The Third & The Seventh

Alex Roman’s The Third & The Seventh is a CG-film that beautifully captures architecture and design. What I like about Roman’s film is that it doesn’t attempt to be one of those rendered movies that tries to be cool (like those reels companies put together with upbeat jazz music) or made just to show off rendering skills. It’s a piece of storytelling: an appreciation of architecture and design.

Throughout most of the film, however, Roman seems to overuse the cliche of CG/rendered movies: in and out of focus shots (though I realise he’s filming the film – if that makes sense [“a full CG animated piece that tried to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces”). Add to this the countless number of tracking shots and you could easily forget the film’s intent.

On the flip side, I really like his use of hand-held camera style shots; they add much needed authenticity to the film.

But what I (and no doubt architects) appreciate most is Roman’s attention to detail and his continual references to great pieces of design, like, the Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe, Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum and Louis Kahn’s National Assembly Building of Bangladesh:

Looking forward to reading his thoughts behind the film. Check it out at http://www.thirdseventh.com/