FACT: Documentary & Reportage
Starting point - Choosing the subject
I found it really hard to start off this project in comparison with the other ones. I usually focus a lot on the concept and the meaning of what I do in general opposing to the point of this task, to create interest on the visuals and make it about the story you find and unfold.
I thought about what interest me in the real world that I could work with. My ideas diverged from lifestyle/diet choices (i.e vegetarianism and veganism) to what I could uncover from Norwich. I thought about communities I could talk to that I'm fairly close to and easy to reach and I came to a conclusion: to make my work about the International Community in the University.
Putting the fact that I'm an international student as well aside, I thought it would be interesting to unfold contrasts between the rest of the world and Norwich as a not so popular British city for the wider world. I want to investigate and connect people to place with stories regarding differences in between different societies and ways of living.
To start off my investigation, I thought I could do some statistics and create a questionnaire online and post it on social media and get all the information I can from the wider international community online. I thought I could use sound to record possible conversations and stories and probably photography too.
I'm still not sure of what I want to do with all the information I'll get at this stage but I'm currently thinking about a series of little booklets or films for each person I can interview. I'm still not sure. I'm going to focus on finding as much as I can, gather all the information and create a body of work and then decide my final outcome.
Task 2 - Visual editor
Over the holidays I decided to create a little booklet showing some of my inicial ideas. I began with the only piece of research I had until then which was an interview with Srishti Sheshadri, an international student from India studying Graphic Communication, together with some pictures I took during our talk. This communicates her struggles and thoughts when moving countries.
Mostly I focused more on type and layout, making this a very commercial piece directed to local audiences that want to get a different view of Norwich and probably an interesting piece of those who are going through similar experiences.
Displaying my work and being able to see other peoples' work was beyond helpful. Getting the sense of everyone's approach to a such distinct project from what we usually do gave me some ideas for how I want to take this further.
Changing my mind
Throughout my reflection on what I wanted to actually do for the project, I faced an interesting thought suggested by a friend of mine: isn't my subject too comfortable to me? Shouldn't I be going and finding out new things to investigate?
Having this in mind I made up my mind and decided to change my subject entirely. Documenting internationals was way too convenient for me as I'm considered an international as well, I could perfectly understand what others felt like towards moving countries and I wasn't going much deep into the conversation because for me, there wasn't anything else I could find out. So I gave up on this theme completely and chose another one.
Although I simpatize with people that chose this type of lifestyle, I don't know much about it. Veganism is a new theme for all of us and sometimes it can be sort of mysterious since I believe it takes a lot of ambition to completely transit. You have to be able to stick to your philosophies and make an extra effort to avoid falling into "sin".
These are my inicial thoughts on the matter. My ultimate goal is to show people how it is to live as a vegan. Not only their lifestyle on what to buy/consume in terms of food, makeup/hygiene products, clothes etc. but how they feel towards certain situations.
Inspired by this submission on The Guardian, I decided to make a first approach to the matter and illustrate this piece of imagery you can see on the left. This gave me a lot of ideas on what I could do as a body of work but first of all I have to start gathering all the research I need. I thought I could spend a day with a vegan person and document it through pictures and video recordings. I also happen to know about this vegan shop in town called Little Shop Of Vegans and ask some questions about who comes here, what are the most consumed items in store, etc.
Considerations
• One interesting aspect of this subject matter is how happy vegan people seem to be with this choice of living contrasting to how angry the rest of the people seem to be. Sometimes it feels like "normal" people are trying to win an argument when in reality, it just has to do with personal life choices. You wouldn't get angry at someone that decides to go to the gym everyday or someone that wants to eat meat everyday, why would you get angry when someone decides not to eat certain things and consume certain things in general everyday of their lives?
• My story is going to be about A day in the life of a vegan, reporting what is it like to live this way, in addition with statistics and research from the vegan shop giving this project a wider vision. Information taken from a consumer and also a seller.
• This interests me in terms of ethical and moral reasons: people that stick to this lifestyle because they choose to and not because they were born this way like an ethnicity or sometimes a disability. It's something anyone can choose to become, the same way people choose their partners, or friends or occupation. And everyone has different reasons on why they chose this lifestyle.
• I need to learn more about why and how people stick through this choice, what is it like to live among friends and family that probably don't share the same philosophies, etc.
• I'm trying to show my audience a choice they're able to take, showing how easy or difficult it is to manage to live with that choice. I will communicate an experience full of perks and feelings, a story about a person that decides to live an alternative life.
