Considering the topic, the treatment is pretty clever.
The subject is streets.
And while everyone uses them, and they’re kind of the carotid artery of urban existence, making them into something most people would devote 7 minutes and 35 seconds of their lives to is something of a challenge.
That’s exactly what’s possible, however, for a new release by—sound of trumpets here—the City of Kirkland. The release is titled, “The Lifecycle of a Street.”
And while that’s probably not as big a draw as maybe Sunday Night Football, it’s also kind of an intriguing effort by people who are supposed to be making a community function to communicate with their customers — the people who use city streets.
To do that, the film starts in what might be an unexpected place: Ancient Egypt. That’s where the earliest roads were built, about 4,600 years ago, the film explains.
By the time a viewer has seen the entire presentation, they’ve learned about things like alligator cracks in pavement, and how it costs about 50 cents a square yard to fix a street crack if it’s caught early and about $65 a square yard if maintenance is delayed.
The film was released Sept. 15 and is a production of Kirkland TV, which has the slogan of, “Tune in-Log on.”
The script was written by Christian Knight, city communications intern who’s getting a master’s degree at the University of Washington, with film work by Mike Connor, city cameraman.
Knight says he was trying to figure out a way to start the film and came up with the Egyptian introduction.
“I wanted some historically significant moments,” he said.
As is common in writing anything, after the video was finished, Knight says he found something better, a description of 16th-Century road building in England, which allowed a proliferation of commercial activity and a “mass expansion of economic life.”
That’s about what roads still do today, of course, with frantic efforts always underway to keep things moving.
The street video is just one of the latest productions on Kirkland TV, with another presentation, by the Kirkland Youth Council about distracted driving, sure to you make you cringe, since it’s kind of a horror-film description of such things as the dangers of texting while driving, resulting in weaving over the yellow centerline and multiple deaths.
If those videos don’t whet your cinematic tastes, you could maybe go back to such previous releases as an Urban Land Institute presentation of July 21 or an update from the city manager on July 15.
Plus, there are recordings of City Council meetings and other public gatherings, hundreds of them, in fact, all available through Hollywood-at-City Hall. The presentations can be seen on the city’s Web site at www.kirklandwa.gov, or on Comcast Channel 21 and Frontier Communications Channel 31.
