PROJEKT iVIEW : Cinema and Architecture
iVIEW AUTHOR:
Krishna (Hyderabad, India)
EMAIL:
kk_architect [at] yahoo.com
I am a student of Architecture, working on my final year thesis for which I proposed to design a film school. Since, cinema is a strong medium that reaches the public there is a need to improve quality cinema.
I am a regular PFC reader and have been learning about cinema, from those wonderful posts by… Anurag, OZ, Sudhir to mention a few.
I have been regularly reading all the posts and one discussion that interests me is to promote quality cinema.
I strongly believe that a school with right kind of environment and resources shall have great impact on the student … So my exploration starts from the influence ofarchitecture and spatial quality on film makers, actors. . I would like to design a Film school which shall influence, inspire and promote creativity in the student by its form,spatial quality and resources.
The basic program includes acting and movie production classes, editing suites, canteen, fitness room and dominated by an interior amphitheater that allows the finished works of students to be shown to visitors/ fellow students for critical apprisal.
Below is a simple questionnaire which helps me to understand what a film maker, actor would like or wish to have in his school, share about what you liked / disliked about it… What facilities would have been more helpful?
I will be happy if you can write your name but if you do not want to that’s fine… mention your profession and how you are influenced by architecture and spatial quality either home/ work place/ school which is either congenial to work or inspiring to your profession.
Hope to get some great response from you all. This would help me as my personal case study for my thesis and hope it would help me in the design process.
Kindly try to address the questionnaire below.. thoughts, experiences beyond this are appreciated.
Questionnaire:
1. How do you use architecture in film, do you think it is helpful?
2. How do you ( actors/film makers) react to or use the space?
3. What do you think that a film school should be like…you can mention things you liked or wish you should have had in your film school? like preview theatre…film archive any laboratories…or other facilities.
4. Do you have a place for group discussion (personal interaction) like a forum which helps for critical practice?
5. Are you influenced or effected by the architecture or quality of space at your academic or work place or looking at a famous actor/ or at yourself in the mirror?
6. What are your sources of inspirations…like a movie, a book, or nature…etc ?
7. What do you wish a film school should be like….an iconic building, could be like any normal building in its form or materiality?
8. Do you think there is a need for a film school at all ?
Looking…
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Krishna:there should be classrooms/ canteen whcih should not be bound by walls. the cafe should open space all around and have roof which should be transparant so that students can feel the rain whenever it is like “sun sun barsaat ki dhun sun” of SIR. students should feel close to nature.
Hi Shailesh….thanks for teh reply..thought my post was uninteresting and bouncer to some.
Besides what you have suggested, what are the usual spaces that students spend most odf the time on campus and why? does it inspire them,…how do thay react to a normal building than to a gugnehium, do that use the spaces in teh film school for their filming projects,…if yes do the walls and spaces need to be flexible or retractable like a film set?
do they spend time in debating over issues like any idea or a social issue to develop ideas
? these are also some of the issues im a lookingforward to know.kindly keep posting to your knowledge.once again thanks for those ideas.
Krishna: i have never been to film school. but i must say that the film school should be close to nature. May other PFCans throw light on this topic? i think u shld visit some film school like FTII, ZEMA, Whistling woods etc. if they allow…
The film school I attended was actually a huge technical institution… basically a university atmosphere. Most of our classes were in our own building but we did have classes in other buildings (Industry operations, Interpersonal Behaviour, etc) which was nice as it allowed us to connect with the “outside world” and not feel totally isolated (pretty easy when you spend 12-16 hours a day in one building). We had a few cafeterias/canteens, also a walk from our building.
Our building, aka “The Broadcast Center” (we did TV/Film production) was shared with Radio and Journalism students, although our facilites took up about 75% of the space.It consisted of 2 floors.
The 1st floor housed 2 studios: Studio 1 was a huge, spacious room which had large double doors opening up to the outside. The room was entirely black (floors, walls, ceilings). Along 3 of the 4 walls were various outlets to plug in audio wiring (mostly standard XLR cables) and video input/outputs (mostly BNC with some S-Video). Also along one of the walls there were the appropriate housings for all kinds of wiring.
