INTERVIEW CLIPS

STORY STRUCTURE:

The video's story is based off of an hour-long interview with Thomas Sayre, the designer of the Cree Shimmer Wall. When I came up with the initial concept for the video, most of the choices I had made were only stylistic, and my group members didn't really have anything nailed down for their stories, either. So we went into the interview with an open mind and a lot of questions. As the interviewer, I tried to get as much naturally flowing conversation to work with as possible, so I started with specific questions and warmed up to more open ended ones. And at that point, I tried to just keep my mouth shut as much as possible. I found that Thomas Sayre was actually very poetic in his answers once we got through the wikipedia-able (totally a word) facts, so I tried to push that, and let his stream of consciousness flow like a Faulkner novel (yeah, I wish!) . Ultimately, I started to think of this video as informative, but also kind of a tribute to the shimmer wall and downtown Raleigh in general.

TRANSCRIPT

It came about as a function of designing the entire building where we had to provide louvers for the HVAC and backup generators and emergency equipment.
We spent months taking what wouldn’t work technically, a bunch of fishing lures and little wires, and made that into a moveable series of panels that that wouldn’t blow off in the wind and that was maintanable and affordable and all the things that architecture needs to do.
It looks like a tree and this is the city of oaks after all. But we’re also… and we are a city of that past and that tradtion, but were also a city next to research triangle park, and the home of Redhat, and Cree, and lots of pretty high tech stuff. It’s no longer the small town that it was—it’s an increasingly importantly city, people want to live here.
Has the shimmer wall brought life? I don’t know if it’s brought life but its added life and it sort of looks and feels like a lot of the dreams we have for downtown.
What’s most memorable about urban spaces…you know the Pragues, Paris’s, and New Yorks of the world—are, are the people..