In Horoma's Head 05

Hi everyone,

Last month was a bit slower and gave me time to refocus a bit, or at least try to. Let's have a quick look at some topics for this new installment of In Horoma's Head newsletter.

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The Youtube channel monthly report 🎵🔈🧠

This past month I've released 3 new videos :

First one was a Teardown of a competition we won with a client dealing with a school. The video dives a bit in why and how I managed to convince the client to go with different point of views than the one chosen, and then the usual critique of the final result that could have been better.

Second video deals with how to deal with poor feedback from clients. Behind this motivating title hides mainly a critique of artists mindset that tend to think clients are responsible for all their professional failures. So I do take the time to address what is actual bad feedback, how to address it, and how to prevent it from happening again.

Last video I posted was regarding references managing where I explain how I use Eagle in order to streamline my process of references gathering and moodboarding. I also give some insight on how organizing properly your references will give you a boost in both productivity and creativity.

So yep, big topics that I highly suggest you check out!

Finalizing cohort #1 Composition from the ground up 👌⏰🧠

First cohort of the course is now over and I'm almost done with all the Battle Plans. Getting to talk about each artist's work in a one-to-one meeting is actually super exciting and really helps in the learning process for the artist I do the review for as much as it helps me refining my understanding of common pitfalls artists can fall for so that I can better address it in the channel or in the masterclass.

I'm still gathering some toughts for some tweaking for cohort #2, but overall the feedback was very positive so this makes things all the more motivating to push this project further.

The masterclass is now live!

Cohort #2 of Composition from the ground up 👁🧠👁

Next cohort of the course will take place on the last weekend of June and enrollment is open again. If you haven't checked out the landing page of the course, I highly suggest you to do so.

The course is centered around composition, taught the right way, or at least I think so. And once it's taught the right way, it really expands your horizon and gives a complete new light on how to use all the concepts it involves in your work. That's not me who says it, but all the students I've had in the beta and first cohort. And I do say so too actually 😁

So if you want to learn how to leverage composition in order to make better visuals, maximize your productivity, and sell more compelling ideas to your clients, this is the course for you. The lifetime access ensures that even though the course is in its early days, you'll still get access to it when it finally becomes a full fledged and nicely packaged course on how to become a kickass archviz artist!

The world of course building and revenue streams 💻💶💶

I've been following the career of Nat Eliason for quite some time now and he recently did an interesting interview talking about how he builds his revenue streams and his philosophy regarding his very cool course called Effortless Output in Roam.

He talks also quite extensively about the difference between self-paced and cohort systems which gave me food for thoughts on how I want my course to look like in the future. 2021 is still dedicated to experimenting, but it's good to have a clearer picture of where I should take things.

Interview can be seen here : https://nathanbarry.com/037-nat-eliason-making-money-launch/

Also if you're not familiar with the work of Nathan Barry, definitely check that guy out too 😉

The world of boring realism 🕹🎮🖥

Here is a funny experiment done by some developers/researchers.

They basically trained an AI in order to recreate a replica of GTA V that is more "realistic".
While the technical video is interesting on many aspects and show how their method is very convincing and far better than ones done in the past, one thing that I notice on an artistic level is that : realism is boring.

And this is not really a discovery, but it does show that simply creating accurate replicas of reality in a 3D world is very boring without any artistic direction. This is why I've always emphasized fundamentals of composition over pure technical knowledge. Because if one knows how to make perfect materials and lighting, and model very accurately a scene, but doesn't really know what to do with that, then it just becomes a boring replica of what to expect from the project once it's built. But with proper knowledge of the fundamentals of composition, and basically an artistic mind, you can give a lot of power even to a less technically-refined image, and also, on a purely marketing point of view, you can differentiate from other people that do boring realistic images 😉

Learning to see 👁🤓👁

Machine learning is a very fun tool and can give interesting and creative results as you can see in the different examples in the following link : http://www.memo.tv/works/learning-to-see/

The world of internal combustion engines 🚗🚙🏎

If you don't know how a combustion engines work, this website provides a very thorough explanation of the main principles with very nice animated visuals to understand the concepts : https://ciechanow.ski
And if you know how it works, you should still check it out just for the cute and very clear animations anyway!

The world of more original animations 🎬🎥🔊

I rediscovered recently the work of 9sekunden. This is a German team of videographers doing work centered around architecture, urbanism and nature.

I personnally find 99% of the archviz commercial animations out there boring af. Always the same type of shots, pans, music. Even studios that do incredible stills end up doing the same boring stuff when it comes to animation!

Here are some thoughts regarding 9sekunden works that I think would be worth pondering and potentially implementing in archviz animations :

• No f*ing cliché music. But rather emphasize soundscape of the site of the project.
• Also there is sometimes a nice discrepancy between real use soundscape, and minimal use in the video (say many children are shouting and playing, but in the shot you only have a couple of people that let you retain a better sense of serenity and understanding of space)
• Variations of types of framing (no endless boring trucking shots)
• Static shots and minimal animation (people walking, wind)
• Aerial drone shots (top down views)
• Details, details details (and I'm talking architecture details, not a random book on a table or a bevel edge of a random table that no one cares about)

So yep, cool work I'd suggest you check out. Other sources of inspiration worth exploring would be In Residence (I think I already mentioned it) and The Local Project that do have interesting ways of shooting architecture too.

That will be all for the moment. Hope this little overview of In Horoma's Head gave you some interesting pieces to think about.

If you find this utterly boring and useless, please let me know before unsubscribing 🎀. If on the other hand you do like it, then I'm glad, and feel free to share it with your archviz pals that would maybe like it too by sending them here : https://www.horoma.net/newsletter-subscription

Thank you

All the best for the upcoming month!

Cheers

Simon