Throughout history and across borders, stories define, teach and mark time for humanity. Film is the world’s most modern story-telling medium and is quickly becoming its most prolific. As film-making grows into a powerful story-telling voice and a vessel of social and cultural knowledge, architecture has a responsibility to respond, to cultivate, and to understand. The making of films is marked by a distinctly communal process of both viewing and making. This thesis seeks to understand the independent film-making process - collaborative, intuitive, intricate, and singular - so as to create a new type of place for this craft and therefore for story. Research methods include production design for a short film and interviews with film-makers.

Through understanding of the correlation of both film and architecture’s understanding of connection to time, place, and collaborative paradigm and the special notions of light and sequence valued by film-makers, this Film-Making Collaborative reflects film-making’s complexities while promoting connection to place and to story-telling’s human element.