“I believe through creativity and design we can make anything beautiful. Beauty isn’t the material sitting fallow in a warehouse somewhere. The beauty is when you start using repetition, and function, and purpose, and light and shadow”…”giving new life to these materials and give them a reason to be in this world again,… and that energy you feel when you’re in the spaces, and its very positive, and it feels progressive and it feels right to me.” ~ Mike Moore

In launching a new direction for my design firm, Analog Design Studio, we collaborated with Mike Moore to create a video that would help express his firm’s message while crafting our visual language in the medium of film. We have put a lot of creative passion into creating this biopsy of Tres Birds Workshop. The documentary uncovers the passion and desire of their firm to create beautiful spaces and experiences through the reuse of objects to create healthy desirable spaces that take on a new life while expressing the past. The workshop explains their use of light, materials, and function making their work both contemporary and timeless. We hope you love this piece as much as we do, enjoy!

production co. – www.analogdesignstudio.com
documentary subject – www.tresbirds.com
music provided by – www.mindthings.net …Read the full article at www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. What happens if an instance of onomatopoeia was stretched into an 8-minute video? How would a comic strip look if the “pow” or “whaam” moments where the only elements in the panel frames?

Guttural and brutally honest, “Varfix” transforms the signifier of movement to a pure reference without a referent and turns it into a stripped down form of cultural and historical citation without the main text. The actual narrative remains perhaps somewhere outside of our screen and only makes an appearance when we try to decipher the video. Vulgarity here is a point of emphasize without the symbolic heaviness that usually lies behind the symbol. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. In this example, the opening scene is of a forgotten house, left to drown in a pit of its own sadness. Struggling with memories that are peeling it’s layers from the inside out, the outer layers are being torn by a haunting memory with real faces and real bodies (the musicians) working as the catalysts of decay. The otherwise contented outer surfaces of wallpaper or the fabric on chairs is torn from the inside. Finally, the empty forms of clothes dance one last time in their decrepit yet familiar environment and then walk out to an unknown world.… To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. Watch it, or just listen to it. Tune out, tune back in, think about it in depth, or just enjoy it on the surface. Pontificate about how our hedonistic ways have brought us closer to the ruination of our planet, or just laugh at the sound effects. That is exactly what I did, over and over again.

This 8-minute short by Lile Stephens is an incongruous, organically evolving, circular edit of scorpions, toy soldiers, dry erase-board animation, and most bizarrely a clucking toy fighter-jet hit by a heat seeking dart/missile.

Piquing my curiosity, I contacted the artist who is currently an adjunct instructor at Arkansas State University with a number of questions.

In answer to my question about how long production took, the artist simply answered, “Production is still ongoing,” and that “ultimately, I would like the viewer to be able to participate in the work and not be able to discern a chronology or order of scenes.”… To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. Place yourself, for a moment, in the position of an airport official behind the window checking passports. The video below reverses our usual point of view to give us a glimpse into what the person on the “other” side sees. The job of an immigration officer requires a honed skill in observation and analysis that is based seemingly on superficial qualities: the type of clothing you have on, how much you are perspiring, your nervous tics…etc, yet supposedly, without prejudice or stereotyping. What if you then, in that position of authority, are assisted with Augmented Reality software? What if you had access to more than looks, and passport information? For a more in depth look at AR software, you can read my article on 3plus1collective.com.… To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. In the past few weeks, I have been searching for a simple concept done well where the technology behind the film is not made to be the point of the film.

Synchronized meticulously to the music of Saltillo (Menton J. Matthews III), the video by Arno Bruderer, a student of architecture at the ETH Zürich, puts many video mapping façade projectionists to shame. (watch this for an example of video mapping http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8jCY9_xcpo). This heavy-on-technology tool leaves much to be desired beyond the initial wow factor. On the other hand, Lumitectura, starting from the idea that architecture is part of a greater realm of cultural production takes the footage and reinterprets it with a new eye combining light, sound and architecture over time. A simple tool from an accessible software (masking with After Effects) is all it took to turn the two-hour footage from a stationary camera pointed at a nondescript building into a 4-minute eye candy.… To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. For the past few weeks I’ve been searching for an animation or an experimental short that transcends the fact that it’s an animation. A few minutes so well put together that it makes you forget you’re watching a computer generated image even if it is partially or completely made with the aid of a machine. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not in search for extraordinary photorealism like, for example, the remarkable short by Alex Roman, The Third and the Seventh. Nor is it a computer-generated marvel with particle flow, and scripting, and all the latest render tools. I don’t want to be wowed by how much time you’ve spent coding it, or how little the budget was. It just has to make me forget that it’s CG and let me get into it, enjoy it for the world it takes me into.

A few, high budget shorts fall into that category. Logorama for instance, the Oscar winning short by H5, or Skhizein by Jeremy Clapin. But is that a necessity? Is a big budget and the support of a large team necessary to achieve that?… To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. Architects have given up on T-squares years ago. Video artists have thrown away their zoetropes decades ago. And today advancement in technology has forced architects and video artists into the same discipline. With the same tools, architects and video artists need to, not only share software, but also share the same work place, university classrooms and ultimately sleep together and make beautiful babies. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. Remember the days when you had to stay in your classroom during recess because there was a deluge outside? As you try to conjure up those cold days, images of it are racing in your head. The smell of your classmate’s lunch wafts in, the lines on a chalkboard, by now useless information, annoy you because it’s recess for god’s sake. Suddenly your friend gets up, flips his chair and starts chatting with you. Somehow, a soccer ball materializes in the classroom and it starts bouncing around. Next thing you know, no seat is left unturned and no tool has been spared in the haphazard fashioning of a toy. That’s the chaos that results when a gaggle of pre-teens is trapped in a room. Multiply that by the chaos of your memories crowding in your head. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. You have a site to begin with. As architects, you are often tasked with creating a space generally with site constraints that you may choose to consider, or to completely ignore much like the early Modernists did! Filmmakers scouted locations, architects took measurements. Green screens changed our priorities and the purely imagined took over (think Sin City, or more recently, the incredibly clichéd Avatar)! Architects did the same with CAD (again, think of Asymptote, Hernan Diaz Alonso or Greg Lynn). But what if that constraint was reintroduced? And I’m willing to bet it will when the viewers start getting weary of the absurd. What if animators were given a site to work with? Here’s an example of what camera tracking technology has afforded filmmakers. A dash of reality. Enjoy.

Replace is an ad for a company that specializes in selling “architectural materials” done by the increasingly provocative NOMINT, a “motion design production company” as they describe themselves. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. In my search for the weird and the wonderful, I came across Peripetics a while ago. I must admit, I stopped and watched but I was intrigued by the “how” rather than the “wow,” also, it didn’t really leave a lasting impression on me! That was until I recently watched its younger sibling, Peripetics Ex Machina, by chance. On their vimeo link Zeitguised describes it as the “making-of” Peripetic. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. Aanaatt is a visually rich medley of stop motion graphics by Max Hattler craftily choreographed with music by Jemapur. As the echoing in the name suggests (just try enunciating it out loud), the film is a constant change in repetition that is rigidly stuck in stasis and form. (A point that might require further psychoanalytical reading into the meaning of “stop” and “motion”… perhaps in another blog!) Every shot is graphically enticing yet immovable both in frame as a single shot and in the framed background due of course to the camera’s secured position (a requirement for stop motion) opening up the possibilities inherent in limitation. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.

Film as Architecture is a weekly series by Rebal Knayzeh with 3plus1collective, showcasing films that begin to stretch the limits of current architectural representation. To watch this series go to www.zeitgeistudios.com.