The Shelter Movie

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

It’s always an amazing experience to screen a film for a live audience. I find that I learn so much from how they react to scenes and moments: a ripple of laughter here, contemplative silence there, or a simple ‘huh,’ signifying a small revelation.  We screened two work-in-progress sequences from Shelter at the San Francisco Public Library this week as part of the Architecture and the City Festival. The screening provided me with a lot good feedback and a lot to think about and we continue the shape the film.

It’s equally amazing to me to watch a film come into focus as we work in production. Many months are spent preparing: pre-interviewing potential subjects, test-filming them on flip cams, mapping out schedules and strategies. Then there is a sparking moment when I  meet those people in person and feel the gravity of their stories.  Here are the sequences that we showed in San Francisco.

 

 While filming in Haiti in August I saw that designing for good means that you have to design for a culture.

You have to have a dialogue with the people you want to design for, and understand how they have built in the past.  This might seem obvious, but it is equally obvious that, humanitarian design fails when it is imposed on a community instead of being created in a partnership.  It’s the kind of partnership that we are going to forge with our outreach program. The leading edge of that program is something we’re calling the virtual exchange.  While in Haiti I filmed Haitian architecture students, asking them about their hopes and dreams for the future, how they believe would be the best way to rebuild (and build in) Haiti, and what message they might want to send to architecture students in America.   We will show that footage at the College of Design: University of Minnesota in the fall – and then record statements and ideas from students there.  We’ll take those statements back to Haiti on our next production trip.  That’s the essence of the virtual exchange program.  I’ve spoken with the deans of architecture and design at various schools, including Pratt, Parsons, and the New School for Design, and some schools here in California, and received enthusiastic support and great advice. I’ll let you now how the planning is going in future articles.

Next week we start our planning sessions for production in Japan.  We’ve been invited by Architecture for Humanity fellow Nathaniel Corum to following a design/rebuild initiative near Sendai, site of the nuclear accident, and also in communities devastated by a  tsunami.  It promises to be a very different trip from the Haiti production section: instead of Haiti’s August heat we’ll have Japan’s November cold, and since there are few structures left standing, we’ll be camping and charging the cameras off solar arrays.

Follow me on Twitter.  Check out Shelter on Facebook.  Donate to the film via the San Francisco Film society and it is tax-deductible.

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

As I was filling out our mid-year report for the San Francisco Film Society I found myself thinking about milestones.  Usually report cards like this make me nervous.  I think I got a really good one in the fourth grade.  The teacher commented, “Lee is our stronghold of scientific inquiry.”  So as I opened the online form for SFFS my mind was racing.  SFFS is our fiscal sponsor, and they are the entity that makes it possible for all of you to make tax-deductible donations to Shelter. I wondered if we had accomplished enough in the past six months?

Turns out I didn’t have to worry much.  As I started to compile the report I could see a satisfying list of achievements for the film and its related projects.  Here are a few of them.

We raised more than $5,000 on IndieGoGo in a “crowdsourced” funding campaign.

We created a great trailer.

We doubled the size of our advisory board, adding great people in media, philanthropy, marketing and NGOs.

We have four grant requests pending, applied for three major ones and were invited to reapply to all of them in the next funding cycle (They were Sundance, California Council of the Humanities and the Tribeca Documentary Fund.)

 We’re prepping six more grant applications that will be ready by the fall.

We spoke about Shelter at gatherings large and small, including at Architecture for Humanity in San Francisco, and to a class of architecture students at USC.

Many of those students volunteered to create blogs for Shelter, and the most recent one is posted here.

We’re planning a symposium at USC for the fall on the topic of ‘design for good.’

We’ve launched the ‘virtual exchange program’ that will allow architecture students in Haiti create videos about their hopes and dreams that will be shown to students in the schools we visit to speak about Shelter.

We’ve hired a production coordinator in Haiti who is helping us set up our filming days there.

We’ve hired a graphics company, fusioncreative.ca, to design a visual identity package for the film.

And, finally, we’re helping to curate a film festival about architecture for the Architecture and the City Festival in San Francisco this September.  We’re planning to show a short work-in-progress version of Shelter there on September 7th.

Wow.  Not a bad list, and I left out some of the blogs and media we’re working on now.  Thanks for following along on our journey.

If you’d like to donate to the film, you can do that through the San Francisco Film Society.  It’s a tax-deductible donation.

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Here’s our latest trailer for the film. Camera: Richard Neill. Producer: Richard Neill. Associate producer: Megan Nemeh. Audio: Kevin Brown, Vlad Gurwich. Edited by: Tal Skoot. Music: Joel Goodman. Haiti footage: Khalid Mohtaseb. Director/Writer: Lee Schneider.

We’re proud to tell you that SHELTER has just been approved for fiscal sponsorship by the San Francisco Film Society. This is a very selective process, and we’re proud to be in the company of other films like these that are current SFFS projects.

