It’s becoming the unavoidable norm: after months of arduous journeying through the bureaucratic jungles of planning permission, you finally have the go-ahead for your meticulously-imagined development of beautiful, high-quality homes.
So the next step is to build them and sell them. Or preferably sell them whilst building. If you’re lucky enough to have a reliable, preferred CGI supplier then you’ll give them a quick bell, wing your plans over and fingers crossed, within a week or two they’ll be sending you a low res architectural visualisation of your development.
You make a few changes, tweak it here and there, and hey presto! Before you’ve even ordered the scaffolding you’re armed with a jpeg which no-one would know wasn’t a photograph, unless you told them. You’re sorted for brochures and hoardings and your sales enquiries start flooding in.
Nowadays we take all this for granted, but CGIs have only been a property marketing staple for the last few years.
In conversation with a long-term customer the other day, I found myself marvelling at his tales of CGI yore: ‘Back i’the day,’ he said (imagine strong Yorks accent) ‘we dint use computer graphics at all. I’d get the plans off me architect, pass them onto an artist. He’d have a bit of a look and paint a picture o’ it, and that were that.’
The Pixel Workshop was one of the few early CGI companies which paved the way from these rudimentary beginnings of architectural visualisation to sophisticated CGIs becoming the bread and butter of the property marketeer’s world.
It all began with a father and son website design team, who, back in the late 90s, were visiting a large local Manchester builder with a view to designing his website.
As with many pioneering ideas, Pixel’s first CGI was fuelled by a chance remark in a conversation that might never have happened. The builder in question wondered if a computer generated image of the house could be produced even before he had built the house. Vijay and his computer-savvy son looked into the concept; they found there wasn’t a go-to company which could provide such a service.
What they did find was the software to do it, which had recently dropped in price to the point it was worth taking a punt on. They also discovered that the North-West had a glut of recently-qualified gaming artists straight out of uni. Swathes of graduates who could easily wrap their minds around modelling buildings instead of modelling spear-shooting dragons in archaic gore-dungeon castles.
And so Vijay took the risk. He bought the software and placed an ad on the student union notice-board. In his own words: ‘We did it. Looking back on it now, the image was rubbish, but the client loved it because no-one else had such a thing. And we had spotted an opportunity to mine.’
With their first successful computer generated property image securely emblazoned onto the hard drive, Vijay and his son took to the phones. They called every house-builder in the area, offering their new service. They were met with an understandable degree of scepticism until they pointed out that their first client had already sold the house he was building, months before it was finished. They sent their image across and soon enough the orders started to come through…and thus The Pixel Workshop was born.
Click the link below to see how far we’ve come since then.
We’ve recently had an influx of new clients, who we’re delighted to welcome on board. Brian Elder, of Elder Properties in Hartlepoole, it has been my absolute pleasure to pop your CGI cherry. Hurstwood Holdings, Manchester-based neighbours and property giant, we have been honoured to impress you with architectural renders of your beautiful designs. Marketing gurus Glow, it’s been an exciting race to produce the CGIs for your latest brochures.
But the flip-side of this most welcome new business is the ebb and flow phenomenon which CGI companies are inherently subject to: unpredictable tides of new orders, which all need accommodating, and most of which need accommodating now. Or yesterday.
But the CGI process isn’t a linear one, nor is it simple. After taking the CGI plunge and commissioning the job, there follows a period of intense communication, where we try to glean every detail of the forth-coming build from your imagination and from your architect’s. Some clients may not have even decided on which paving they’d like in the driveway, or what colour the rainwater pipes might be, or whether or not the external floor levels will be flat…
But if you want your image, we need to know! Decisions have to be made, whether that’s at board-meeting level or over a pint with a mate later that day.
And once we have all the information, production kicks in, in earnest. The client waits in quiet anticipation for those first drafts to arrive and when they do, it’s that eureka moment. Those 2D scribblings and that foundation ditch behind the site fence are suddenly transformed into a photo-graph of the finished thing. It’s a bit like going to the hospital for your twelve week scan and catching the very first glimpse of your new baby. Only in the words of Brian Elder: ‘It’s so much better than that!’
Stage one of the process has come to fruition, to a resounding gasp all around.
After this initial amazement and relief comes stage two – a period of analysis and intense scrutiny. Because, let’s face it. You’ve never seen your beautiful designs look real before. And until you do, you might not realise that you’d rather have an oak timber cladding on part of the building than the bricks that are currently there. You might notice your architect missed a gate, or stipulated gravel rather than woodchips on your path. Or you might just fancy changing the doorframe to a different colour.
These may all seem like small, insignificant changes, but while you, the client, undergoes the process of deciding on them all, what’s going in on the design studio? That artist, the one who so thoroughly imagined your dream in order to create it, has moved on to the next job with its own deadline of yesterday, and before we can re-do the changes, we have to understand what they are, analyse them and get them in the queue. So, however small the change might be, it still requires a process to enable it.
The thing is, we can’t just hand over the amends for one project to another artist just because that one happens to be free. That’d be like leaving your three-year old with a new babysitter they’d never met before and bolting out of the door without leaving any instructions. A new artist on someone else’s job would need time to get to terms with the project before implementing any changes, and then they would do so in a different style. Chances are it just wouldn’t work, a bit like say Bryan Adams attempting an Arctic Monkeys cover.
Changes may well be a part of our process, and of course they take less time than the original modelling; but they still need scheduling and when the ebb becomes a flow, everything needs doing at once, and that isn’t always possible.
Which is why, in the words of our founder, sometimes it may seem that ‘…the elephant has gone through the gate but the tail is dragging.’
It’s no easy task getting an elephant through a gate, but once the required changes are made to help it pass, it is indeed a magnificent and triumphant elephant which emerges, and one that is equipped to take its owner to unchartered territories of success.
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