it would be cool to keep it alive as a frozen chapter in this project's development.

Today we met with Stacey Williams the program director of AIASF. The three of us discussed the potential outreach of the project and how we could distribute the film to organizations and user groups.

Tomorrow we will host an event titled, Cultivated, which coincides with this years ASLA conference in San Francisco. The event celebrates peoples interpretations of landscape architecture through various mediums of art. Cultivated will be held at Mars Bar in Soma and will feature artists from all over the country. After two months of legwork and a team comprised of two other San Francisco artists, the event is ready to debut. Please try to make it if you are in the Bay Area. Proceeds will go to the SF Parks Trusts a local non-profit organization devoted to enhancing our open spaces.

Today we returned from our intense East Coast tour. We visited four different institutions starting with Philadelphia University. We drove from NY to Philly for a two day visit. We spent most of the time touring the campus and studios with two of the architecture faculty members, Carole Hermann and Susan Frosten. The staff was very welcoming and the campus had a nice open feel to it. We returned to New York for a one day meeting with Evan Douglis and Tom Hanrahan at Pratt Institute. Evan gave us a great tour of the architecture studios and campus. The next day was spend at CCNY with George Renali who offered up some great insight to the project. Our final school visit was with NYIT. We met with the director of the program, Frank Mruk, who was giving a speech at a solar decathalon ceremony. He spent the rest of the day showing us both the urban and rural studios at NYIT.

David returned yesterday from a business trip to Tanzania. He spent a week and a half working on a large conservation project in the Serengeti.

Today we had the photographer for Architect magazine come to our apartment to shoot photos for the upcoming article. The photographer was quite a character and found our career change to be amusing.

Today also marks the start of our East Coast trip. We are scheduled to catch the red-eye tonight to New York where we will start our tour of the final four potential schools for the documentary.

Today we met with Braulio Agnese, an editor with Architect magazine. Braulio approached us a few weeks ago with interest in covering an article about our film in the November issue of the magazine. We met up with him at Union Square and briefly spoke over some coffee. We showed him our think-tank of an apartment, where he conducted most of the interview. He turned out to be a really cool guy and ensured us that a photographer would be sent to get shots of us in the apartment in the next couple weeks.

We've got a substantial back log of interesting architectural articles and visuals to share.

First is an article by the LA Times discussing the push of "architects" into more powerful positions.

The Herald Tribune had an article discussing the rapidly approaching need for architects to be prepared for the increasingly urbanized planet. This following the recently revealed statistical research showing that over half the world's human population is now living in urban environments. Tipping point?

On a lighter note, we find an article by the New York Times showing the hunger and collaborative drive of a group of recent RISD grads in their first significant design commission. Of course this is by mom and pops but none the less this article explores the nature of design ownership versus collaboration and the necessity of post-grad exposure.

Last but not least is a collection of Charlie Rose (personally a bit obsessed with the man's work) interviews with prominent architects - Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Santiago Calatrava, Peter Eisenman, Renzo Piano, Philip Johnson, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and many more.

Caught up with Eric Corey Freed this past week to discuss the documentary film and some of our sustainable initiatives for the project. Eric is better known around these parts for his work as the organic architect and provided a very invigorating conversation for the project.

His work can be described from the caption on the organicARCHITECT's website:
"Promoting both an organic and individual approach to design, architect, author & educator Eric Corey Freed sculpts innovative buildings that embody ecological & social responsibility. organicARCHITECT creates designs to question, innovate and delight our clients."

We had a great discussion with many inspiring concepts bounced around. We shall see how they develop as we move towards full production. For more on the organic architect, check up on his blog to see more of his insightful findings.

After listening through a bunch of the mixes on Designer Mixtapes, we have decided to make our own mix. A little different from what Mixtapes has constructed, we would like to post our top 10 "Architectural" songs... Our songs are everything from specific lines on architecture, as in The Hexx by Pavement, to figurative lyrics such as Squares by The Beta Band. OK so here they are:

Aesop Rock - How to be a Carpenter lyrics
The Beta Band - Squares lyrics
Bloc Party - Like Eating Glass lyrics
Erland Oye - Sheltered Life
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - Ghost lyrics
LCD Soundsystem - Yr City's A Sucker
Pavement - The Hexx lyrics
Pinback - Fortress lyrics
Postal Service - District Sleeps Alone Tonight lyrics
Shout Out Louds - Oh, Sweetheart lyrics

So there they are. Let us know what you think via our myspace comments or on our new forum thread (old site). We want to hear your "architecture" favorites.

