Behind the scenes

See it Through Buffalo stitches together a story of school and city as told by the sights and sounds of Buffalo, and of our students at work on campus and in the community.

As a muse inspires the artist, so has Buffalo moved our faculty and students, to experiment, innovate, and create. As such, the film serves as both an ode to Buffalo, and an artistic reflection on the dynamic of inspiration and influence between a school and its city. 

Scenes from the city represent sites of intensive engagement by faculty and students, over the course of five decades. Sound focuses on the ambient hum of place without the didactic overlay of narration—extending an immersive experience of city and school and allowing the viewer to deduce meaning across the cut from one scene to the next.

Using complex techniques in time-lapse photography and sound recordings, the project's creative team captured a diverse cross-section of the city's urban landscape, including its collection of masterworks (Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building and Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin House); swaths of its urban fabric (the view of City Hall from Court Street, Frederick Law Olmsted's Delaware Park), sites of industry (Rigidized Metals, Boston Valley Terra Cotta), neighborhoods and communities (Perry Projects in South Buffalo, telescope houses on the East Side), sites of making and learning at UB (from the shop to studios), and sites of innovation and reuse (Silo City, Assembly House 150, Full Circle).