In Horoma's Head 09
Hi everyone,
Back in full speed, September has been quite hectic on the production side. So let's have a look at the theme of the month for this newsletter!
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The world of Podcast 🎤🎙🎧
Let's start off with a great news!
I've been following for almost a year now a podcast called There's Something About Archviz, hosted by Federic Biancullo. It's an original podcast in the sense that it deals with what most people would consider "secondary" topics of archviz, mostly business, health or client related, rather than the usual technical aspect (how many cores do you have?!!!)
I was surprised and very excited when Federico reached out to me last summer to have a little talk about my view on client management and what it can mean to "educate the client".
While this was the main theme for the exchange, we did cover many other small topics that are dear to me like client relationships, the mindset to adopt to minimize frustration and maximize creativity, my background altogether, and other things like that.
All this is happening on Spotify **here**
I highly suggest you give it a listen as it is a good summary of my philosophy of work I'd say. And also, if you didn't know about this podcast before, I highly suggest you check out the previous guests that all had valuable and sometimes unorthodox views on different topics.
The world of Youtube 🎵🔈🧠
This month I've released the usual 3 videos.
First one is a critique of my own work dealing with a competition I did some years ago. On this video I tackle more in depth the issue of building proper series of images and not make them too redundant. For some reason, this issue went under my radar while working on the project. So in the video I give some thoughts and tips on what to keep in mind when you're working on several images for a project and how you can organize them to maximize their individual and collective power.
Second one is a video I wanted to make for a while tackling the topic of "working for free". This is something I often see people mentioning (in good or bad ways), so I wanted to clarify a stance that I think is the most sensible on the topic. It is important to clarify what I mean by working for free (because my research have shown that people manage to talk about different things on such a simple concept as "working for free"), so I did that in the beginning of the video, to then cover typical tricks clients use to justify why you should work for free, and then explain as thoroughly as I can why this doesn't make sense, how you can reply, and why even the most beginner artist still creates value for a client.
This goes quite deep in the concept of value, time preference and pricing, but it is a necessary conversation to have I think.
Finally I released a video that is a little excerpt of my composition course where I talk about Gestalt theory and how it is, despite what most people tend to think, still very relevant for us archviz artists. So if you don't know Gestalt theory at all, definitely check the video, and if you do know the concept but think it's useless, think again and check the video!
So yep, diverse topics, I'll hope this will give you food for thoughts and help you in becoming a better artist and businessman 😋
The world of surgery 💉👩⚕️🥼📄
What does it have to do with archviz? Well not much. But beginning of this month I had minor surgery for wisdom tooth removal and my appointment was right in the middle of a deadline.
The point of this information can seem secondary, but we tend to push our health in the background when we get too hyped on projects. I thought recovering from this pretty minor surgery would take a day maximum, but after a week I was still in pain, which made working much harder than it should be, and sleeping almost impossible, which in turn made both the recovery and working a longer process than it should have.
The point here is to really be more mindful of our own body and the time we actually need to recover properly from any event (whether physical or psychological) and take the time to accomodate. Work should always be second after ourselves, even if this is your "one in a lifetime opportunity" contract coming along.
Of course for minor things like my little anecdote, rescheduling would have been easier, but eh 😁
The world of - music - composition 🎹🎼🎹🎨
I recently stumbled upon a very short video of Jacob Collier talking about music theory and the concept of right or wrong note that, for my weird mind that always makes odd connections, rang a bell regarding my composition course.
Indeed in this video Jacob explains, if I paraphrase a little, that there are only strong or weak decisions, but not necessarily wrong notes. They could happen to just be in the wrong context. And he then asks an interesting question, as to how can we justify that "wrong" sound?
And the parallel with visual composition, to me at least, is striking. Indeed everything is potentially possible to make an image work, but whether it work or not will always depend on the context in which you are working (your brief) and the strength of the decisions you are making.
This is why the so called "rules" of composition are pure bullsh*t. Depending on the context, following the rule of thirds will make a boring image, or having my horizon perfectly horizontal will not create the effect I'm after, or correcting the verticals will not create the dynamism I'm after.
What matters is how you justify your approach, and if it does the effect you're after to a broader audience.
You can check the short intervention of Jacob at the following here
The world of RGB art 🟥🟩🟦
RGB art? Well, every render is done in RGB so what's new about that?
Well, this little gallery is fun because the principle is described as follow : "_All RGB colors from 0-16777215. Where 0 = 0, 0, 0 and 16777215 = 255, 255, 255. All even numbers are in the upper half of the image. All odd numbers in the lower._" . As we can quickly notice it leads to many different types of visuals while retaining, on the "realistic" one a sort of odd feeling that something is not quite right.
You can check out all the artworks here
The world of moving deadlines ⌚📢⏰⏱
When you work mostly on competitions if there's one thing that matters it's the deadline.
Sometimes you can be lucky and it moves and it gives you more time than you expected. Sometimes you can be unlucky because it moves and it falls in the middle of an already busy schedule and then ... you're kind of screwed.
I haven't really figured out how to deal with these changes without basically overworking myself when all the deadlines are stacking one on another. Since I know, by experience, that clients will usually take this deadline move as an opportunity to put in extra work and therefore don't want to have to do their renderings several weeks prior to the final deadline.
So yep, just an open question that I keep asking myself everytime this happens. How to manage these changes without constrainting too much the client, destroying my health, and not accomodate too much leeway around each project, which would mean turning down more contracts than necessary.
Hopefully I'll find something that accomodates all this one day, in the meantime, what a dilemma!
That'll be all for this month newsletter
I hope you'll enjoy some of (or all!) the content I shared here and would love to hear back from you if you ever want to further the conversation on one of the topic, feel free to reach out to me!
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