A few interesting links we would like to post up.

A hysterical article published in PIDGIN, has been shooting around the architectural world of emails and blogs like wildfire. Here is a good link to the open letter by Annie Choi.

Here is a good music link to Designer Mixtapes, which has 7 song mixes of the most inspiring songs from designers around the world. Great range of inspiration.

For anyone who can name all 10 architects on our Starchitect tshirt you will receive a free tshirt through the competition going on at our myspace site. Please post your answers on our myspace comments so we can keep track of submissions. Good luck!

Many more exciting things happening behind the scenes on the film and will be posted soon...

We have recently reorganized and added some new content to the site. We would like to invite you to check out the new buttons for info, shop and support on the website. Briefly the info page provides the mission of the film, a synopsis of the story, where the concept originated, background of the team and some of our initiatives/goals for the project. The shop page is an area were we can display some of the products for sale. Tshirts are available now, with more to come online in the near future. The support page is the area were we accept and give support to the individuals and groups which are helping make this project a reality.

Look around and let us know what you think.

We would like to post up some of the recent blogging about the project.

Edgar Gonzalez
Arkitekturbloggen
Land + Living
A is for Architecture
Future Feeder
Rockitecture
Hippoblog
The Lighthouse Diaries
7dv
derive
Living Well in Westchester

Thanks to all for the interest and comments. It helps us stay energized when we see the architectural community react to the project.

Jennifer's is now up on our films page. This interview brings a whole new level to the confessionals due to Jennifer's background as both a professor at the California College of Arts and practitioner through her design firm, Landscape Office. In this interview, the dynamics of the architectural studio setting are candidly discussed along with descriptions of the thesis process based upon her extensive professorial and academic experience. Give it a look and let us know how you respond.

We have some new photos up from our all night shoot two weeks ago and from our trip down to L.A. to meet Carole Dean. We have decided to use this footage for a different short film than the original version for the Thinksync Competition. More details to follow.

On another note, a new confessional is close to being posted and should be showing up this weekend on the website. This interview showcases an architect who blurs the lines between the professional and academic sides of architecture daily. A very animated and thought provoking conversation which will add a new level of background to the confessionals.

Our trip to LA has turned into a very intense injection of resolve for the project. The meeting with Carole Dean was a phenomenal asset to the current evolution our film and will prove to be invaluable as we move towards the shoot.

We also just finished shooting with our friends at Empty Kingdom Media, for a short film we are submitting to the ThinkSync Film Competition. "The premise behind the competition being to highlight and encourage the use of independent music within film and the resulting event an exciting, innovative fusion of independent music and film." Basically they provide 30+ songs to choose from for the shorts to utilize in their three to ten minute story submissions.

We are extremely excited with how our shots turned out and thrilled to see how the final cut turns out once we edit over the next two weeks. It due on June 30th, so keep a look out for it on our films page.

We are driving down to LA tonight for a meeting with the amazingly talented and experienced Carole Dean tomorrow. "As president and CEO of From the Heart Productions, Carole (has) created the Roy W. Dean Grant Foundation in honor of her late father. To date Carole’s grant and mentorship programs have provided filmmakers with millions of dollars in goods and services and have played an instrumental role in establishing the careers of some of the industry’s most promising filmmakers."

Our purpose for meeting Carole is two fold, one is to get someone with such a depth of film experience to discuss the current and future development of our project, and secondly to discuss our submission to her LA Film grant which is due June 30th. We are extremely excited for this chance to evolve our project's funding strategies with someone of such achievements.

We will post comments and some new exciting footage shortly after we return.

There are some new photos up from our recent shoot for the full length documentary Art Symphony No.1. This film being produced by our friends at Empty Kingdom Media "represents the first volume in a multi-part series of documentary anthologies taking an introspective look into the world of art & culture," specifically the L.A. and Bay areas. The film "follow(s) the lives of a variety of artists, from the most respected industry professionals with cult fan-followings to the classically struggling artists, and even the perspectives of students just entering the world of art."

The shoot took place at both The Shooting Gallery and White Walls Gallery in San Francisco showcasing the talents of Shawn Barber and Kim Cogan respectively. All the photos were taken and credited to the talented Jane Kim.

