Landscape is a time-based medium. Negotiating change, growth, and decay is necessary for adequately designing for and representing ecological and emotional ephemera. It is becoming increasingly inappropriate to represent such complex systems in traditional static imagery. As digital media becomes more accessible as it has done over the past decade, it is through the screen by which we all consume and interact with spaces, places, and stories. The flat LCD’s of our personal devices have become the means by which we engage designed space; a digital-physical landscape. By realizing that almost all media is consumed through screens, we can leverage this format to optimize the places we want to design and the stories we want to tell. This studio will focus on world-building and storytelling from a landscape perspective using film, animation, and motion graphics, culminating in a collaborative short-film festival celebrating Southern California Landscapes.

This studio will leverage the skills and techniques of film to tell the stories of mute Southern California Landscapes. By analyzing a different place-based film every week and practicing the techniques used in digital filmmaking, the studio will explore the storytelling capacity of time-based media. Every landscape has a story to tell yet it may be incapable of speaking a language we understand; we also may be unequipped to listen. This studio will explore the latent myths and legends of Southern California Landscapes and tell their stories through traditional and contemporary filmmaking processes.

This third-year undergraduate landscape architecture studio, written and taught by myself, took place in the Fall semester of 2021. Below are some short-films that the students in this course developed from the above studio prompt.