psu-architecture-film-course

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Mission:

Divisions aims to show the impacts of development at the street level and its ability to give an identity to a street that is starkly different from a street just one block away.  This impact is shown in our parody of a developer’s promotional video, showing Clinton street and its outdated development and architecture as a thing of the past in comparison to Division street and its block-long developments.

Abstract:

Divisions is thematically split into two parts.  Part one begins by showcasing Clinton street as a charming “Old Portland” filled with a theater, bikes, and a video rental store.  We filmed shots on Clinton mainly using the Diji Osmo as we walked through the streets to emphasize the feeling of scale on the street.  Most of the buildings are no more than two stories and experientially focused on the experience from the sidewalk.  Clinton street has rhythm of one block of restaurants and shops followed by a block of single family residential buildings which we show to later contrast with the very commercial oriented Division street. The shots are sped up by fifty percent to mimic the low frame shots from old timey videos.  Final touches at achieving the old timey look was to make the shots all black and white and overlay the images with a reel effect.

We transition into part two by doing a timelapse walk down the block onto Division to show how close it is to Clinton.  The shots are cleaner and tighter, and not as focused on the human experience.  Shots of buildings that could be anywhere and do not seem to have any context to their site are shown.  The idea of “sameness” is the focus of part two.  Similar materials, architectural styles, even storefronts are shown as a whitewash over whatever was there before it was developed.  We show two different yoga studios, the overuse of exposed concrete, and trendy places to drink coffee.  The driving shots are shot at a different angle than the driving shots on Clinton to show how massive the developments are, taking up entire blocks.  Part two ends with a shot of a construction site in action, showing that development is continuing to happen and continuing to shape the neighborhood.

Project Development:

Divisions began with the desire to speak out against the gentrification that is happening in Portland and the desire to be comical.  We had always had the two streets in mind to show how development can be done differently; one within the fabric and context of the existing community, and one done out of context that aims to create an entirely new street experience.  Our first film session we tried to get as much film as we could and utilized the DJI stabilizer.  As we began to edit and pivot into making a parody of developer’s promotional video, we made more visits to Division specifically to get tighter and cleaner shots.

Course Reflection:

Videography is a powerful tool to share experiences.  Architectural videography can be used to sell an experience of a building to clients or possible visitors.  This course was entirely too short to get into the specifics of filming for architecture.  It could have been better organized to be more than once a week so that we could have had more feedback and more motivation to work on our projects more than once during the week.

[psu-architecture-film-course]

[psu-architecture-film-course]

PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

Mohamed Fakhry & Markell Jahya

Timeline of Project Development

Week 1-4 Project approach, choosing a topic

We wanted to explore Homelessness and how building small pods in Portland has helped some people find a new home, but yet need to be improved

Week 4-5 Storyboards and first video assembly

Taking shots about an area of interest, and start thinking about our idea. Develop a storyboard of our idea. Cully Grove, Dignity VILLAGE, Downtown Portland Homelessness.

Make a short video of our progress as we started visiting the communities we wanted to make a film about. Going to both Dignity Village and Cully grove, and exploring the spaces and interacting with the people who occupy them.

Week 5-6 Midterm Cut

Refined video of all our shots in downtown, dignity and Cully Grove. New shots added, work on improving narration and sound effects. Choose the right narratoR, put the video into the right foot by having a journalistic approach. Raise questions, not give answers.

Make a short video of our progress as we started visiting the communities we wanted to make a film about. Going to both Dignity Village and Cully grove, and exploring the spaces and interacting with the people who occupy them.

Week 6-7

Project progression, by doing more visits  into the communities of interest, getting engaged with the residents, and taking part in some of their most important activities. Finding ways to capture more empowering shots.

Week 8 Sounds effects

Working on introducing a paced music that connect with the film. Get rid of some voice over, refine some shots, and organize the sequence of the video in term of its purpose, and connection to design.

Week 9 Graphics

Introduction of new graphics and captions into our video, to better explain our idea as well as how we transition from one space to the next.

Week 10. Rough Cut.

Polished video with all the features and ideas introduced. Worked on our transitions, sound effects, and graphics.

Week 11 Final video.

