From our first workshop with Simon Grennan I realised the importance of avoiding duplicating the thing shown by the image in the accompanying text and instead using the accompanying text toward different tasks. To this end I provided an accompanying analytic text that sat outside of each panel, caption boxes continued to work as formulations of actions to accompany video grabs.

In this fragment, a regular approaches the counter to pay and manages the pace of his payment sequence (given regulars often depart from the cafe quite slowly while making small talk with staff and moreover this regular is leaving the country soon so has been saying extended goodbyes to other staff members).

The second element of experiment in this layout was to crop video grabs to begin to produce shifts in focus and point of view. This was a solution to maintaining a connection with the original video recording which would have been broken by drawing from a different perspective character (which is a common move in comics) to shift the reader’s perspective to align with a character, change the mood etc.

The first panel provides an overview of the setting which is then a resource for the reader in what follows. The second panel is a tightly cropped section of the image that shows and thereby produces the staff as the centre of the reader’s attention. The third panel shows the staff looking up which by adjacent pairing to the fourth panel then shows the object of the staff’s concern.