Every image tells a story. But is it actually the one you commissioned?

Put figures into a scene in our studio and within about a minute the conversation has left the architecture entirely. Who in the image is saying what to whom. Who's arguing. Who's flirting. Which two are in a love triangle with the bloke by the bike rack.

It's a joke, and it's the same joke every time. But it only works because every one of us is doing the reading involuntarily. Posture, distance, where someone's weight is sitting - we can't not interpret it. Which makes it a useful reminder, because the person opening your brochure or working through your planning submission is doing precisely the same thing, with no less conviction and considerably less humour.

Which raises the question that actually costs money. A story is being told either way. Is it the one you commissioned?

Film has never needed convincing on this point. Where the camera sits, who's in shot, what the light is doing, what's been left just outside the frame - all of it is understood to be a decision that carries meaning. Nobody shoots a scene and calls it finished on the grounds that it looked convincing.

Visualisations get treated differently, and I've never really understood why. It’s a single frame doing the work that film spreads across a whole sequence. That's harder, not easier. And it's exactly where the line falls between a pretty picture and a visualisation: one is a model that has been rendered accurately. The other has been directed.

Which brings me to the thing our industry gets wrong most often.

People aren't set dressing

Figures aren't in an image to prove the space gets used. Buildings are made for people - they're a framework for human activity - so what the people are doing is the closest thing you have to showing what the building is actually for.

Which means the demographic matters. What they're wearing matters. Where they gather, and where they deliberately don't, matters.

A hospitality shot with nobody in it says nothing about the buzz of the place at seven on a Friday. A plaza shot with people distributed evenly across it says “Weekly fire drill.” Crowds milling through a space designed for calm quietly undo the thing you're selling. Get it right and the same figures say: relaxed, well used, a business thriving in this location.

People do other work too - drawing the eye to the entrance, marking out the amenity space, showing the new route where somebody will walk their dog.

Which is really about direction

If you haven't decided where you want the viewer to look, they won't look anywhere in particular. No hierarchy, no engagement. They get bored - or worse, they engage hard with the wrong thing and leave with a message nobody intended.

Some direction is heavy-handed, and should be. We produced a plaza shot with a full Christmas market: reindeer, braziers, snow, the lot. Cinematic, unashamedly.

Most of it isn't. Cloud shadow falling so the new building sits in light. A little more shine on the new fabric than on the existing around it, so you know without being told which is the new thing. Vehicles arranged so the circulation reads. The surrounding development dropped back a touch in intensity so the eye goes where it should.

Camera height does more than any of it. High up and you're in overview mode - detached, diagrammatic, thinking about function. Drop to eye level and it becomes immersive. Put a single figure at the centre and the viewer feels the space through them.

The readings you didn't ask for

The same wiring works against you.

A scheme shown at dusk, lit up, full of activity can read to local residents as a workplace that never stops - an objection handed over for free. Too many cars on the approach and the brain files it as congestion, so connectivity becomes the problem you were trying to argue away. Leaves across the paving and planting spilling over the edges, and a potential occupier concludes - without ever consciously forming the thought - that the landlord isn't on top of things.

That's why I'm exacting about landscape looking considered and well maintained. It isn't tidiness for its own sake. It's a statement about how the building will be run.

Why the industry is behind on this

For most of the history of archviz, the battle was making things look real. It took a disproportionate share of the time and it was genuinely hard. That's largely solved now - and the habit has outlived the problem. Photorealism is still treated as the goal when it was only ever the entry ticket, and the storytelling layers get skipped.

Meanwhile, the part of a viewer's brain that reads people, light, tidiness and hierarchy isn't going to give anyone a break for having spent the budget elsewhere.

The awkward part

When all of this is working, nobody notices. It's processed below the surface and the response is simply that it's a good image.

Which is why we point it out. Otherwise the assumption is that we rendered the architect's model and it all came together on its own. It didn't. It came together because we worked out what story needed telling - and then built every decision in the frame around it.