Transitions refinement, develop our graphics, correct the texts and use knowledgeable vocabulary and words that don’t discriminate the houseless population. Finally, addition of references, features, and acknowledgement

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Written Component

Mohamed Fakhry

ARCH 433/FALL 2018

INSTRUCTOR Ian Harris

Mission

Portland, OR is a city with a growing homeless population, and the past few years have been mainly dominated by a rise of the cost of living in Portland. Moreover, in order to tackle that issue of homelessness around the city, we have been witnessing a rise in pods development, and houseless villages in different part of the city.

Abstract

First of all, we wanted to show a brief perspective of the homeless situation in Portland by talking to them, taking pictures, and sharing these in order to find how that issue affects the city. Afterwards, we approached a design based learning by looking at a community in Portland where sustainability has enabled them to create a space where everyone can feel like home, and that community was Cully Grove.

In order to show the differences, and commonality between a houseless village and the community we visited, we went a little further by visiting Dignity Village, one of Portland first homeless village started around the year 2000, and now home to approximately 48 residents who used to live in the streets.

Dignity is a space that has been created by assembling single pods and linking them together into one common space. It is a beautiful community where everyone feel like family, respect each other, and harmoniously live together.

In addition to that, visiting Dignity helped us understand the role that design can have in a community. We spent a day of service, learning, and sharing with both Dignity residents and Cully Grove residents. The purpose was to see how we could approach one space by looking at another one, and thus help solve the little gap between these two community in term of design and use of communal spaces.

The biggest challenge was to go out in the community and experience what it looks like to live in these space, and we tried to show that in our videos.

Then, it was important for us to develop our thinking and express our video by telling the story we wanted to tell. Well, homelessness is a big issue, and in Portland it is real. At the same time, architecture schools are working with the city to design small pods, and then village in order to tackle the homelessness crisis.

Project development

Our intention was and is, to show how design can help us achieve a great communal space for the houseless in the future are we designing more pods. Meaning that when we think about building individual pods, it would also be important to design the space itself instead of just focusing on the pods.

We made a process for our video by taking shots in downtown Portland, and then we visited Dignity village and spent a day here understanding the community. Finally, Cully Grove was an interesting communal space where we had a chance to better understand what we were doing.

week 4-5 First shots. Trying to better know the communities we were interested in by getting involved, exploring their communal spaces and the way the individuals living in these communities interact with each other.

week 6-7 Asking more questions until we found the right layout for our film, and applying class feedbacks into our work, one of the most important process that helped us develop the film. Using myself as a narrator to approach the video in a way that feel like a short documentary.

Week 8-9, more shots, polishing sounds effects, voice over and captioning on video. Also, understanding the right words to use and comfortably talk about the issue we are highlighting.

Course Reflection

This class presented an internal challenge as it was my first time spending intimate time with communities like the ones at Dignity and Cully Grove. It also helped me understand how architecture can transform our lives through the design of space that enhance our values, our belongings and our understanding of the way our live could be better organized in term of sustainability.

It was my first time taking a video class, and not only did I learn a lot from my own project, but also, the video critic in class helped me better look at the community and think about the way architecture can empower people, communities in needs, and spaces.

Overall, the class helped me develop my perspective about the way a film can be made, and the way a video can be developed to address some issues of our modern days.

The biggest takeaway from this course was the learning environment as well as the approach to making a smooth and impactful video using different design tools, different angles, and different elements of photography or video making (ex: photoshop, camera, phone, premiere, etc,...).

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Written Component

Austin Roberts Arch. 433 / Fall 2018 / Ian Harris Final Written Component

Mission: Focussing on a single building that provides and insight on how preservation can benefit the built environment. With Shattuck as our case study, we show what a preserved buildings can do to a community and how people interact with its functions.

Abstract: Distinguishing the need for preservation of certain buildings can help to guide and make precedence for future development within the built environment. While not all buildings should be preserved, there are others that stand out and make for a prime example as to what should be preserved. Buildings that positively affect their surroundings and the community itself are critical when looking at what to preserve. Historic or not, a building should have a quality impact within its setting and provide a pleasurable architectural aesthetic for those that see it along with a pleasurable experience for those that interact with the built structure. Our goal is to highlight what it is that makes for a quality preservation. What does a preserved building evoke in others? What does it provide for the community? How does it affect those that interact? These are some of the questions we are asking to find answers for and take those answers to provide our narrative.

