A free screening of this very film will be hosted at Campus Cinema in Witherspoon on Sunday, April 15, at 7 p.m., followed by a Q&A with Hustwit , the director.
Urbanized is a documentary about the design of cities and how it shapes our everyday lives, Hustwit said.
“From the moment you step out your front door, your day is determined by the design of your city,” Hustwit said. “So I guess I wanted to explore the thinking and strategies behind urban design to get a better sense of how it affects my life and what I can do to help shape the city I live in for the better.”
Inspiration for the film also came from Hustwit’s desire to look at and spread ideas about innovative design projects in other cities.
“There are also so many challenges that are facing cities around the world, and many of those challenges are being addressed through design,” Hustwit said.
The director’s presence on Sunday is the result of collaboration between the film studies program at N.C. State and the Full Frame Documentary Festival based in Durham.
“We have been partnering with them for many years now,” Marsha Orgeron , director of film studies, said.
Every year the film studies program sends a group of N.C. State student fellows to Full Frame. Once there, they are allowed to participate in special sessions with filmmakers and go to smaller panels, along with the regular screenings.
About 100 documentary films will be featured over the course of four days, in six theaters. Last year alone, Full Frame distributed about 28,000 tickets, Sadie Tillery , director of programming for Full Frame, said.
As part of the University’s relationship with this festival, filmmakers affiliated with Full Frame are invited to bring their films to campus and discuss them.
In 2007, Laura Poitras was one such director who came to talk about and screen her Academy Award nominee film My Country, My Country.
Hustwit participated in the fellows program as a panelist at Full Frame before, according to Orgeron .
“Most filmmakers are really excited to get their work in front of college students,” Tillery said.
Urbanized is the latest work in Hustwit’s design-oriented trilogy, proceeding Helvetica (2007) and Objectified (2009).
“Both of which [ Helvetica and Objectified] are very, very interesting,” Orgeron said. “They’re slick, they’re well done, they’re engaging, they’re entertaining. I mean Helvetica is about a font and it has the potential to be completely uninteresting, but it’s a totally fascinating film.”
Hustwit doesn’t produce his documentaries through the traditional avenues of investors. Along with his own personal money, Kickstarter is an online site he uses to raise funds from the public to create his films.
“It’s literally, you just say like ‘Look, I need 10 or 20 or however many thousands of dollars, and if you donate at this level you’ll get a T-shirt and a DVD when the film comes out. If you donate at this level, you get your name in the credits,'” Orgeron said. “So it allows you to not have any other ties and obligations beyond basically a support group that can make donations.”
“If you have a great concept for a film, the money will find you. Don’t obsess over the funding or the equipment, obsess over the concept,” Hustwit said.
The cost of a documentary isn’t a lot and it can be paid in stages over the course of the project, according to Hustwit .
“I think he’s an incredible inspiration for students, in terms of how you can think about really pursuing a career in filmmaking completely independently,” Orgeron said.
Looking past the upcoming N.C. State screening of Urbanized, Hustwit has other plans in the making.
“I have dozens of film ideas, for both documentary and fiction films,” Hustwit said. “I’m planning on starting a few new film projects this summer, but I’m not sure which ones they’ll be yet. I’m also collaborating with another photographer on a book project that we’ll announce later this month.”
