Making short film on the suburbs

[Benjamino3]

I'm making a short film about the suburbs and I'm unsure what to include in the film. What is a key feature of suburbs that I should film? In other words what comes to your mind when you think of the suburbs?
Thanks

 

[Quality]

Suburbs mean outside of a city. Any area out side of a city is considered suburbs. A waste land, a long road with cornfields left and right or just grass, trees or forest with little to no houses. Even a residential area is considered as suburbs. On each side of the road, many houses adjacent to each other. So any area as long as it's not in the city is called suburbs.

 

[AcousticAl]

Suburbs mean outside of a city. Any area out side of a city is considered suburbs. A waste land, a long road with cornfields left and right or just grass, trees or forest with little to no houses. Even a residential area is considered as suburbs. On each side of the road, many houses adjacent to each other. So any area as long as it's not in the city is called suburbs.

False.

Suburbs are, by definition, districts of a city, especially residential. Suburbs are edges to city limits.

Once you get outside the city limits and into wastelands(?), corn fields, and prairies, you have entered rural area.

As to the OP, the stereotypical modern suburb is a developed community of close-packed and similarly-designed houses. It's all about unformity. Sidewalks, upper middle-class residents, perfectly-manicured yards. Many of these modern, suburban developments are populated with streets full of McMansions (large homes that are quickly built from stock designs and materials). Look up Malvina Reynolds' song "Little Boxes", which is commentary on suburban development and their (stereo)typical blandness.

 

[Quality]

Yes, what he said.

 

[directorik]

What is a key feature of suburbs that I should film?

Does this short film have a story? Or are you asking about the physical
description of a "suburb"?

A suburb is never a rural area; forests are not a suburb, grass isn't a suburb,
long roads are not called a suburb. It's short for suburban which means inhabiting
an area outside of a city. The suburb is always an inhabited place.

Benjamino3, I don't know what key feature you should film, but what comes to
my mind is the same as AcousticAl; in the U.S. I see single family houses often
very similar on gently winding streets. What is your film about?

 

[Filman]

His theme seems to be SUBURBS and the rest seems to be open for discussion.

In a suburb it might be totally silent, nothing happening and suddenly there's a lot going on and a hell of a noise.

 

[Morris]

In some of the older suburbs, you will find a lot of differences in houses especially in historical districts. In some neighborhoods, you will find people who help each other out and perhaps know each other more than in some cities.

 

[FreddyLongSongs]

Have Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" playing.

 

[Alcove Audio]

Have Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" playing.

Or Rush's "Subdivisions."


There are many different types of suburbs depending upon geography and economics. There are quite a few wildly different types of suburbs outside the Five Boroughs of of New York City, for example - Long Island (Ocean-side and bay-side communities, some old, some new; lots of those planned communities from the 1950's), Northern New Jersey ("What exit?" Sorry, a joke about the New Jersey Turnpike which runs the length of the state; that's what you ask instead of "what town?"), and Westchester County (a mix of old communities, planned communities of various generations, wealthy, middle-class, lower middle class).

I've lived in seven (7) vastly different suburban communities, most within a radius of 20 miles. As I sit writing this there are "poor" suburbs within two (2) miles south of me and multi-million dollar homes less than three (3) miles north of me.

As to what makes up the suburbs in general? The "tempest in a teapot" that occurs all too frequently - zoning, budgets, pet peeves, school curriculums, local scandals, etc.

Otherwise it's just people in their myriad variations, and their myriad personalities playing out on the suburban stage.

Why not just go to the suburbs and do some first hand research?

 

[indietalk]

Seeing you're from Oz maybe this helps.

In Australia, a suburb is a named and bounded locality of a city, with an urban nature, regardless of its location within that city. The term inner suburbs refers to the older, denser, urban areas closer to the original colonial centre of the cities and outer suburbs refers to the urban areas more remote from the centre of the metropolitan area. Sometimes the term "middle ring suburb" is used to refer to areas that were urbanised early in a city's expansion after the inner suburbs had become established. This differs from British and North American usage, in which the term "suburb" is usually not applied to urban areas (neighborhoods) that are close to a major city centre or inside the central city's local government boundary.