Project Development: Week 1-4: Learning how to use hardware and software and testing video footage with Premiere. Analyzing films to see what works well. Storyboard start and start of Group Project. Week 5: Midterm review. Compiling of video footage and working with sound to compile a rough work of our Group Project. Week 6: Working on how and when to apply text to video and bettering our narrative. Added footage to Project and clarified our story. Week 7: Applied first cut of our narrating voice to our video and rearranged footage and added footage to further help our narrative. Edited texts. Week 8: Added a second interview narrative and replaced some video footage and tested new arrangements. Changed our "theme" song. Further edited texts. Week 9: Continued testing arrangement of certain scenes to better fit interview narrative and music sequence. Cut scenes and replaced with better fits. Week 10: Edited interview "ums" and finallized on screen texts. Replaced one scene and cut down a couple scenes. Added credits and special thanks.

Course Reflection: Throughout the course, we were able to use technology and our creative minds to work towards a final product. With learning about how to use camera technologies it will benefit my overall use of a camera in future projects with how to successfully capture what I am wanting to evoke from either a photograph or video. Utilization of the Adobe Premiere program will definitely help to compile works and create videos for my projects and portfolios for even getting work. Looking into how other films affect people was very helpful in how I will look into other films and further analyze how film can help people to further understand architecture. With creating video, I can help my own future architecture in this same way to express more directly what I am trying to bring out in my designs and process. This class offered a valuable insight on how I can utilize video to capture emotion and story and understanding to relay it to the viewer effectively. While most architectural classes are based purely visually, video offers the bonus of sound, which amplifies the impact and feeling one recieves when also seeing architecture. This powerful addition will help my future projects get to another level even further. An extra note of adding comedy to architecture is something I've also been interested in, but never been pushed to try it. I love comedy and I think the architectural world could use it heavily. I'll definitely be adding appropriate notes of humor to future works.

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Written Component

Markell Louis Jahya

Arch 433 Fall 2018Mission

The 2-5 minutes’ short film aims to take documentary of the current houseless people in Portland Downtown, and shows possibilities for ways to help in an architectural and design standpoint. Homeless is a very serious issue that can be seen all around the world; and the results are isolation, houseless community and other. Thus, as an architect and designer, we are trying to show how different communities could enhance the one before in term of organization, activities and other; starting from the houseless community.

  Abstract/ Video development

First Process: (narrowing)

Choosing the houseless community as a topic was very interesting to begin with, however it is a very broad topic that could take years to compile. So, after a short discussion with Ian (our instructor) and Mohammed (partner), we decided to narrow down the topic. As a result, we chose the route of design developments in helping to improve the houseless community. We ended up choosing three different locations with improved design developments (organization, events, shelter and other) than the other, to show sequential improvement and elements that could help in enhancing the other communities. Thus, choosing Portland Downtown, Kenton village and Cully Grove to be the representative of those communities. However, we were required to not put any form of interview in our videos.

Second Process: (Initiate)

Our first shot of the week was rough, we didn’t get a chance to take video in Kenton village because we had to make an appointment beforehand. So, we went to Portland Downtown and Cully Grove instead. We were pretty lucky to get an overcast sky when we took videos in downtown and bright blue sky in Cully Grove, as we took consideration of small things like the sky, actives and expression to determine the mood of the short video. For our houseless community shots, we covered the whole Burnside underbelly bridge till Portland Chinatown and as we walked, I was also taking shots causing most of the end product for our houseless community shots to look like a vlog. After spending almost 3-4 hour taking shots, we went to Cully Grove; surprisingly after explaining our intention in the community, we got a tour around the community and got permission to take videos around the residence. After compiling all the shots into a video, I slipped in an accidental interview-like shot in our rough cut, even though we were not asked to do so. It was for a gag in the beginning; but then, I think it has potential to be our opening.