"I wish there were more of us. When I became a vegan at 19, my meat-eating parents worried my already fraught relationship with food was deteriorating. Family meals became stressful, eating out was a problem; I felt like a burden. But the more articles I read, and the more recipes I tried, the more my relationship with food began to heal.
In recent years, I’ve found being vegan makes romantic relationships difficult. Sitting across from a partner while he chowed down on an animal carcass didn’t get me going. Eating meat is not a deal-breaker for me – considering I know only one vegan man (a former teacher), this would be ridiculous – but in past relationships it has gnawed at me. It’s a constant reminder that we see the world in different ways.
There’s a loneliness to being vegan, to facing the fact that most people do not share your perspective, and will probably feel affronted if a discussion arises. Do you think I’m self-righteous? Preachy? Oversensitive? Overprivileged? The common stereotype is that everyone knows if you’re a vegan because you don’t shut up about it, and this still makes me anxious. Am I talking about it too much? Am I that girl? I’m not silently judging you for the choices you make, so please don’t do the same about me. I’m always happy to discuss the topic, and hope to encourage some change or understanding.
Ultimately, veganism is a philosophy that permeates every strand of my being. It is a part of my identity, so yes, it probably will come up in conversation. Just don’t ask me where I get my protein."
A bit of background research
I started off with a bit of online research on the vegan history and that led me to a bunch of new amazing information and visually interesting works such as videos, ephemera and a comic strip.
I was caught in this article This Is What a Vegan Looks Like on The Guardian and suddenly felt the need to know more before going out there and start my interviews with both my chosen vegan person and the vegan shop.
I thought it would be interesting to know if there was any sort of vegan-diet people in the 20th century so I began my actual research. I found out through this website VegSource a bit of the vegan history and apparently the word was invented in 1944 to describe "non-diary vegetarians", as being the word vegan taken directly from the word vegetarian. The founder of this group was an English man called Donald Watson and in November 1944 he wrote their first journal The Vegan News.
All this led me to even research about the frequency of google search on the word vegan throughout the past few years.
Then I started wondering if there were any vegan illustrators, or illustration work on that matter and came across a blog called The Illustrated Vegan which gave me a lot of visually interesting works to look and reflect at with an own reflection and self-debate in her part. This helped me in lot in terms of visuals and vegan-ethics and how she feels about current art in general.
One of the posts I found on this blog was about "Animal Rescue" by the illustrator Patrick George, a children's book where you constantly place the animal in the "right place" through the spreads using acetate as a form of placing the images from one place to another. This is a gentle approach to the importance of animal welfare and is also a book without words which enables the reader to choose the appropriate level of input for the child. I thought this was beyond interesting and such an effective way for kids to think about contemporary matters like this.
Another post I found on this blog had to do with an ambulant installation produced by the street artist Banksy in New York called "Sirens of the Lambs". This video of the installation consists into a specially meat delivery truck containing squeaking animal puppets and labelled 'Farm Fresh Meats' driving around, as well as reactions from members of the public. As a most of Banksy's work, this is highly prompt to generate discussion within society. I find that this piece of work communicates successfully what people don't see or hear when they're buying animal based food.
I also found this company called Chipotle Mexican Grill that made a video called The Scarecrow to advertise a game in which it promotes their welfarist stance on food production, i.e. happy exploitation. This could also be a matter of discussion within the vegan community, what do they feel about this kind of raised animals for consumption called by them Responsibly Raised Meat. Because at the end of the day, they're still slaughtered.
All this gives me a consistent background on veganism, in which I can more easily start conversations and debate, to prompt discussion within this community and gather rawer information to work with.
More contextual research
I found this really interesting article on Dazed Digital Magazine about Artists Pushing Animal Rights Further.
"Performance artist Jacqueline Traide, sickened by cosmetics testing on animals, wanted to convey the cruelty of it to the public by having the procedure done to herself. She was tortured for 10 hours in the performance, which was done in a vitrine in the Oxford Circus branch of Lush, as shocked pedestrians looked on."
Portuguese Fine Artist Zoe Birrell "once made an art installation consisting of 420 dairy cows, each made from vegan fair-trade chocolate, and each equalling her body weight of 53kg. The life of a modern dairy cow is marked by the emotional stress of the loss of her baby calf, combined with the hormonal effect of being kept perpetually pregnant. It inspired Birrell to respond to these psychological and physiological issues, considering the ethical alternatives, as well as, how it related to her own femininity."
"Rocky Lewycky’s project Is It Necessary? addressed the problem of factory farming in a violent new way. The work was comprised of hundreds of ceramic animals – pigs, cows, turkeys, fish – neatly positioned together. Each day Lewycky would enter the gallery space, elect an animal, and brutally smash it to pieces, leaving the white sculptures to reveal their blood-red interiors."
