Dharanidharan Subramaniam

Beyond the Screen: Where filmmaking meets people

This thesis proposes a public film school in Winnipeg’s North Point Douglas neighborhood that explores how cinematic techniques can be translated into architectural strategies to reactivate industrial decay and encourage community participation. The project adapts a four-storey industrial mill built in 1912, introducing new volumes that accommodate teaching studios, production spaces, exhibition areas, and public workspaces. Together, these programs transform a vacant site into a center for filmmaking, learning, and shared experience.

The research reinterprets core cinematic methods such as framing, sequencing, rhythm, and montage as spatial operations rather than screen-based techniques. Through movement, light, sound, and materiality, cinematic thinking structures architectural experience, prioritizing atmosphere, encounter, and sensory engagement over representational symbolism. This approach responds to the site’s fragmented industrial character by fostering curiosity, anticipation, and interaction.

The design organises studios, workshops, and circulation routes as a sequence of cinematic “scenes,” guiding users through moments of invitation, observation, making, and gathering. Public pathways intersect with production spaces through framed views, layered transparencies, and controlled proximities, making the process of filmmaking visible without disrupting creative work. In this way, the building functions as an inhabitable screen that reveals and celebrates creative production.

By combining adaptive reuse with cinematic spatial organization, the project demonstrates how a public film school can blur the boundaries between audience and filmmaker, observer and participant. The thesis positions architecture as an active medium for storytelling and engagement, transforming neglected urban fabric into an inclusive and vibrant cultural institution.