The plan was to set up a few cameras and explore the building from different angles and perspectives. Besides that I started playing with a basic light setup with a HDRI. It’s a quite interesting building which is located in a tight space surrounded by other buildings, this in my opinion makes the rest of the building a complementary part of our protagonist, there’s an interesting contrast in style and materials so I tried to keep the other buildings in the shots and play with that.

I even went further and tried an angle as if someone is taking a photo from a 2nd floor from a neighbor building.

Rather than start picking interesting views right away I decided to spend a couple days thinking about the building itself. How do people use it, and interact with it? Having experience with being a student in architecture classes I remember how proud we were of our building, and how much time we spent sketching it from every angle. The narrative I landed on is set during a Communications Skills class for Architecture students, and they are clustered around the building while standing, sitting on the ground, or benches trying to do timed “3 minute quick sketches” of the structure. The Hero is a female student holding up her pencil to building trying to understand the ratio of the windows in the facade.

This initial phase was just a stroll around the project, getting a grasp of potential images/perspectives to capture and getting a grasp of the graphical impact of some viewpoints. None of these are definitive, they are merely exploratory, with a simple white shader with AO and a simple sky/sun setup.
This is the preliminary phase that will eventually lead to the final images, and a playful approach with the liberty needed to find unexpected and interesting viewpoints.