Link: You are one of my heroes.
I can't connect to the latest animation - it might be fine, but:
re-scolding, for the record, on why any single, long animation is bad in lieu of a comprehensive, "storytelling" approach:
"If you look at any piece of professional media, they spend a lot of time "storyboarding" their project so that their media bit has pacing and information at as fast a rate as can be presented. This pacing builds to a climax and ultimately, a resolution. A building has a story - salient places you want viewers to remember, and plenty of long ugly corridors you want them to forget. You need to decide the hierarchy of ideas presented to support selling the project. A long animation defies this and shows everything at the same pace and can't skip the crap. These long clips also bear striking resemblance to a "first-person shooter" video game. And there's no Archicad ShotGun object at the bottom of the view. I can now criticize this approach without being sexist. It used to be said that women hated animations, but now I'm old enough to know that anyone over fifty hates them, too. Queasy. They don't make story points fast enough. It is self-indulgent and bad movie-making.
The best animations are a carefully orchestrated series of short clips that speed up the storytelling, and make the points communicating building design to SELL THE IDEA. Like an essay, not a drunken ramble.
I hate animations in general, because for me, architecture is about details. You spend hours setting up an animation path that doesn't collide with walls, send your machine off for a long time to render a rough and tiny, jiggly mess and it fails the story. Even a series of short animations needs editing and assembly. This is slow work. The same effort could go into making a series of meticulously-composed, highly resolved, finely illuminated and entouraged views. They are placed in a multi-media application like PowerPoint, serenely cross-faded, [no gorpy effects, please, altho they are tempting - nothing like "sparkle"] alternating plain views with captioned views to convey your story point to the less-visual - and maybe one or two short animated clips - if they add to the story. Good architectural communication needs many kinds of imagery.
I believe that architecture is "reflective memory." [Except for Disney's Space Mountain Ride where architecture is "not throwing up."] We merely want to give viewers fine work to favorably fix their memory of the building like a photo album of a trip taken years ago fixes memory of the trip. You forget the time that Granada taxi driver over-charged €10 from the Airport to the Alhambra because you were arguing with him so hard you didn't take a picture.
So, call me an old guy, but architecture is stills, diagrams and text, not simply the novelty of motion.
Archicad users interested in better multi-media should read the screenwriting bible "Story" by gruff [he yelled at me, the geezer] Hollywood screenwriting guru Robert McKee.
Dwight Atkinson
