On a lighter note... At a recent dinner with some colleagues from an earlier life, the discussion turned to how the construction of a building is like making a movie. Both are very complex, and both take hundreds, if not thousands, of professionals, each with a specific role to play. Giving credit to those professionals is a different matter, especially in the AEC world even though we spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours preparing award presentations and then eating at a rubber chicken or BBQ award dinners to collect our “hardware” as my colleagues call it.
To give you some sense of how they are different; I went online to discover that there are typically (in the major movies) two types of credits: opening and closing. In the opening credits, the producer, director, funders, and production companies are called out with everything from logos to names, and the top three or four major stars are credited. (probably negotiated into the actor’s movie contract negotiated by their agents).
In the closing credits (which most of never see since we don’t often stay to see the names of the “gaffer “or “driver” or “green screen” artists or “stand-ins” or stunt performers or even the other actors are since we are likely in a hurry to get out of the theater as fast as possible so that the ushers can clean up the trash and get ready for the next movie) are the names of the hundreds or thousands who made the movie come alive.
As an example, according to an article in the New York Times, for the making of the blockbuster film Iron Man 3, there were 3,700 names listed in the closing credits. That’s right 3,700 and that might not have been everyone. Likely the folks who worked to feed the cast and crew or clean out the “porta cans “or supply the “picky “actors with nuts and snacks might have been omitted. None the less, 3,700 were called out in the credits.
Can you imagine if we listed in the credits on our project portfolios the hundreds of subs and suppliers and skilled craft workers it takes to do a build? Even though it seems that in the more recent films, the companies are listing more names in the closing credits as it takes an ever-growing list of technicians, programmers, and graphic artists and even gamers to make today’s films, we are a long way from doing anything like that in our industry.
Contrast the movie credits with our industry where it takes several phone calls just to discover who the production architect or the structural engineer was on a major project. A couple of years ago I was trying to give credit to a drywall company for a particularly complex project and after three or four calls to the owner, architect, general contractor, I finally gave up. Can you imagine what I would have gotten had I asked for the name of the drywall foreman or the glass manufacturer?
After thinking about it, I believe that we give credit in the AEC field like the movie folks give in their opening credits or on Oscar nights. We recognize the owners, the architects, sometimes the structural engineers, maybe the civil engineers, the General contractors, and major subs, but we are not yet to the point that the movie industry is in that we give credit to the thousands of professionals who make today’s projects come alive. Many of the individual companies or clients do congratulate their key professionals inside their own operations and that is great, but maybe it is time that there was a venue to recognize those men and women who gave their time and talent to complete their part of a build that will stand for the next 50 years in tribute to them.
On the other hand, maybe it is enough that they tell their children and their grandchildren as they drive by, “I helped build that one and that one and that one and…”
Here’s to all of the unnamed men and women, skilled and unskilled, professional or trained who all work together to make projects “come alive” for the users and tenants who occupy them. When you go to the movie this holiday season or watch a streaming video on Hulu or Netflix, pay attention to the credits and see who worked on its production. Maybe one day soon the AEC industry will find a way to do the same thing.
