In Horoma's Head 06
Hi everyone,
This month passed a bit weirdly. I piled up contracts for next month, but focused mostly on this month cohort of the masterclass. 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 🎵🔈🧠
For this month, as usual, 3 new videos were posted on the channel.
Reinforce your composition by placing cutouts the right way was a video I wanted to do for a long time. It deals with, well, how people have a heavy visual weight in image and how we can use that to our advantage in refining our composition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqNSp4Rq-bw&t=71s
Critique of this month was regarding a set of images for a library that I was not super happy with. The video mainly focuses on me figuring out why it didn't work and how I would tackle it now. I think there's a lot to learn in there so I highly suggest you check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ2yVJLEXAE&t=2s
Last but not least, many people asked me about my photoshop postproduction workflow, so in this video I take the same project from the critique and do the postprocessing of a new point of view that I think would have worked better. While my workflow is definitely not super original, there might be bits and pieces in there that might interest you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avSIY7W_9qU
The world of stupidly fun and retarded interfaces 🖥🕹💻
A funny website turning the worst of UI and UX into a simple game. Very informative on how clarity is important in all the steps of the process, and on what we call "dark patterns" in the world of UX.
The world of AI machine learning drawing 🕹🧠🎨
The latest software created by Nvidia called Nvidia Canvas is now available for downloading. If you have an RTX card, you'll probably want to give it a go as it is definitely a fun tool to play with. It does of course starts to put into perspective the future of some artistic tasks and how they could be done by AI quicker and simpler. This is mainly why I always focused my teaching on learning the fundamentals of composition, perception and the likes, rather than simply relying on software proficiency.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/studio/canvas/
The world of cool artworks 🖼📷📼
Whether you enjoyed season 2 of Love Death and Robots or not, there is still undeniable amazing imagery in there that are worth analyzing. In this blogpost you can peruse some very nice artworks done for each of the episodes. Reminded me for some reason (not in style nor topic) of how exciting it was to have a look at the artworks you could find in the booklet of Diablo 1 back in the 90's, with amazing black and white drawings of each main characters.
The world of video inspiration 🎬🎥🔊
Last month I touched a bit on how boring archviz animations generally are, so here is another type of references that I found quite fun and that could be implemented in some way for some specific project. My favourite one of the lot is The Lion City II. It was done back in 2016 when tilt shifting and time-lapse were very trendy, but was doing it with a much higher level of expertise and dynamism that most of what we could see at that time... or today.
The world of feedback 💭💭💭
I've always been a sucker for feedback. It literally is the only thing that can help you grow since there's almost no chance you have an unbiased enough look at yourself or your own work. Interestingly, positive and negative feedback alike are helpful to improve, motivate yourself, and give you a potential path to getting better in a certain area.
On one of this month's video on Youtube I had a very nice and thoughtful comment that really warmed my heart and reminded me that even though the channel is not that big, it's still worth putting out there the content if even only a dozen of people appreciate it and learn from it. Back when I was a beginner, I know I would have benefited greatly from a channel that tries to go deeper than basic questions answered over and over again all over the internet.
On another note, one of the feedback I got this week from the second cohort of the masterclass was a bit negative (some areas and concepts were a bit unclear). Nonetheless it was written in a very encouraging way 😁 But the thing is when you think about it, when you start a course, or anything, the last thing you want to hear from people is just "yeah it's great, don't change anything!". There's way more potential for improvement when people tell you where things are wrong and give you direction.
So after reading the survey, I took some minutes to think about it and then sit down for the next 5 hours to think on how I can address all these issues for the next cohort.
Thanks to this "negative feedback" I can say that cohort 3 will be quite different from cohort 2 and hopefully much closer to the goal I've set myself with this course and delivering more value and clearer concepts to the customers (past and new onces thanks to the lifetime access 😁)
The world of interviews 🎤🎙🦠
An interview I suggest you to read to maybe get insight on the mindset of a (very) successful archviz studio, namely Mir.
A couple of quotes that resonated with me :
_"For an image to truly have impact, it needs to look different than anything else out there"
"The surprising truth is that the closer you work with someone, the more creative freedom you get."
"we used to make images based on pride and vanity. we wanted to WIN and to prove to everyone that we were the best. we didn’t care about our clients, we cared about our portfolio. multiple burnouts, depressions and a couple of mid-life crises later, we realized that we needed to find a better motivation in our work — and in life too actually."_
You can read the interview here : https://www.designboom.com/architecture/visualization-studio-mir-interview-trond-greve-andersen-mats-andersen-06-02-2021/
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