Fiscal sponsorship means that we will be able to accept tax-deductible donations and will become eligible for grants offered by organizations like the California Council for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, and the Public Broadcasting System.

When World Shelters and The Turning Point Foundation teamed up last September to revitalize the River Haven community we were there to capture the moment.  Several hundred volunteers came together to build nineteen structures.  Here’s a look at that happened on the build day.  Let us know what you think!

With three HD cameras rolling and a still camera shooting time lapse images we witnessed something remarkable through our viewfinders.

At the River Haven homeless encampment in Ventura, California, we saw nineteen new homes constructed in just one day. The homes are called U-Domes, a product of World Shelters. They are weather worthy, rated to withstand 80 mph winds, fire-retardant, and fully recyclable. They have locking doors, windows and vents.

We’re putting all the material filmed on the construction day into our edit system in San Francisco. Our Los Angeles edit system is handling the timelapse sequences. We hope to have some previews of the timelapse materials up on this site soon. It’s all part of our documentary called SHELTER.

There has been a little drama while building this village.  High winds blew some of the structures off their platforms before they could be properly anchored. The platforms had to be rebuilt because of a design problem. But by Thursday a small crew of workers hopes to finish fixing the platforms, with a move in scheduled next week for twenty five River Haven residents.

Mark Michaels, a resident of River Haven who helps oversee the community, told us that the residents were really looking forward to taking occupancy, now that winter weather is on the way. “We can get some heavy rains here,” he said. “The whole area can turn into a lake.” But with the U-Domes sturdily perched on their wooden platforms, River Haven residents can stay warm and dry. There are six of U-Domes with 200 square feet of space for couples and 13 U-Domes with 120 square feet for singles.

Do projects like this represent the future of pre-fab used in emergency relief situations? Bruce LeBel of World Shelters will find out. In the coming weeks, he will be working with county and city governments to get approval for similar U-Dome installations elsewhere in California. There’s a lot of red tape to cut through and a lot of NIMBY – “Not In My Backyard.” But as Steven Elias, a friend of World Shelters, explained, while a 250-person homeless shelter might meet with resistance in some communities, small twenty five-person communities might answer the needs of the homeless without having a large footprint.

According to the Ventura County 2009 Homeless Count, there are 2,193 homeless people in Ventura County, counting 361 children. 161 families are homeless.

Certainly there’s a need to shelter the homeless, and pre-fab structures like U-Domes could help. Yet U-Domes are just one form of pre-fab. Generally speaking, pre-fabricated manufacturing is a method of constructing homes using manufactured sections that are assembled on site. This method can be “greener” than traditional construction methods because fabrication is centralized and homes can go up more quickly. This brings another advantage – pre-fab can cost less than conventional building.

Companies like LivingHomes offer high-end pre-fab homes. Jennifer Siegal, founder of the Office of Mobile Design, (OMD) has pioneered the construction of prefabricated homes, schools and other buildings. Ms. Siegal is a big fan of portable architecture – like the classic Airstream trailer.

But high-end pre-fab hasn’t always found an audience. One pre-fab pioneer, Michelle Kaufmann, closed her Oakland, California company MK Designs this past May, citing the bad economy and withering housing market. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Blu Homes, of Boston, MA,  purchased the rights to build Kaufmann’s preconfigured designs.

Still, what often comes out of pre-fab projects, even the expensive ones, are “ideas, experimental materials, assembly methods, and good design–which can often translate into lower costs for all housing,” including homes for the homeless, says Richard Neill, director of photography on SHELTER and an executive producer on the project.

Could be that companies like World Shelters, and groups like Architecture for Humanity are looking into the robust future of pre-fab by focusing on disaster relief, temporary housing and housing for the homeless. We’re going to tell their story in SHELTER. Look for production updates here.

Thanks to Panasonic for donating the use of one of the world’s most advanced 1080P HD cameras–Panasonic’s P2 HD Cinema VariCam, and also thanks to Marshall Thompson for additional cinematography.

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This is the ongoing  blog of SHELTER, a movie about innovative solutions to provide housing for everyone.   The film examines everyone’s right to a roof over their head and focuses on inventive methods of building as advanced by such architects as Jennifer Siegal, Whitney Sander, Shigeru Ban and Dean Maltz, design innovators like Buckminster Fuller and activists like Bruce LeBel of World Shelters.  SHELTER is a production of DocuCinema and Adventure Pictures.  Its executive producers are Lee Schneider and Richard Neill.

Written by Lee Schneider

Is it possible to construct a village of new homes in a day, providing much needed housing for the homeless in Ventura County, California?  The answer is yes if you have a few hundred volunteers, two battalions of Navy Sea-Bees,  an innovative design for geodesic domes and some vision.

