Scary Monsters. Super Creeps.

For most of my career, the people in architectural animation have been scary monsters. Wooden on a good day, and on a bad one like extras from Shaun of the Dead (one of my favourite films I should add).

They shuffle. They stare straight ahead. They walk through a brand new reception with the fixed purpose of somebody who has just risen from a shallow grave. And we're all remarkably good at noticing when something is wrong with another person. One strange walk or unnatural gesture, and the audience is watching that instead of the building the film was made to show.

Why the Camera Did All the Work

So for years the sensible answer to the zombies was to keep people small, distant and few. A figure at the far end of the yard. Two colleagues behind glass. Nobody close enough to inspect. They were there for scale and a bit of life, and nothing more was asked of them.

Which left the camera to provide the movement, as I wrote last week. It's also, I think, where the current enthusiasm for FPV drone films comes from. They're remarkable pieces of flying and I enjoy them: through the dock door, up over the racking and out through a window, like a roller coaster with a letting board at the end. But when the subject is large, empty and perfectly still, the camera is the only thing left that can move, and nobody has ever experienced a warehouse at that speed.

What's Changed

What's changed is that we can now put real-looking people into a scene and have them carry it.

We use AI for this, carefully and selectively, and I should be straight about it: it isn't easy. There's no single prompt that produces it. It takes planning, a good deal of iteration and somebody watching every shot, which is why for now you'll only find it in our higher-end films.

But the same person can now arrive at a building, walk in and move through it, and still be the same person in every shot. We've built a tool in the studio for exactly this, which produces a character from a set of parameters and keeps them consistent through a film. It's one of the better examples I have of speed going into the work rather than out of it. The film doesn't get cheaper. It gets a lead.

Who Does the Film Follow?

Which raises a question we never had to ask while people were background scenery. Who does the film follow, and what would seeing the building through them actually tell you?

Follow a driver arriving at six in the morning and the film is about access: the approach, the gatehouse, the yard and how the site works. Follow somebody on their first day and it's about arrival: the walk from the car park, the landscape, the entrance, reception. Follow a facilities manager and you'd find yourself looking at a different set of things altogether.

Same building, three films. Choosing between them is choosing what the film is for.

That's the part I find most interesting. A flythrough can show you every space in a development. Following a person shows you what those spaces are for.

It changes our job too. Once there's somebody to follow, the work is less like operating a camera and more like directing: deciding what the person wants, where they look and when they stop. That's a skill in its own right, and one our industry has mostly never needed.

The Person Still Isn't the Point

At the cinema the person is the point. In our work they can't be. A good protagonist leads the eye to the space and then gets out of its way, and one who upstages the building is only a better-looking version of the zombie problem.

There's a responsibility in it as well. A figure crossing a courtyard claims nothing. A person shown doing something specific is a statement about how the building works. The route they take, the kit they wear and the job they're doing all have to be true to the design, or it will be spotted at once by anybody who runs a real building.

And not every film needs a lead. Some spaces are better left empty, and sometimes a plain, conventional sequence is exactly right.

Getting a person into the scene was the hard part for a long time. Getting the right person is the job from here.

Until next week.

Rich

PS: This is the hundredth issue of Seeing is Selling. Thank you to everyone who's been reading, replying and occasionally disagreeing with me. If there's a subject you've been waiting for and I've somehow avoided it a hundred times running, reply and tell me. I'm usually short of ideas on a Friday morning.