Dynamic American Cities

Dynamic American Cities is the design & engineering remix about community planning, featuring original music composed on a Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard mixed down to a Zoom MRS-1044 multitrack recorder & rhythm composer. The finished music was then compiled with the video clips in iMovieHD.

Big thanks to the Prelinger Archive at www.archive.org for providing the video source footage, all of which is public domain:
-- Dynamic American City (1956) for the interview segments
-- When Work Is Done (1943) for the b&w footage of WWII-era community-building
-- Community Growth: Crisis and Challenge (1959) for the urban design animations

The reassembled clips and soundbites from the two source reels create a new voice that considers the goals of an effective urban design process:

Perhaps most importantly, cooperating with each other;
working together, playing together.
A new community is being born.
But the main thing is to get people together.

My remodeled prose from these observations, initially made more than a half-century ago, can call to mind an idealized yet worthy vision for pursuing successful community development.

And how about the clips of urban design animation? We often overlook this hand-crafted graphic style in our age of computers, but it could be intriguing to be inspired by it with our improved rendering and file-assembly capabilities. Just imagine some kind of animated presentation influenced by the look of work from Paul Rudolph or Otto Wagner.

I'd really like a copy of that Urban Development Guidebook too.

Obviously, it can also be inferred that an effective urban design process includes a jam into the juke joint, so if that happens, be sure to hit it on the beat and take it on down.

Support programs and initiatives in your area that promote safe walkable communities by balancing development with responsibility.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• community
• planning
• urban
• masterplan
• master
• plan
• design
• animation
• dance
• zoom
• mrs1044
• casio
• sk5
• aec
• prelinger
• mashup
• remix