Three kinds of writing on the work and the craft. Project Notes — long-form reflections on specific buildings we’ve filmed and photographed. Field Notes — working principles, observations, and lessons from behind the camera. Studio Notes — how we operate as a practice.
The Lee Marvin Home was designed by Josias Joesler in 1936. It’s the first film we wrote and narrated, and it’s where we worked out how a short script can carry what a camera can’t: the people and the time that shaped a place.
How do you market a 7,000-square-foot hangar at La Cholla Airpark? We made a scripted short film for the pilots most likely to buy it, and made sure every detail would hold up when they watched.
The grammar of Contemporary Spanish Colonial is specific — plaster walls, timber beams, arched openings, steel-frame windows. What each of those elements asks of the camera, and how a new build in the Foothills made each one visible.
Notes on architectural composition, drawn from a Judith Chafee house in the Catalina Foothills designed for it. Composition isn’t a feeling — it’s a sequence of unconscious decisions, most of them old, some of them mathematical, almost none of them random.
Architecture that earns its place by staying quiet — and what it took to document a compound the desert was allowed to keep.
Most architectural photography is documentation. Narrative work — in stills or film — is something else entirely. It understands that every building carries an intention, and uses the frame to bring it forward.