Visual Essay Main Project Work

 I decided to do a collaborative project with Ange to explore the world of alcohol and pub culture. Our first idea was to create a video from a set of recorded interviews with one or more Landlords from pubs in Bristol, to get to better know them and their line of work. After all, without landlords, there would be no pubs.

The first thing we did was start out with a rough plan of action so that we had a better idea of where to start off with setting the video and interview plan into action. This helped us to better organise ourselves.

We started off by going to our local Spoons to do some observational drunk drawing, I quickly decided that Ange was a better subject than the patrons though so I was slightly distracted from the task at hand. I did however, figure out that I preferred a more simple style of drawing.

We then started making a plan for the video structure and how we would present and report our content.

We then decided we wanted to create an animated title card to go with the video, we designed the title and took inspiration from some pub themed fonts we found.

While we waited to hear back about our animation booking, we tested out some different styles and ways of using different mediums such as ink and dip pen, normal brush pen and using watercolours with this. We settled on using ink and dip pen with a Japanese watercolour. The bleed using the brush pen was too much and we came up with a pretty quickfire way of drawing.

After that, we began emailing a few chosen pubs with our proposal. We emailed five pubs in total with the initial idea that we would like to interview the landlord/manager and illustrate the pub whilst getting drunk and recording the process and progression of our drunkenness and its effect on our artwork.

After we had a one on one tutorial with Paul, we decided to rethink our project and our aims became more direct. We left behind the idea to do the interviews as none of the pubs we had emailed had responded or were unable to take part. Instead we decided that we were more interested with what effects alcohol has on creativity.

We wanted to make some surveys that we could hand out at our chosen pub, so we started making roughs for these. We also created a new video structure as that was still something we wanted to make but as more of a vlog instead on informative structured media. What we want to find out from the data we collect is if there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and levels of creativity. We tailored questions toward that goal. We also made a chart for ourselves to keep check of our alcohol consumption along the way.

These are the Surveys we created. Along with the surveys, we decided we were going to create a set of illustrated beer mats as our chosen canvas, we created these beer mat sized pieces of watercolour paper to imitate the real thing. This method of working kept things simple and they were easy to work with. This also caused a very nice man called Ben to come over to us and ask us what we were doing. This encounter jumpstarted the collection of our survey data.

Then we put our plan into action at the Hatchet Inn near the Hippodrome! Above is a screenshot from one of the update videos we filmed throughout the evening. We arrived at the pub around 6:40pm and started on the drinks immediately. Not before we did our first drawing though, so that we had a baseline to compare our other drawings to. The Hatchet inn was a quite small pub hidden away from the busy streets, those that were there were probably regulars or new the area well. There was a wide variety of people there, this made for an interesting environment. I'd say this pub was everything you could want from a very British pub. While we were there, we had our friend Mac be our designated supervisor, just in case things got out of hand and to ensure we left with everything we came with. He also made some illustrated beer mats with us and was a large factor in our mood and what we were drawing.

I tallied up the results from surveys and started to examine everything we had collected from the pub.

Above are all of the beer mats we created while we were at the pub, thirty three to be exact. We had started to edit the video in Premier Pro like we planned, but we quickly figured that we probably wouldn’t be able to finish it to a high enough quality in the time for the deadline so we fell onto our back up plan and then put all our remaining energy into creating a zine out of the data we collected and our beer mats.

This is the script that Ange put together for our original video idea. We have summarised each section and are going to use the text instead in our zine, to explain our data and the progression of our art. 

Our plan for the zine is to create a beer mat sized booklet of all of our drawings, in order of when they were drawn throughout the evening. As the zine will be so small, this limits the amount of text we can add so we really had to narrow down what we wanted to say.

We put all the pages together in Indesign and organised them in order of how many drinks had been consumed. After doing this, we added the summary of each sections and the credits. We then went to the printing bureau to go and print the zine but while speaking to them we found it wouldn't be ready until after deadline. However! We arrived on Thursday morning and to our surprise, it was printed!! We were so relieved and then had to trim down parts and create a sleeve to hold the mats together.