Cocktail Road Trip
Video Series for Complex Magazine: In Association with Lush Life and Capstan Visuals
Series concept in brief:
The series is a road trip through the Deep South, exploring the region’s craft cocktail culture and meeting the people who make it. The videos are told from the POV of a bartending-elite tour guide, more or less in the style of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown with flare.
Generally speaking we like the area east of New Orleans, south of Louisville, and probably north of Jacksonville. But that could certainly change or expand, pending concept direction.
Proposed scope:
One city (or region) per episode. We start off with something like 6 episodes, to be shot in one 2-4 week roadtrip, and edited in the month or so afterwards. Episodes can be as long or short as we like, but were imaging these as something in the vicinity of 10 mins each.
Tour Guides
The Bon Vivants: Josh Harris and Scott Baird
These two wildly charismatic on camera, run one of the hottest cocktail programs in the country, and are the epitome of Bay Area hip.
Josh, and he’s flying out to Osaka, Japan next month to be featured in a video series paid for by their board of tourism. They’re bringing one interesting person to learn about Japanese culture from 7 different countries, and he’s repping the USA. That’s pretty relevant experience for what we’d be doing here.
Here’s an old video Lush Life made with them for Tanqueray:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc7vK3_g944
Here is their American Hipster episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXxdUjMJO2I
Duane Fernandez Jr. – NYC
Duane is about as close to a broadcast-tested celebrity bartender as we’re likely to find for something like this. He’s very NYC, very flamboyant, very fashion forward, and very funny.
Here’s his profile for a Sundance show: http://www.sundance.tv/series/iconoclasts/cast/duane-fernandez-jr
Jared Schubert – Louisville, KY
Jared is one of the best option if we want to have our tour guide bring in an authentic voice from and of the south. He’s about as Kentucky as you can get, and is one of the biggest personalities ever. He loooooves the south.
This is a horrible video, but gives a little bit of a sense of his personality. He’s extremely charming.
Our Ask for Complex Media
- For Complex to air the project online.
- Any other ways Complex would like to be apart of this project.
What Lush Life & Capstan Visuals bring
- Connections to the above talent.
- Potential advertisement dollars from sponsors to pay for production and advertisements on Complex Media.
- Production resources, from concepting, to execution, and finishing.