Nobody Knows What It Looks Like Until It Exists

WARNING: this newsletter seems to have ended up a bit long. Sorry about that. But stick with - hopefully it’s useful!

The most common question we get asked is how long something will take.

The second most common is really the same question, just arriving slightly differently:

“We have a planning submission next week and need images.”

Or:

“We are in front of agents a week on Tuesday.”

We can usually help. That is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is what gets lost when the process is compressed, because it is rarely the thing people expect.

It is not always the quality of the final render.

It is the chance to change your mind.

The Honest Timing

A set of CGIs typically takes around four weeks.

That is not four weeks of rendering. It is four weeks that allows for the model to be built, views to be agreed, drafts to be issued, comments to come back, revisions to be made, and everyone who needs to review the images to do so properly.

We have turned images around in a week.

Sometimes less.

It is possible.

Animation and film usually need longer, because there are more decisions to agree: storyboard, pacing, camera movement, message, sequence, voiceover, music and review.

But the principle is the same.

The less time you leave, the fewer chances there are to improve the work before it has to be final.

Faster is often available.

It just costs you something other than money.

Drafts Are Where the Work Improves

Two rounds of drafts are our usual baseline, and they are not a courtesy.

They are where the project gets better.

The first draft is the point at which everyone involved sees the same thing at the same time.

• The developer.

• The architect.

• The agent.

• The marketing team.

• The landscape architect.

• Us.

Sometimes the draft confirms the brief.

Quite often, it changes it.

• A material does not read as expected.

• The chosen view is not quite doing the job.

• The building feels heavier than anticipated.

• The foreground is distracting.

• The landscape hides something important.

• The image answers the wrong question.

None of that is failure.

It is the normal business of turning drawings, assumptions and intent into something visible.

But when the programme is compressed, drafts are usually the first thing to suffer.

You still get the image.

You just get something much closer to the version everyone guessed at in the first meeting.

Nobody Knows What It Looks Like Until It Exists

This is the part worth sitting with.

None of us really knows what a scheme will look like until the work is done.

• Not the architect.

• Not the developer.

• Not the marketing agency.

• Not us. (Yep, even little ole’ us!)

Everyone has a strong idea of it. Often a very informed one.

But it is still an idea.

It is only when the building is modelled, lit, viewed and placed in context that the specific issues surface.

A colour behaves differently at scale than it did on a sample board.

A façade that looked balanced in elevation feels overbearing from the one angle that matters.

A planting strategy that works beautifully in plan quietly hides the thing the image was commissioned to show.

A view that seemed obvious turns out to be adequate, while the better one sits a few metres to the left.

That is why review time matters.

Because if you brief at the last minute, you are betting that the design, the view and the brief were all right first time.

They rarely are.

Too Early Can Cost You Too

The obvious conclusion is to start earlier.

Sometimes that is absolutely right.

If there is a board meeting, agent presentation, consultation, planning submission or design decision coming up, early visualisation can be extremely useful. The imagery has a job to do, and the review time has value.

But “earlier” is not always better.

If you bring a visualisation team in while the design is still likely to change substantially, and there is no decision or meeting in the meantime that needs images, you may simply be paying to build something before it is ready.

We can absorb a certain amount of change. We build a reasonable allowance for it into what we quote.

But revisions are not free, and we would rather be upfront about that.

A radical design change, a wholesale shift of viewpoints, or a change of mind about what the images are for can mean genuine rebuilding.

So the useful distinction is this:

Review cycles improve the work.

Revision cycles rebuild work that was based on information that changed.

Both have their place.

Only one reliably makes the project better.

The Useful Test

The question is not:

“How early can we start?”

The better question is:

“Is there something happening between now and the deadline that these images need to serve?”

If there is, then early may be genuinely useful.

• A board meeting.

• A consultation.

• An agent presentation.

• A planning submission.

• A material decision.

• A design option that needs testing.

In those cases, visualisation can help people make better decisions while there is still time to act on them.

If the honest answer is “no, we just wanted the images in hand”, it may be worth waiting until the design has settled.

Otherwise you may be buying revision cycles rather than review cycles.

And those are not the same thing.

A Different Kind of Timing

We have been brought onto projects at every conceivable stage.

At one end, everything is locked and coordinated, ready for a detailed planning submission.

At the other, there is barely a design at all.

Both can be right.

They are just answering different questions.

We once worked on a rooftop extension off one of London’s main streets where the client did not initially need an image for marketing or planning.

They needed to know the precise volume within which the architect could design without the extension becoming visible from street level.

So we helped calculate that envelope, and the architect designed inside it.

That was visualisation being used as a design constraint rather than a marketing output.

It only worked because we were involved early enough for the answer to be useful.

That is the point.

The question is not really:

“When should we commission visualisation?”

It is:

“What do we need visualisation to answer, and when does that answer need to exist?”

Some Things Have Their Own Clock

A few parts of the process do not care about your deadline.

Views and compositions are one of them.

On a plan, a view can look perfectly reasonable. It is only when alternatives are tested that the better option often appears. Rush that stage and you may end up with something adequate, which is a quiet and expensive kind of failure.

Photography has its own clock too.

For anything involving real context, photography is doing at least half the work. Given time, we shoot it properly: the right position, the right light, the right conditions.

Given no time, we work with whatever exists.

We can improve existing photography.

We cannot change the weather it was shot in.

Seasons matter as well.

Bare trees in February are not the same as full canopy in May. If greenery matters to the scheme, that is a fixed date in the calendar, not a preference.

And then there is the campaign itself.

A few weeks ago, in something like thirty degrees, we were putting together proposals for clients’ Christmas presentations.

It felt slightly absurd.

It was also correct.

Three Questions Worth Asking

So, rather than simply asking when to commission visualisation, it is worth asking three more useful questions.

First: what does the imagery need to achieve?

Planning, marketing, investor confidence, agent conversations, public consultation and design testing all have different requirements. The right timing depends on the job.

Second: when does that answer need to exist?

Not when would it be nice to have the image, but when does someone need to make a decision based on it?

Third: how much is still likely to change?

If the design is still moving significantly, starting too early may mean paying to rebuild. If the design is mostly settled but the deadline is close, starting too late may remove the chance to improve the work properly.

Too early can cost money.

Too late can cost options.

The useful moment is somewhere between the two.

Our advice is not “commission earlier”.

That is the sort of advice a supplier gives, and it is only true some of the time.

The better advice is to work backwards from the point at which the imagery needs to do something useful.

Add time for review.

Add time for the things with their own clock: photography, seasons, view testing, campaign dates.

Then commission.

That will sometimes land earlier than expected.

Occasionally it may land later than expected, because the design was not ready and there was nothing in the diary that genuinely needed the images yet.

Both can be right.

Nearly thirty years of doing this means we can usually see some of the problems before they arrive, and help steer around them.

But it does not create time that has already gone.

If you have a scheme coming up and are not sure when the visualisation should start, that is usually a short conversation and a useful one.

Happy to talk it through.

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