The innovative dome design comes from an American original named R. Buckminster Fuller.  The vision comes from Bruce LeBel of World Shelters and Clyde Reynolds of the Turning Point Foundation.  Clyde, the foundation’s executive director, heads up a program serving more than 500 clients in Ventura County each year through its shelter rehabilitation programs. Clyde hired Bruce’s company, World Shelters, to do something amazing: create housing for the homeless in just one day. Bruce, once a student of Buckminster Fuller, was ready for the challenge.  Why?  Not only did Buckminster Fuller advance the concept of a dome as a multi-use building, but Fuller also believed in a passionate and committed form of architecture that would help citizens of Earth survive and prosper.  He saw his life as an experiment into “what, if anything,” an individual could do “on behalf of all humanity.”

“For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known.  Only ten years ago the ‘more with less’ technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller, 1980

Bucky, as he was known, inspired Bruce LeBel to use the dome design to provide emergency housing all over the world.  We’re making a film about pre-fab architecture for the very poor and the very rich called SHELTER.  One of Bruce’s projects we’re following happened over the weekend, at an encampment for the homeless called River Haven, in Ventura.  Winter is coming, and that means heavy rains and some heavy weather.  The homeless people who lived here were camped in tents that were showing their age over the four years this settlement has been in existence. Domes would provide warmth, strength, and security.

The domes at River Haven, called U-Domes, are the result of years of research at World Shelters. Bruce was once an engineer at The North Face, the outdoor equipment company whose tents utilized Fuller’s principle of tensegrity.  Tensegrity is a synergy of materials achieved by a balance of tension and compression in their components.  U-Domes are designed to ship easily and go up fast.

Putting one of World Shelter’s U-Domes together looks complicated – it’s something like wrestling with really big origami – but it can be done by volunteers with little or no training.   It’s one way you can get a village standing in a day. The domes that went up this weekend are strong, light and portable – built to withstand 80 mph winds and last for ten years.  Those who contributed to the project included members of two battalions of  Navy Sea-Bees, some of whom had just returned from deployment in Afghanistan.  They put down sixteen wooden pads on gravel that provide steady grounding and support for the domes.  Allegra Fuller Snyder, Buckminster Fuller’s daughter, stopped by to support the effort and fill us in on her father.  She gave us an interview connecting the vision of her dad with the applications Bruce has been seeking for his domes.  We hope Bucky Fuller will be the spiritual father of our film.

Cheryl Deay of the United Way was heading up some of of the volunteers on site. She told us that 70% of the homeless population are working and struggling to get out of homelessness.  For the most part they keep a low profile.  “For every homeless person you see there are eight more that you don’t see.”  She explained that you may see the men on the street, but the women and children and families are hidden away.

SHELTER will follow this and some other projects Bruce has going and will also track pre-fab housing projects for the very rich.  We’ve completed interviews with Jennifer Siegal of the Office of Mobile Design and have met with two more pre-fab architecture powerhouses, Shigeru Ban and Dean Maltz, to speak with them about being in the film.

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This is the ongoing production blog of SHELTER.  The film examines everyone’s right to a roof over their head and focuses on pre-fab methods of building as advanced by such architects as Jennifer Siegal, Whitney Sander, Shigeru Ban and Dean Maltz, design innovators like Buckminster Fuller and activists like Bruce LeBel of World Shelters.  SHELTER is a production of DocuCinema and Adventure Pictures.  Its executive producers are Lee Schneider and Richard Neill.

Today we had a look around the River Haven site. This is a homeless encampment in Ventura, California that has been in existence for four years.  For four years it has been a tent community, the only self-governing homeless camp in Ventura County.  With winter on the way, it’s getting an overhaul — with pre-fab shelters called U-Domes.

World Shelters and the Turning Point Foundation have teamed to create  housing for 25 individuals. In the place of the tents will be six 200 square foot U-Domes and 13 120-square foot U-Domes on wooden platforms. The structures have locking doors, windows and vents. The U-Domes are pre-fab structures, and tomorrow morning they will be part of an amazing experiment.  Several hundred volunteers will arrive to set them up.  The catch?  They will be learning “on the job.” Bruce LeBel, who heads up World Shelters, wants to see if its possible for volunteers to create a community in a day.

“I expect that if we have 100 people in six hours we will get through it. Can U-Domes be erected by unskilled people?  We’ll see!  That’s our experiment.”  — Bruce LeBel

Early this morning, Navy Sea-bees were prepping the pads for the U-Domes.  It was quiet  – just the sound of conversation, power drills and teamwork.  Commander Williamson told us that there were two Sea-bee battalions at work  – all volunteering their time.  Some had just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Still, they pitched in.  They expected to stay “until the job was done.”

This week we begin production on the trailer for SHELTER, a documentary about everyone’s right to a roof over their head.  It looks at the uses of prefabricated housing to serve the very poor and the very rich.