Third Process: (enhance)

After our first review in class, we were told that our shots in Downtown was great, and got approval on the interview-like shot, but the one in Cully Grove need to have people and context in it; Note: we only had shots that pans over a series of permaculture garden and houses. As a result, we then take the route of implementing short interview as an introduction of every communal space we visited. So, for the next 2-3 weeks, we add in new shots that were supposed to be in week one rough-cut (as a bridge), came back to Cully Grove for new shots and refining our rough cut video. We change our plan on taking video in Kenton, and instead we got a tour and permission to take videos in Dignity Village. We were lucky enough to get a shot of their communal gathering space, which most people don’t, because of several personal reasoning they have inside the neighborhood. Later, we found out that the space organization inside dignity are not well developed compare to Cully Grove. Note: Because our topic is somewhat a hierarchical process, we choose Dignity Village to be the bridge in connecting the houseless community in Portland Downtown and Cully Grove.

Fourth Process: (Compile)

After the end of third week, we still didn’t get a chance to get a great shot in Cully Grove where residence is occupying the space. So, we had to comeback there and met the people who gave us a tour in the very first week. Luckily on the fourth week on Saturday, they had a so-called “work group” where people gather around and assigned to do some monthly communal chores. We were invited on that day and got a permission to take videos as well; in exchange, Mohammed will help them. It was a beautiful and sunny day, the people were so nice and we feel like we are one with the community. After staying inside the community for half a day, we were invited to an early thanks giving dinner and allowed to take videos of the event as well. We get a chance to talk to everyone, get to know people living in Cully, it’s a once in a life time experience. It was an unforgettable moment and I ended up having a very good shot of the “real Cully Grove expression”. So, at the dinner party, I use this opportunity to take a closing scene for the video as it has a very good vibe into it.

Fifth Process: (Refine)

After gathering all the shots components, our next step is to refine, enhance and enforce the meaning behind the short video. What we did is adding words and over-voice of Mohammed speech (as he is our interpreter) to convey the message. However, because “homeless” topic is so broad and sensitive; choosing the proper questions and wordings is very crucial in this video, as misused of a single word can determined a whole different meaning in our short video; and a single change of word could have meant something different to other people perceiving the video.

  Course Reflection

I think that this class has taught me a lot of things in term of video taking and storytelling. I believe that story telling is a very important element in architecture. It opens up various opportunity in term of designing and presentation. To tell the truth, I am not a very bright person that can come up with something quick and easily, but I think by having some story line to begin with, it could ease the process in my designing career. So, I’m glad that I took this course, it was fun and engaging; I could go out and put myself in the situation base on my topic, meet new friends and learn new things every day. But, my only problem is the time schedule, it was late at night right after studio; furthermore, it’s a four-hour class. But beside those reasoning, I really enjoy the class in term of educational purposes, engaging conversation, video watching and making and other. For our short video, I hope that it can be a starting point or a tool that initiate ideas to design a better communal space.

[psu-architecture-film-course]

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Bridge Video Dialogue/Narrative

Mission:

   This video aims to create a distinction between the varying cultures in West and East Portland through the use of the Burnside Bridge. Featuring footage under and above the Burnside Bridge on both sides of the city, this video captures the essence of two unique locations rendered by the Willamette River. Although the actual divide between the two locations is not shown in the video, the activities and commentary on each side illustrate their differences. Both sides foster art and creativity, but the Westside does not provide as much of an organic flow of creation in comparison to the Eastside.

Abstract:

   Beginning on the Westside of Portland, this video takes the stance that this part of the city has been formally organized for a substantial amount of time. This is illustrated through the dialogue of Jay “The Cowboy”. He speaks of maintaining a positive outlook while waiting for a stable housing situation. The Westside works well in his case due to the various outreach programs for people looking to transition into permanent housing. Located directly on Burnside near the West bridge head are the Union Gospel Mission, The Portland Rescue Mission, Mercy Corps, Central City Concern Employment Access, and various other programs catering towards those in need of transitional assistance. In addition to these formal developments, the Max train line runs under the West Burnside bridgehead, adding to the already developed urban fabric in this area.

   In order to showcase the differences between the two sides of the city, a similar approach is taken to present the Eastside. A compilation of people skating under the bridge is put together. This snippet of the video illustrates how fundamental this piece of Portland is to the city’s creative history. The comparison between the two sides of the city under the same bridge allows for viewers to understand that further urban development may do more harm than good if the proper steps to maintain culture are not taken.

