Design Revolution: 'If You Build It' Documents an Experiment in Education

If You Build It, the latest film from Patrick Creadon, is a departure of sorts from his previous works, I.O.U.S.A. and Wordplay. Whereas Wordplay takes as its main character a passion, in the form of crossword puzzles, and features a number of high-profile figures—President Bill Clinton, filmmaker Ken Burns and pundit Jon Stewart among them—to articulate this passion, and I.O.U.S.A addresses a national crisis (the debt) and enlists the services of two Baedekers to help us understand the magnitude of this issue, If You Build It is a decidedly smaller film, with arguably larger ambitions.

The film takes us to a small town in rural North Carolina, where designers/activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller relocate, at the request of the school superintendant, to introduce their innovative means of education to local high school students. Despite resistance from the school board to help fund their initiative, Pilloton and Miller get to work, and over the course of a year, they take ten students through an intensive design-and-build curriculum whose intent is empowerment, transformation and ownership. By the end of the year, the students have built a farmers market for their community—and more so, have come away with a sense of the power of a progressive educational model.

Creadon and producer Christine O'Malley discovered Pilloton and Miller through television writer/ producer Neal Baer, who had recommended Pilloton's book, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, to them. When Baer learned that Pilloton and Miller had been offered a chance to put her theory into practice in North Carolina, he thought that documenting a year in the life of this teaching experiment would be a great story for Creadon and O'Malley to follow. "I'm a gigantic fan of This Old House," Creadon says. "We felt this was This Old House meets The Breakfast Club. I just loved the idea of teaching young people how things worked and then giving them an opportunity to take that knowledge and plug it into their community and build something the town has always needed. Our only concern was, What if everything goes according to plan? What if there's no conflict to the story? Well that wasn't a problem at all. The first day we got there, all hell broke loose."

Pilloton and Miller may have had the blessing of the school superintendent, but the school board wasn't so willing to embrace change, let alone pay the couple a salary; they survived on grants and credit. "The school board looked at what Matt and Emily were trying to do and thought these kids are not going to be able to handle this," Creadon explains. "This is college level, if not graduate school level, stuff. You're teaching it to kids in a very poor town in an underperforming school district, and they were being thrown a very sophisticated, very challenging curriculum. That's a large reason the school board pulled their funding: ‘This is just going to be a waste of everyone's time, so let's pull that class and put the kids back into the computer labs and just drill information into them like we do for the rest of classes.'"

With Creadon and his crew on the scene to document this initial tension, one would think that Bertie County was getting a double-dose of interlopers. And for both filmmakers and teachers, it took a while to build a sense of trust.

"I think when you're around two really great teachers, that doesn't take a long time," Creadon notes.  "After a few weeks the kids realized, ‘Matt and Emily are really committed to us, and what they're teaching us is really cool.' As far as our team, on every trip to North Carolina, I traveled there with one other person. When I'm shooting, I am the only person in the room because I shoot all my own stuff, and I don't use an audio person. I usually put a lav on one person in the room, then I have a wide angle lens on my camera with a very good mic on top of it, so I'm right next to where the action is. I've been shooting in that style for a very long time;  I'm just very sensitive to trying to fit in."

To facilitate the filmmaking process and help achieve access and trust with the students, Creadon gave cameras to the students so that they could document their process as well. "We did that for two reasons," he explains. "One, we wanted to take away some of the mystery of cameras and shooting and let them understand that their footage is every bit as valuable to the story as our footage. The other reason we did that was from a practical standpoint: We were in North Carolina about one week out of every month, but if something was going to be happening and we knew we weren't able to be there, we would have one of the kids shoot it for us. Putting the cameras into the hands of your subjects is something we've never done before, but we're in a moment in time where that makes a lot of sense: Cameras are very inexpensive, and we wanted the kids to feel ownership of their own story, just as Matt and Emily wanted the kids to feel ownership of the project they were going to build."

"I'm a filmmaker and I'm going to be spending a lot of time with these kids," Creadon continues. "What can I teach them that they might also be able to use later in their life? If you teach them how to tell a story with a camera, that's a pretty important skill set. I did take some time to show the kids how to make good frame and how to ask questions; their footage turned out to be incredibly valuable for us. The movie is a product of this theory that Matt and Emily had about design and building and being able to take ownership over those things. That shouldn't be a one-way street; it should be a two-way conversation."

While the idea of collaborative filmmaking took root in the late '90s and early 2000s with such documentary projects as Senior Year, American High and Chain Camera, with cameras and content outlets so ubiquitous now, being in front of or behind the camera is practically the default mode. "Unlike any project I've done before, for If You Build It, there's not a sense of, ‘OK, everything we're going to do is going to be on camera, and then we'll turn it off and everyone can take a breath.' The kids just ended up being who they are, whether cameras were rolling or not. We really didn't see a difference  between the way they reacted on camera versus off. I've been shooting long enough to know that that's not always the case; in fact, that's rare. But with this story, because we spent so much time with them and earned their trust, the camera disappeared and I was just another teacher or classmate."

Creadon wasn't entirely alone in the shooting process: George Desort is credited as the director of photography. "This is the first time we worked with another shooter," Creadon explains. "We felt that the passage of time was an important character in the film. With any sort of new educational model or curriculum, you're never going to see overnight change. We wanted to try to capture the passage of time in the movie, so we hired George Desort to do all that really beautiful time-lapse photography. We also really pulled back quite a bit on motion graphics in part because we didn't want a professional graphic designer's work to overshadow the creative work that the kids were doing.  But the timelapse photography could almost be what our motion graphic has done in previous works."

Most of the funding for If You Build It came in around the time of the film's world premiere at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The Kendeda Fund, for example, whose main area of interest is education, is underwriting a tour of the film to 30 cities. If You Build It premiered January 10 in New York and makes its Los Angeles premiere January 24, with subsequent runs in cities across the US through March 23 (For a complete list of the screenings, click here.).

"The release of this film is much more independent than the releases of the other films that we've done," says Creadon. "But I think it's going to be as effective. We've cast a really wide net for partners—architecture groups, education groups, schools, universities, public interest design groups, etc. We have dozens of partners around the country who have adopted the movie, and they're helping us. I'm dieing to see what kind of audiences we reach. There's nothing better than to walk into a theater have the lights go down and your movie plays. To me that's the most rewarding part of all of this."

Thomas White is editor of Documentary magazine.