This gave me an idea to search more about Lush products, since they promote cruelty-free and vegan hygiene and cosmetic consumption. And by looking at more fine art-like projects I can broaden my horizons in terms of questions to ask on my future interviews and to a have a more contextual background on what kind of information I want to gather.
This also informs me of what type of body of work I want to produce. Seeing a range of different work that other people came up with to express problems in the contemporary world helped me to get a sense of what's out there and what I can add to the communication of such broad and interesting topic/way of living.
On site gather of information
I started my gathering of information (on site) with going to the Little Shop of Vegans on Magdalen Street. There I had a really nice conversation with the owner Rachel Cox and also took some pictures. We talked about a variety of questions and opinions as the demographics on the shop (statistics), the most frequently asked questions (as we were talking about this, Rachel tells me that people seem to find cheese really mysterious and that would win as the most FAQ and right at that moment, a costumer comes in asking about cheese, which was actually really funny); we talked about what drove her to open the shop, what being a vegan meant to her and what having the shop represents to her. I found out that she rules the whole shop alone being the only person working there at the moment which I find absolutely astounding! Then we talked about a few more moral questions like what she thought about Responsibly Raised Meat (connected with the Chipotle Mexican Grill business) , what was her opinion on raising newborns as vegans and if there was such a thing as 'vegan medicine' in which she tells me that the UK doesn't sell proper medicine without being tested on animals so it's something Britain vegans cannot avoid, which I found really sad.
Rachel seemed to me a person full of ambition to pursue what she really believes in, making this local business a place to take a step further within her philosophies. Her testimony constitutes a big part of my research and understanding of veganism.
She recommended to me a couple of vegan coffee shops/restaurants so I packed up again and went looking for them.
Tofurei is located on Pottergate lane in the city centre and it's a nice place to take a break and enjoy a treat. I took some pictures here as well and ate what they call a Soysage Roll for only 2 pounds, which is actually not bad at all in terms of price! And I feel that taste is definitely a huge part of research in a world where what you eat plays a big part on the whole concept. Everyone was really nice but I had one more place to visit. Bia Kitchen is located on the Norwich Market and to me it seemed not only a touristic site to eat good food but also a place where local people can enjoy. I didn't talked much to the ladies working there as they seemed pretty busy with such an hectic cleaning but I still took some pictures for further reference. I want to visit this place again as the food looked amazing! And with this vegan diner I finished my day and headed back home.
As I'm such a consumer by nature and because I do want to support local businesses like this I bought some products throughout my journey. In terms of food products I bought a vegan coke (really wondering what it tastes like and because the packaging was quite the aesthetics), two hot chocolate powder to mix in hot water, a piece of vegan cake with orange and white chocolate (the most amazing cake I've ever tried in my entire life!!!), some strips of "seasoned chicken style wheat gluten and tofu pieces" (really curious about this one) and some vegan cheese.
In terms of other products I sold myself to the Vegan Sidekick comics, a really funny collection of comics related to the perks of being a vegan, an illustrated nutrition chart, the Innocent Cookbook, a book with tons of vegan recipes (starters, main courses, deserts, sauces, snacks, etc.) and a really cute t-shirt promoting adoption instead of commercializing animals.
I'm really happy with all the research I gathered today and I hope to start my visual development very soon but first I do need to organize, edit and filter all the information I have so I can have a clear idea of what I want my final outcome to become.
Some visual research
After my interesting day around the subject under the name of 'veganism in Norwich', I did a bit of further visual research.
In a vegan blog a found last week I read this article on the Life of Pi seen through a vegetarian/vegan perspective. Even though I saw the movie a quite a while before, I thought I could watch it again since it's such a good filmography after all with such a compelling story as well. After I saw it the second time, I noticed how connected it is with this doctrine, the decisions Pi makes
throughout his journey through the ocean with such a carnivorous being as his companion. There are many scenes where it makes us question about the value of life, being that of a human being or a life of an animal. I really had fun watching it and I consider this film as a strong piece of research, not only visual but contextual as well.
This made me want to research about the book and as soon as I saw one of its' covers, I fell in love with such boldness and amazing composition! Andy Bridge is an English illustrator and painter and I'll definitely use him as an inspiration for my visuals.
I gathered some pamphlets yesterday on veganism but also the shop owner Rachel told me about the large vegan community in Norwich and recommended to me that I should take a look at the facebook page/group where they post about current events and news on the subject. I thought this could be a big piece of information on the wider public for my project.