Project Development:

    The initial idea of our video was to compare the variances in culture throughout Portland through the use of the Broadway and Burnside Bridges. We began by filming at the Broadway bridge on a sunny Fall afternoon. Designed by Ralph Modjeski, the Broadway Bridge opened up for use in 1913. Connecting Northwest Portland to Northeast Portland with a 1,600 foot span, it is used every day by thousands of commuters. The bridge is surrounded by a grain silo, a sports arena (MODA Center), a post office, a train station, and various other governmental entities. These locations attract a crowd that differs from that of the Burnside clientele, which is partly why we decided to redirect our focus.

   The Broadway bridge area is also home to a small portion of the city’s houseless population and a hub for people entering the city via train and charter bus. The majority of locations on both sides of the bridge offer practical services, creating a primarily mobile population within the area. The area is also projected to experience change to accommodate the city’s current growth. The post office is expected to move, leaving 32 acres available for future development. This information is important in describing Portland’s growth, but we decided that relating it to Burnside would create an over complicated narrative. The initial footage we gathered offered a brief glimpse into each side of the both bridges, leaving us without much space to illustrate cultural importance. This left us at the point of focusing more on comparing the history of two bridges rather than the history of two cultures. In order to focus more on cultural comparison, we decided to examine the two sides of Portland via the Burnside bridge.

   With two varying cultures on Burnside separated by the Willamette River, the Burnside bridge offers for a clear comparison of the city’s cultural development. Designed by Ira Hedrick and Robert Kremers, the Burnside bridge opened up for use in 1926. Spanning 1,400 feet, it connects West Portland to East Portland, and is the divide between the North and South sides of the city. Over the past few decades, the area surrounding the bridge has transformed vastly. The area on the East side of the bridge has primarily served as an industrial warehouse community. With freight lines running through area, it has long been used to house various products and industrial materials. Amongst this industrial commotion, the Burnside Skatepark began rooting into the area in 1990, taking over a parking lot under the East side bridge head. The park has blossomed into one of the world’s most distinguished DIY skateparks. Within the past two decades, the bridge and the park have experienced a lot of change due to the growth of the city. The development of the area has threatened the thriving culture within it, and the future of the skatepark is shaky because of it. As the city’s development continues, the Eastside of Portland faces the dilemma of losing its culture, becoming more formal like the Westside.

   In order to capture the elements that make each side of Portland unique, we captured footage of the people and buildings that occupy each side. Dialogue from people and actions on both sides offers a closer look into the differences of the West and East. The Eastside is rich in culture and is in danger of transforming into what the Westside currently is. It is important that the rich artistic culture that exists in this city remains.

Course Reflection:

   This video can be used as a way to illustrate the dangers of gentrification. The West side of the bridge is shown as an area that caters to those who are down on their luck, while the East side is shown as being a place for creative escape. These two ways of viewing the same bridge tell the story of how city development can wreak havoc upon cultural areas. When examining bridges in the future, it will be crucial to look at how each they connect varying parts of the city. In the case of the Burnside bridge, it connects two parts of the city that are at different stages of development. My explorations in this class began with a broader look at two bridges, and narrowed down to focus on one. This focus allowed me to observe Portland in from a new perspective.

   When designing in the future, I will use strategies that were exhibited in this class. When showing our rough cut project, a peer suggested that we throw the end of our video at the beginning. This suggestion seemed radical initially, but ended up leading to clearer refinement. From the point of switching the beginning to the end, we were able to focus on our narrative more. This allowed us to scrap our focus on the Broadway bridge and solely look at the Burnside bridge. Going forward, maintaining an open mind similar to that of the mindset taken upon in this class will allow for my design work to truly blossom.

   In regards to the techniques gained in this course, I believe that learning and using Adobe Premiere was one of the most impactful course pieces. Becoming acquainted with the program allowed me to edit videos in a way that I had never done before. This further opened my eyes to how video can be a beautiful way to present ideas. Shuffling through clips and audio has also improved my appreciation for well composed videos and films. The process of filming and editing is unique in itself, and I hope to create more through this medium.  

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Written Component

Hannah Mann

ARCH 433/533

Ian Harris

Fall 2018

Mission

The mission of our video was to bring light to a neighborhood that is rich with culture, but potentially facing gentrification in the next few years. I wanted to address the current climate without necessarily proposing a “fix all” to the problem. The same way that many other neighborhoods in East Portland (Alberta, Mississippi, Division) have underwent rapid change in the last decade, I wanted to document the Cully neighborhood and what it looks like today.