Another massive bit of news for the project, the film has been accepted by Film Arts and is now fiscally sponsored! This is big because we can now start to seek funds besides our own incomes to support this thing. Little paypal-esque shopping carts will soon pop up all over the site so you can donate at any moment. But joking aside, this is an extremely crucial step in the evolution of this project with our continued association and collaboration with such a respected foundation.

So check out the links and look forward to more posts regarding our new found friends in Film Arts.

We are very excited to announce that our short film Released won a prize from the nice folks at Youthnoise.com for their Reducing Energy Consumption category. Check out the winners of the other categories: Conserving Resources, Reducing Toxic Chemical Consumption, and Reforestation. Congrats to all.

This is a little bitter sweet since the original competition on treehugger.com that we created this short had an upload error at the deadline and were unable to submit. Its always nice to receive any form of recognition for creative efforts. Check back often to see other creative vents as we evolve towards Archiculture.

Confessionals have arrived! We quickly realized that there needed to be a way to give others the chance to explain what Architecture is about. We decided short and simple interviews with Architects was the best way to communicate this complicated issue. We have three of them up now on the films page. Give them a look.

The first interview is of a young architect on her pending return to grad school in the fall and her decision to continue pursuing the profession.

The second finds a young architect 5+ years into the profession reflecting upon the memories and aspirations of his student years while discussing his current career path.

The third follows a grad student on her journey from home to studio while discussing the origin of her interest for architecture, previous professional experience and her pending review the next day.

So the confessionals are coming, I promise. They are edited and getting qued for the web. For now check out some of the bios of the team and other informational links we feel crucial to comprehending the thesis environment. The team will undoubtedly grow in the near future but from these few the concept has evolved. We continue to look for collaboration.

Check out the image on the front of this month's Architect magazine. The cover is about an article called "The $34,000 Question" regarding the pay of young "interns" and comparisons to related fields. But please put trust into our profession for it does have the potential for future bags of cash! So where is the pay for the next generation? Is it worth it all. There is also an article related to an architectural salary survey. Bias? Check it out.

Look Architects are happy! Rated 6th over such amazing professions as mechanics, special education teachers, and actors. We did lose out to #1 Clergy.

Just a little stimulation from the 2006 General Social Survey based on interviews with randomly selected people who collectively represent a cross section of Americans.

Confessionals are coming!!! We are currently editing the first batch to post up hopefully next week. Keep an eye out for these intimate windows into the field.

We have also been shooting interviews and capturing footage for a short film regarding Landscape Architecture to be submitted for an event outside of this year's ASLA conference. A trailor will be up in May.

Check out the discussion forum (old site)! We are attempting to make it a bit more user friendly, but at least now we have adapted it to our layout and linked it up. Give it a look and post away. We know you all are looking. Post something, anything. Vent if you like. We love the stories and as do others. Help us explain what the studio environment is/was like.

Since the submission of our first short film Released a month ago, we have been hard at work on some crucial pre-production documents. From today forward we will be posting information regularly in this area of the website to keep our audience updated. A few things in the short future will be more graphics, a revamped discussions board and a confessionals page with interviews of undergrad and masters' students, and a wide range of professionals. We are extremely excited about the confessionals aspect of the website and have already shot a few with a bunch more scheduled.

We have also begun working on our next significant short film, Cultivated. This short film will attempt to bring clarity to the current state of the profession of landscape architecture. A more in depth description will be posted soon as will details of the event which this short will be showcased.

In progress is a short film for the Convenient Truth Contest. By the time this short is submitted it will have been conceived, shot, and edited in one months time. Check back with us at the beginning of March to see its debut and if we meet the tight deadline.

We are actively seeking grant money to help assist with the pre-production phase of Archiculture.

The team has recently expanded to include the musical talent of Mike Perry as well as technical writing support from Eric Krantz, Jacob Richardson and Linda Oeding.

The original idea for Archiculture was conceived, by David as a student in the back of a classroom at Clemson University in 2005. The idea turned into a collaborative effort in January of 2006 when the two of us, David and Ian, met in an architectural office in San Francisco. The next big relationship occurred at a gallery opening in August of 2006, where we met Henry Kim of Empty Kingdom Media during a shoot for one of his many works. Since then, Henry has taken us under his wing and shed all of his film knowledge. Through the many shoots and time spent with the Empty Kingdom crew we have gained the experience to put our hands into the field of film. We are currently working on a hand full of short films to strengthen our knowledge and formalize our concepts. Look for them in the near future on the films page.