God's Architects

God’s Architects, by Zack Godshall, was an hour and a half long documentary about 5 extraordinary men who “blindly” built different structures for God. Each man had a different story, and a different reason for building their specific structure. Each man was religious, some more than others, and each building was built with a specific reason, history, and purpose.

The film was not broken up into 5 separate chapters, but the stories were inter-woven with each other. I like this film structure much more than “1, 2, 3…”. Most of the shots were not choreographed, it was a lot of him walking behind the person and letting them do what they wanted. I like that we were able to see the men actually building their structure, rather than them just talking about it. We first saw the structure, but then we were able to see and learn the process that goes about making it. My favorite was the God’s Mountain because I got to see the process of making adobe and all the hundreds of paint buckets the man had. He really wanted to send the message “God is Love”, and the shots let us see all the messages the man wanted to send out to the world.

The actual editing was very basic. There were no fades or transitions, just regularly cut shots. I think it would have looked good either way, but I like his choice. The music was original, and really didn’t play that big of a role in the film. It came in during the emotional scenes, for example, when the dad was telling the story of Lacy, his daughter. I really like that the music was original and it shows that he was willing to go the extra step instead of just using someone else’s music.

I really liked the film, and it was much more interesting than what I originally thought. It was simply done, with a simple message about God. We were also able to learn more about the film after when the Q and A. It was a good film and I would gladly recommend it to anyone.