Also I found out about the first vegan advertisement ever and it happened on the 3rd of January of this year in London!! Several posters were put up on the London underground stations promoting this lifestyle with animal rights. I think this is great news for the vegan community plus a great promotion to a healthier lifestyle.
At this point of my project I have to define what I want to actually do with all the information I've gathered throughout the past few days. The sooner I start the better! I have exatly 2 weeks to make this outcome develop and if I manage my time correctly, I'll have enough time to complete everything as I want everything to be!!
Mind mapping & this week's lectures
The end
Vegan Sidekick comics
David Foldvari
Oliver Kugler
Throughout these past 2/3 days have been really inspirational to me. Both Gareth's and Toby's lectures were amazing, they made me think about my project so far in a another perspective. How ideas are hard to come up with and in the end, our practise reveals how much informed we have to be to be able to pass on that information correctly to the people. And that doesn't mean it has to be overly complex, intricate and scary. As long as work is produced, you're able to evolve and train your ability to have ideas throughout just keeping your mind doing creative tasks. Sometimes, those meaningless and funny tasks we come up with, lead a way into our actual and real production.
I spent these days editing and filtering down my information and successfully got to the core of what information I want to be able to communicate to whoever interacts with my body of work. Looking at Oliver Kugler's work gave me ideas about how I want to tell my story and in which medium. I want to produce a booklet in a concertina binding in which is constructed by one side of information on the lifestyle and being the other side is composed by information on local businesses in Norwich that promote and support that exact lifestyle . I want it to be playful and happy, showing people that is not a boring lifestyle or a choice for restriction. But a healthier way and tastier way to live, evoking less harming to other living organisms who share the same planet as us and therefore promoting a healthier lifestyle for planet earth as well.
I'm also showing some imagery I made up until this point. The first illustration was a commission I got this last summer about vegan food in a holiday where you normally eat sardines and beef. This is celebrated back at home in Lisbon. I got commissioned from a friend who was running the business at the festivities that lasted for probably a whole week.
The second set is one I made in the beginning of this project on the type of issues that can come along with being a vegan, where is hard to relate to others when others don't respect your choice.
The third set is the most recent one, an illustration on my going to the Little Shop of Vegans.
Connecting people to a more informed choice of lifestyle
Promoting Norwich's local business that support such choice
Raising awareness
Persuasion
Reveal/inform/educate
Project 4 brief
26.01 Group tutorial w/ Miriam
Execution
Since the beginning I visualised my booklet as an accordion brochure type of print. As it people unfold the brochure, they're also unfolding a story from the real world in their hands. I thought that the information would look better and make more sense if people could read it as a long piece of paper or as you would read a standard two page spread booklet. I decided to also break it in two sections: the first being information about the lifestyle and the second being information about the existent market to support that lifestyle here in Norwich.
For the illustrations I chose the one colour palette, as it's easy and quick to read but also colourful and fun. I also did some spot illustrations for the areas with a lot of text, so it doesn't seem to heavy on a page.
To add to the booklet, I also decided to make a brochure that unfolds into a poster with the description of my project. This was more as a trying to "run-away" from the booklet idea since it's something really common and popular nowadays.
Description of project:
This project is based on an issue that’s more and more discussed around our contemporary world: veganism lifestyle. With my body of work I want to show a bright side on this type of living, that not only has to do with a dietary programme but also with what we consume in general: clothes, hygiene products and entertainment. I got to interview the owner of a vegan shop and also visit some cafes and restaurants around the city. Gathering research was fun. As I dug up more information, I started to realize how easy, cheap and healthy it is to be a Vegan in Norwich, there’s a lot to offer, specially from local businesses. My audience are not only local people that don’t have any idea to what this lifestyle constitutes but also anyone in the UK who is interested to know more about Norwich’s local market. The visual work produced for this project is meant to be easily understood by everyone, considering the one colour palette for a more straight forward message, informative but also fun for those who think that being a vegan is boring and colourless due to a limit on a diversity of food consumed nowadays. The booklet is meant to show limitless possibilities on what to eat and buy, alerting for environmental concerns, shortage of natural resources, ethical and moral reasons but also a healthier way of living. I have to say this was probably the most challenging project since the start of University. But also I got to engage with an issue that interests me a lot and I got to discover real world experiences and compelling information. This is a story that reveals how people choose to live on the now. Promoting the audience to reflect, evaluate and learn more about such a “mysterious way of living”.
Inicial inspiration
One-page final illustrations