Of course one corner held the controls for the lighting grid, which was the entire ceiling. This is very important as we were up there quite a bit (I spent far more than my fair share of time up there) changing lights. Mostly 2K’s and 1K’s with some spots as well. The grid should be strong as well as allowing students/profs the flexibility to light for any situations.
Just outside those double doors I mentioned was a storage room (also part of our building) which housed set peices. There was a portion of empty cemented space just outside the storage room where we could paint/design the set peices according to our productions.
To give you an idea, Studio 1 was to shoot everything from dramatic scenes to TV commercials to variety shows. In my 2 years, we used it for everything from different rooms of a house, hospital, office, school hallway, grocery store, bakery, etc. Through those double doors we brought in everything from cars (and huge green screens to throw behind the cars so we could later chromakey in b/g footage), to furnishings for the above mentioned settings.
We also used Studio 1 as a classroom where we learnt everything from Production Planning to Video Basics to Dramatic Writing.
For us, this was THE most important room on the planet for a full 2 years.
Also on that 1st floor, across from Studio 1, was a production office (should have been bigger). It housed 8 computers which we used for everything from writing scripts, completing production reports to surfing the net… I mean, researching.
Beside Studio 1 was Studio 2. This was about 1/3 the size of Studio 1 and was used mainly for shooting news (we ran a weekly news/magazine show from there) and interview/talk show programs. There was a set that basically stayedAlso used it for smaller classes. Same idea as Studio 1, lighting grid, audio/video bays, wiring and all. Again, lighting grid and double doors wide enough 2 bring in set/prop peices is key.
Then there was the equipment room which houses the cameras, tripods, lighting kits, C-stands, flag kits, filters, bounce boards, sandbags, crates, monitors and lots more audio/video/power cables. Oddly enough this room, like the production office, was much smaller than you’d think and much smaller than need be. Lots of shelving and lockable cupboards…
Sorry I got writers cramp…
Ok, the 2nd floor now… Had 2 control rooms (1 for each studio) and 5 editing rooms…
Each control room had a wall of monitors which sat infront of a large desk housing the controls for the studio cameras and the switchers used to control which signal was “on air” (live-to-tape) and which were on “standby”.
For each control room there was also a VTR room which from which tapes (mostly Betacam) could be played which would feed into the control room which inturn would feed into the main signal which was live to tape so it was being recorded in the VTR room.
The most important aspect of the control rooms were the ability to communicate with the studios, the VTR rooms and any remote locations from which a “live hit” was being filmed.
We also had all the editing facilities on this floor.
1 huge main editing room which held I think 20 Avid Video Editing Suites. This was to learn, well, video editing.
2 more actually video editing suites (each with 2 bigger more powerful Avid Editing suites, with a glass door seperating the 2 to avoid disturbance and the occasional 2am romp…
Also, 2 audio editing suites (fully equipped with Protool editing suites and of course your audio mixer boards and all the required audio equipment).
There was also a large computer room which was used to learn shit like graphic designing (Adobe Photoshop) and other computer based programs.
I almost forgot, we had 4 more editing suites which were used for Analog (tape to tape) editing… Betacam and 3/4 U-matic machines and the required monitors and all that jazz.
There was also a “green room” which we used to rehearse scenes, production meetings and romping around. This room had tables and chairs, and contrary to what you might think, wasn’t green (carpet was ugly brown though).
There was a forbidden electrical room full of fascinating patchbays (connecting the
K, that’s the best of my recollection.
Our screening theatre room was in a the adjacent building, shared with other classes from other mediums, though we always felt we had more of a right over it than anyone else.
Now keep in mind we also did many many TV productions and news shows so the building was designed with that TV Studio format kept in mind.
I guess you also have to keep in mind that with the exception of the 4 main editing rooms and maybe the control rooms, every room was designed to serve multiple purposes.