Production Notes: Introduction

View a revised, though nowhere near edited version of the Introduction here:  http://youtu.be/Fd-CVPQPGuQ

Begin Introduction

On a black background with the sound of road traffic and windshield wipers, the following credits appear, cross-dissolving into and out of view.

“Rutgers School of Environemtnal and Biological Sciences”

“In association with”

“Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture”

“present”

“Praxis Studio: Agircultural Literacy”

After the last credit, the view for Route 206 from inside the car cross-dissolves into the screen.  The car turns into the driveway at Cherry Grove Farm.  Two narrators begin to speak.

N1:  What a nice day we have for a farm visit.

N2:  Yup, all part of the studio experience!  I think it’s supposed to clear up a bit here, so by the time we start walking, maybe it won’t be so bad.  What were those questions the professor wanted to think about?”

N1:  She was saying that for this walk around the farm, we should put ourselves in the farmer’s shoes and try to relate to what we observe in that way.  The questions are how do you read the agricultural landscape?  What can we learn from a productive farm?  And what can a productive farm learn from landscape architecture? 

N2:  And isn’t there supposed to be someone from the Ecology department with us today?

N1:  Oh yes!  Dr. Ehrenfeld is walking with us. 

This style of dialogue will not work for this film.  In the lines above, the characters are supposedly engaged in the scene, present at the time the footage was shot.  All other footage and all other narration discussed for other scenes has the narrators as omniscient contributors of their amassed knowledge, reflecting on past events. 

“How do you read the agricultural landscape?

“What can we learn from a productive farm?

 

“What can a productive farm learn from landscape architecture?

“These are the questions at the heart of our agricultural literacy studio.  Over the course of a semester, thirteen landscape architecture students came together to start answering these questions through the process of design..

“We focused on a single farm in central New Jersey, and we accomplished a lot, from our initial site visits in December to the completion of the trailhead structure we built in May. 

“And we learned a lot too, in a research process that connected us with the farm and its processes, with farmers in the region at a major winter farmer conference, and with the regional scale of agriculture in central New Jersey through the use of geographic information systems.

“We worked in teams to create designs that would evoke what we learned in research.  We worked hard, through many stages of design, critique, and improvement.

“And ultimately we created something that worked.  It worked on paper, as a design for a trailhead that would welcome visitors to the farm.

“And it worked as a built structure, when our class came together as a unified construction team, bringing the trailhead design into reality.

“This film will take you through our process, from exploration to research, and from the drawing board to the built reality.

End introduction.  (Film design decision to be made at this point.  Should the introduction footage be the continuous progression of the farm as seen from the car?  Or, should the view of the farm from the car cross-dissolve into a view of our narrators as they are speaking?  …Or, narrators can appear in a frame of their own, set on top of the view of the farm from the car, like Picture-in-Picture on a television.)

What are your thoughts?  Please feel free to comment.