Capturing the kind of environment that coffee shops create and the things that coffee shop owners care about has been so interesting and so much fun. Being in a coffee shop always makes me happy and excited to be in a creative space. In fact, I am at one as I write this!
This coffee guide is coming together at a much slower pace than I planned. Because my project revolves around talking with so many different people, finding a time to interview the owners of the shops I want to feature has been incredibly difficult. With a heavy class schedule on my end, and obviously a very busy work schedule on the owners’ side of things, lining up a time to meet has not been working well. I reached out to five different coffee shops: Mountain Goat, Unlocked Coffee Roasters, The Village Grind, Barista Alley, and Bridge City Coffee. The only shops out of those five that I have completely interviewed are Unlocked Coffee Roasters and Mountain Goat. Coordinating with other people’s lives is the most difficult part I have noticed about my individual project and the group project.
I reached out a few weeks ago to set up interviews for the use of short videos about their shop. My original plan was to mention a plethora of shops here in Greenville in the narrative and photography, but only do feature videos on the five shops mentioned. My idea as of now is to use the photography element for the shops that I cannot schedule interviews with and use video for the ones I can. I made a mood board for what I want the photography piece to look like which should stay the same as the original plan. The videos, however, I feel like I may have hit a dead end with for some of the coffee shops, so I will do a heavier focus on few rather than doing a wider scope on many.
What you see above was part of my storyboarding. We talked about this earlier in the semester and how important it is to storyboard your ideas before walking into something. The chapter on storyboarding in Design is Storytelling helped me to formulate my ideas in how I was going to storyboard all of the pieces.
“Designers produce storyboards to plan the actions that take place on a digital screen when a product is being used.”
Ellen Lupton, Design is Storytelling
Going into each shop I have filmed in, I took a list of shots I knew I needed to capture. I had to plan this out because I wanted to get in and get out as fast as I could so I didn’t interrupt anyone else’s work day. Below is the list of shots I wrote out when I visited Unlocked Coffee Roasters. The shots go along with what the owner talked to me about in our interview.
- The outside and location of the shop
- Scan menu on wall
- Barista making a drink
- Chocolate espresso
- Bakery items
- Pan de bono – going into the oven and coming out
- An item being handed to a customer
- People gathering in the shop
- Film it empty and then full
- Show coffee beans being roasted
- The whole process of in the roaster to coming out
My idea still remains the same of using photography and video as my multimedia elements though it will look different than I had first envisioned. A multimedia story called One Block about people in New York City has given me some inspiration to pull from in regards to what I want my website to look like. Below is an element on this specific multimedia platform that shows different people doing the same action. I plan to use that in my coffee guide with the baristas handing me a coffee.
The positive thing is about not being able to set up interviews with some of these coffee shops is that I was able to change the trajectory of what I am doing before I filmed a ton of b-roll. That being said, I don’t have any unusable footage or photos from what I have already shot. I still have a long way to go, but I am going to be wrapping up b-roll this weekend. Fingers crossed!
Advanced Multimedia Storytelling 