Abstract

Intro: Orienting audience to Portland in general, and then honing in on the neighborhood of Cully located in NE Portland.

First Scene: Documenting the faster pace traffic of killingsworth; the construction sites that are active as well as the sites that are just bordered off with no activity happening at the time of filming + what that looks like in the context of the neighborhood. Walking down alleyways with major potholes; gravel roads, etc. Documenting low-income communities side by side with new development.

Next Scene: Interview with Lori from the Cully Park community garden. She talks about the struggle and how it’s more than about development. “It’s about families...it’s about people not making enough rent.” She goes on to mention how it’s (rent) gone up twofold. And how people are having to choose between paying rent or feeding their kids.

Shots begin to reflect the community at risk of displacement. More faces of the residents. People of color, houseless, elderly, youth, just a mixed bag of people that makes up the culture of this community.

Closing: Ending on a positive note that strikes some sort of emotional chord with the audience. People feel like they grew up in this neighborhood; as if Lori was their aunt - and they don’t want to see this community at risk for displacement. Old man in wheelchair waves as he smokes his cigarette next to his little dog.

Project Development

The project began when I visited the Cully neighborhood on a site visit with my studio. Although my individual design proposal for studio had nothing to do with the narrative of my video, I knew that I wanted to document this time and place to shed light on what is happening in Portland’s most racially/ethnically diverse neighborhood. As this demographic is the most at risk of displacement to begin with, I knew that it was a topic of importance. Week after week of site visits resulted in hours of footage of the neighborhood, a 45 minute sound bite of an interview with Lori (a woman we met in the community garden of Cully Park), trips to taquerias, elementary schools, parks, more construction sites than I could count, as well as chatting with people waiting for the bus and smoking with skateboarders at what used to be the Sugar Shack. We had way more inventory than we knew what to do with, so we began to piece out what specifically we were trying to communicate in the 2 minute video we were producing.  Me with my teammate Courtney learned the capacity and limitations of what our cell phones could do. Some days after a full morning of shooting, we realized that everything was shot at the wrong frame rate or that the screen rotation was locked so it was all filmed in portrait rather than landscape. Through many trials and errors, we were able to compile a collection of our footage to try our best at relaying the story of what is currently taking place in the Cully neighborhood. Courtney did the editing in premiere, I did the storyboarding, and together we collected footage on site.

Course Reflection

As someone is looking into the Cully neighborhood, whether as a developer, an architect, a city planner, or even an artist, this video can help educate in a quick and efficient way what the current climate is of this neighborhood. There are many ways of communicating ideas, and as architects, we mostly rely on poster boards and models. But having another way of communicating an idea can be extremely beneficial. It provides an element that you can’t get from a sheet of paper or a 3D model. Hearing someone’s voice and seeing someone struggle, watching kids play in a classroom speaks volumes more than listing statistics or looking at a pie chart. I think we limit ourselves when we stop learning different ways of trying to tell a narrative in architecture. Since architecture is something that is constantly evolving, changing, morphing, shouldn’t the way that we represent it also be looking to the future? As someone who has always used the same tools to communicate my work in this degree, it has been so helpful to have another outlet to try to express my work through. I also think it has been really interesting to see the students rise to the challenge of using their cell phones to film everything over the course of this term. Each team came up with great deliverables given the fact that no one used actual professional equipment. It just goes to show that it’s not about how much money or how expensive the camera is that is being used, but rather learning the capacity of our phones and utilizing those to the best of our abilities.

[psu-architecture-film-course]

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Written Component

Savannah Echols

Arch 433 Fall 2018

Mission:

This video aims to showcase the dichotomy of the underbelly of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, OR. The footage captures east Burnside versus west Burnside starting with the top of the bridge, the bridge itself, and the culture that thrives under the bridge at either side of the river. We hoped to show that DIY spaces are important to our community and what makes Portland a unique place by showing the prevalent culture that exists at Burnside Skatepark and the type of transit and people that exist on the west side of the bridge.

