Pick of the Week

When I first saw this last week I initially really liked it. It had a bit of grit and a filmic quality. Then I watched it again and I liked it less.

I, like many others, felt compelled to compare it to the work of Alex Roman. It has the stylised look, with heavy grading, shallow depth of field and lens artefacts that Roman’s work has. On the third watch I liked it less again. The short shots made me feel like I wasn’t seeing enough and that it was a little hurried. Then I realised that I needed to view it less as a copy/tribute of the 3rd and the 7th and treat it as a piece in its own right.

Fourth time round, once I got over my flawed views, I really started to like it again. So what if styling cues have been seen before? It looks great here. There are some great shots. I now love the short exposure of certain elements. It makes you want to see more and that can only be a good thing.

The modelling and texturing work are very high quality and the lighting scheme is beautiful. There are parts of the environment that aren’t quite up there with the rest of the piece but they aren’t bad and are in the minority.

The actual design of the building looks good and is novel. The addition of actual butterflies in some scenes doesn’t come over as too obvious or cheesy and they aren’t given centre stage.

I love arch-viz work like this, which has some grunge and emotion involved. And, to all the detractors out there, surely the more work we see that is as good as Roman’s the better? It certainly is in my book. I’d much rather look at emotive work by passionate artists, than clinical renders of sterile spaces.