Abstract:

We began on the west side of the Burnside Bridge to show what typically exists under a bridge in Portland and how the city has decided to use the space and what culture came out of that. We start with an interview with Jay, a person currently houseless that would be moving into a new apartment soon but seeked refuge under the Burnside Bridge where he listened to country music and drank. The shots then alter to what typical things happen around the bridge, cars driving down the street, the max arriving at the station, and the environmental noises that exist on that side of the bridge.

We then move over to the east side of the bridge, beginning with footage next to Burnside Skatepark. We wanted to showcase that although there are plenty of other things around Burnside Skatepark, the culture does take over there, including Tilt, a local restaurant, having seating outside that people could skate on with little damage to the furniture. After those shots we show what skating at Burnside Skatepark is like and why it is prevalent to the community.

The comparison of the two sides of the bridges is to give viewers an inside look at what under bellys of bridges can be used for and hope to give some insight as to why DIY spaces and places like skateparks benefit the community and make good use of the underbelly of bridges.

Project Development:

We started out our project by just going to Burnside Skatepark, not knowing exactly what we were going to contrast it to. We got a couple shots of people skating as well as some insight of why this skatepark is important to the people that hang out there. Next we walked around the end of the Burnside Bridge on the east side to see if this culture had expanded into the area. We found that The Yard, an apartment building next door, had a restaurant underneath that made use of the area for skaters. We also found that some people basically lived at Burnside Skatepark, broken down cars housed skaters and some people would sleep near the park just to be able to skate all day. Going to the top of the bridge on the east side you could also see Burnside Skatepark if you look under it correctly, although sheltered and hidden from the main streets, it is still known that it exists while walking across the bridge. After some research we realized that Burnside Skatepark used to be a sore on Portland, before it was built it was just a place for people to do drugs and sleep. The skatepark was welcomed by the city and by the police because technically, it was cleaning up a part of Portland that no one would visit anyways. After learning this we knew we wanted to compare it to other bridges in Portland because the vacancy does leave room for illegal and unwanted things to happen and due to previous knowledge we knew that Burnside Skatepark was in danger of being torn out for new development.

Our initial idea was to compare East Burnside to West Broadway because of the similar layout under the bridge. After getting footage from under the Broadway Bridge and viewing the construction happening around there, we decided we would not need to do that, a stronger dichotomy would be East Burnside versus West Burnside just because the difference was so large and we did not want the footage to mislead that the other side of Burnside was being used for a similar program to East Burnside.

This led us to comparing both sides of the Burnside Bridge so that we could show it is a safe haven for a lot of people and now a part of our community. After our midterm feedback we went back to Burnside Skatepark to get some shots of our friends skating as well as shots about the construction around the skatepark to show this threat. We then went to the west side of the bridge to learn more about the culture downtown. We got footage of max lines, cars driving across to get to the east side and an interview with a person currently seeking refuge there till he gets a new place to live. We wanted to show the dichotomy of what these spaces do for people and what the ambience is around seperate sides of the river.

Course Reflection:

I think this video is very important to the architectural profession because it shows how unused space can be used for the better, and if the space is not planned out, people will still fill it, it will just be with something you may not necessarily want. This video showcases heavily how important program is to every aspect of design, and if you leave it open to people, it will gain a reputation for what people are attracted to the space. Burnside Skatepark is one of the most famous DIY skateparks in the world and has been showcased in many videos and articles in magazines. Burnside is important to people because it was built with only one thing in mind, having a place to skateboard that is fun and creative and can be changed by whoever stumbles upon it. This is one of the rare instances that something like this would happen. No one talks about what is happening under the west side of the Burnside Bridge because no one is attracted to the program unless you are a commuter. This video could also be used for academic purposes to show that wiping out a culture to expand a building may not necessarily be the program that everyone wants in place.

Making this video will heavily change the way I think about how important program is and also how important it is to ask the community what is important to them. In recent days I found out that the city has to do some maintenance on the Burnside Bridge and had to shut down the park for a few months, because it is city property it is entirely allowed and the way they let people at the skatepark know was professional and kind says a skater that was interviewed on closing night. He commented on how having this space be part of the community allowed a good flow of communication between people who value the space and the city. This is just one example of something I will take into consideration when designing from here on out, it is important to make unwanted spaces, wanted again, especially in major cities like Portland that are running out of room for community to take place.

[psu-architecture-film-course]